Shame on You, Mr. Singh
Written: Dec 24 '00 (Updated Jan 02 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Roughly ten minutes of mind-blowing cinematography
Cons: Only the undeveloped characters, the expository dialogue, and the bungled plot
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| Sloucho's Full Review: |
Forty-five minutes into The Cell, the viewer is treated to a swooping, looping, whoop-de-dooping camera shot that is even more breathtaking for its refusal to quit than for its beauty. It's precisely the kind of eye candy that the director (Tarsem Singh) needed to incorporate into the movie in order to remind the audience that directors are allowed to be artists.
Would that it had happened forty-five minutes earlier! Unfortunately, most viewers will never make it to this camera shot; for Singh gives us plenty of reasons to abandon the film well before the forty-five minute mark.
I'm afraid I can't say whether I was more annoyed by Jennifer Lopez's throaty whispering or Vince Vaughn's cartoonish interpretation of a film noir detective. I fault Singh for both problems, since he could have told Lopez to speak up and should either have changed Vaughn's character or shot him in black and white. I'm not suggesting that film noir has to be in black and white, but I will say that shades of gray tend to be more indulgent of the tough guy persona projected by guys like Mitchum and Bogart--actors whom Vaughn seems to be attempting to impersonate (or possibly mock)--than the vivid colors of this particular film.
Since a cell is the smallest whole building block of a living organism, one might expect a movie entitled The Cell to be somewhat devoted to the idea of unity. Strangely, however, The Cell is the most un-unified major Hollywood release that I have seen in some time. It features two distinct plots (neither of which can be termed a subplot) and does not end in the typically neat fashion of having one plot solve the other.
On the one hand, we have the fairly imaginative story of a child psychologist (Lopez), who is trained in the use of sophisticated equipment to enter the minds of comatose people. On the other, we have the contrived tale of an FBI agent (Vaughn), who must rescue a kidnapped woman before she is drowned in the automated tank of the serial killer who abducted her, but has since lapsed into a coma. (The title of the movie actually seems to refer to the glass cage in which the killer keeps his victims, but also alludes to the fact that brains function as prisons entered by visitors throughout the film.)
The two plots begin quite separately, then come together, and then diverge for entirely separate (and equally unsatisfying) conclusions. I applaud the efforts of the screenwriter (Mark Protosevich) to challenge the structural constraints of the typical Hollywood film, but can't help feeling a little betrayed by his failure to deliver more compelling resolutions.
As a whole, the film is an insult to the intelligence of the movie-going public. It plods along at a glacial pace in an effort not to confuse or unsettle viewers with its presentation of a machine that enables people to enter one another's minds. Then, once the viewer has had enough clues to understand the risks and rewards of undergoing such a procedure, the head technician explains everything to Vaughn's character. If, instead of moving so slowly, Singh had stuck to the beautiful camera work that he is capable of producing, then the glaring inconsistencies of the plot would not have been so painful for the viewer.
As it is, however, all we can do as we watch the film is sputter with rage. Perhaps the most ridiculous inconsistency of the plot is based on information that is established at the end of the opening sequence. Lopez's character, who is meeting with limited success in coaxing a young boy out of his coma, wants to reverse the feed of the machine she uses to enter his mind. She argues that she can do more for him in an environment that she can control (her own mind) than in one in which she is merely a guest (his mind). "No," one of the technicians says, "it's too dangerous."
Although her reasons about the dangers don't seem to be quite as compelling as the dangers involved in entering the unstable mind of a comatose boy, viewers will probably accept the technician's explanation because we all understand that it's simply the movie's way of establishing that the feed can be reversed (which will obviously become important later). Another such clumsy piece of plot advancement comes when Vaughn visits the room for the first time. "Why are there three tables?" he asks. The head technician explains that the third table was for a second psychologist who joined Lopez's character on trips into the boy's mind in the beginning, but that the boy only trusted Lopez. That's about as awkward a bit of foreshadowing as I can imagine for the later scene in which Vaughn joins Lopez in the mind of the serial killer.
But here's the really crummy part: Remember that bit about how reversing the feed was too dangerous? Well, according to the technician, it would have been dangerous for the comatose boy, not for Lopez. In other words, it's less dangerous to have people enter your mind than it is to go spelunking through theirs. So when Vaughn needs Lopez to get the location of the serial killer's latest victim from the catatonic killer, what possible reason could Lopez have for going into the mind of the psychopath?
Well, for one thing, it's productive of a lot of really interesting footage. The psychopath's dream vocabulary, while not a terribly sophisticated symbology, at least manages not to be tediously Freudian. And of course there's the titillation that audiences the world over seem to feel during scenes that offer more or less metaphorical treatments of the (one-sided, sadistic, and frankly tiresome) predatory relationship between male killers and female victims. Lopez has entered the mind of a man who lives to kill women. She finds herself in a universe that he controls. I guess that's a sexy scenario for people who equate sex with danger.
Precisely as you would expect, one thing leads to another, which leads to Vaughn coming to Lopez's rescue. Hoorah for the good guy! But not only does Vaughn save Lopez, he also finds a critical piece of information that enables him to find the killer's last victim, whom he also rescues. There are damsels in distress left and right, and who better to save them than a disillusioned former prosecutor who has joined the FBI because he's determined to catch the bad guys even if the system won't put them away? By golly, it makes you just plain proud to be an American!
While Vaughn is off saving the psychopath's last victim, Lopez is trying to come to terms with her abandonment of the "good" part of the serial killer, a young, innocent version of the killer whom she promised never to hurt. (Twice in the film, she says, "I would never hurt you," to a person whose mind she has entered. Both times, the assertion is fraught with irony. It's actually the cleverest thing about the movie, and makes the conclusion a bit more sinister than it might superficially seem.) Once she decides that she must help the killer's inner child, she locks out the technicians and--shock!--reverses the feed.
This time, the killer will enter her mind. She will be in control. She will be able to protect the good part of the killer from the bad part of the killer. She will become the saintly figure that she is in her own dreamworld.
Her final mind-meld with the killer is silly enough even without our asking why she didn't do this to begin with. Instead of entering the killer's mind and avoiding all his booby traps while trying to coax him into revealing the location of the tank in which his victims drown, why not start by putting him in her mind and having her torture him until he surrenders the information?
But if we can't help finding holes in the film's plot, it's because Singh offers so little to distract us from those holes. If he hadn't spent so much time holding our hand and explaining the machine to us, then we wouldn't have been forced to think about it. And if he had decided to give his characters a third (or even a second) dimension, then maybe we could forgive his oversight.
In the end, we're left angry and upset at having been duped into watching a brilliant ten-minute short padded by an hour and a half of hackneyed characters tripping through a patchwork plot.
Shame on you, Mr. Singh. Try giving our minds as much respect as you are clearly capable of giving our eyes.
Recommended:
No
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Sloucho
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Member: Mike Davis
Location: Philadelphia
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Read my reviews in order to heal the sick and control the weather. Seriously.
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