Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
12/12/10
*****SPOILER
ALERT: DON'T READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE TOURIST YET...
BETTER YET, DON'T SEE THE TOURIST AT ALL AND THEN GO AHEAD AND READ THIS
REVIEW*****
“How reliant is
a movie on the way it ends? You spend 90-99 percent of the time you're
watching a film not knowing how it will end, so if you really enjoy everything
about the experience but fall somewhere between dissatisfied and betrayed
by how things work out, is the movie “ruined”? Over time, as I
develop and deepen my appreciation of the movies, I've become less likely
to throw the baby out with the bathwater...”
-from my review
of Buried
True
enough, but I didn't say I never do it. The Tourist
is fashioned as an old-school action romance in which two of Hollywood's
biggest stars trade smoldering glances as they dodge bullets in the middle
of the most glamorous International location the filmmakers could find.
In other words, the last kind of movie that should ever have a twist ending.
But, after about 95 highly entertaining minutes, The Tourist just
can't help itself, napalming the closing moments with a reversal that totally
destroys everything that was good about what came before. Twists,
by their very nature, work against empathy: nobody likes a liar.
And love stories require empathy as their fuel: who wants to watch
two jerks fall in love? When all is said and done, The Tourist
disgusted
me not because I didn't like the way things work out but because the emotional
connection I'd forged with its story vanishes into thin air so the filmmakers
can feel clever. I could not imagine a movie I initially had a good
time watching that I'd like less upon a second viewing.
Inspector
John Acheson (Paul Bettany) leads an investigation whose sole purpose seems
to be following Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) to see if she'll lead
him to Alexander Pierce, a mysterious criminal who stole billions from
gangster Reginald Shaw (Stephen Berkoff) and then vanished. She receives
a note from Pierce telling her to travel to Venice, finding a man of roughly
the same size and act in a way that convinces the authorities that this
person is he. She burns the letter (leaving Acheson to CSI his way
through the ashes) and selects American Math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny
Depp) on the train. The glamorous, seductive Elise is everything
Frank isn't, and the perfect antidote to his three-year depression after
the death of his wife, so the spy novel-loving teacher plays along as she
keeps turning up and encouraging him to join her, even staying in her hotel
room under the guise of being her husband. It isn't long before Shaw's
goons are in hot pursuit while Acheson keeps letting Frank twist in the
wind because of his obsession with finding Pierce. Elise has a decision
to make, because the tourist has fallen in love with her and refuses to
go home to safety while she's still in danger. If she doesn't turn
over Pierce to Acheson and his billions to Shaw, neither of them will survive
this vacation in Venice.
Let's
start by pretending I didn't see the last few minutes and talk about why
The
Tourist works as well as it does for as long as it does. Depp
is just great as Frank, finding the right nerdy pitch to seem totally out
of Elise's league while still being Johnny Depp enough to believe she could
actually fall for him. Now that Jolie has mastered the insane level
of poise that makes her natural beauty unmatched among contemporary movie
stars, parts like this play themselves, and the sparks between the two
stars are formidable. Call it corny, call it cliched (obviously the
filmmakers did), but I absolutely loved watching Frank grow in confidence
and stature as he refused to let go of the adventure fate tossed into his
lap. Bettany is great as the Inspector whose obsession with his quarry
borders on OCD, Timothy Dalton shines in a few scenes as his boss, and
Berkoff is terrifyingly smooth as the gangster who'd thought himself above
strangling men with tape measures until he discovers otherwise.
Director
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (a stage name that's short for Florian
Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck; I salute a fellow
member of the “No One's Ever Pronounced My Name Correctly on the First
Try” Club) stages all of this with just the right Old Hollywood glow.
His camera likes to linger, be it over the beautiful Venice locations,
the lavish things Shaw's pilfered wealth has purchased for Elise, or Jolie
herself, whose loving perusal by the film's extras might be considered
a mad ego trip were her attractiveness not the plot's primary engine.
John Seale's cinematography and the score by James Newton Howard are just
terrific.
All
this builds to a satisfying climax and then, like Frank, it simply refuses
to go home. ******LAST WARNING, TURN BACK NOW IF YOU WANT TO SEE
THE TOURIST UNSPOILED****** OK, so I fully expected Frank, who is,
after all, a math teacher, to have some sort of mathmatical trick up his
sleeve to figure out the combination to the safe, and even once he opens
it, I expected that to be the reveal. But the air goes out of the
movie like a balloon on the business end of Jolie's heels as it becomes
clear the real reason he knew that code. Yes, once it's turned out
that the movie's lead character not only isn't who we thought he was, but
is someone who's been playing all the other characters (and, by extension,
us) the whole time, every previous moment we've spent in his company is
completely invalidated. Frank's nerdy likability? A trick.
His heroic journey? Trick. His falling in love with Elise?
Trick (since, already BEING her boyfriend, he would already have done so).
His insistence on still acting like Frank when no one else is around?
Well, damned if I can explain that one other than that The Tourist
is one of those movies that would never let standing up to a second's scrutiny
get in the way of being able to say it pulled one over on us at the end.
After it's spent the preceding 95-odd minutes insisting that Pierce is
a bad, manipulative, dishonest character, the movie (and most of its characters)
decide he's really swell and that we should all love him. Funny,
then, that in the two scenes where Depp actually gets to play who he really
is, he seems like such a jerk. Credit where due to the counter-twist
revealing the true identity of Rufus Sewell's “Englishman” who's been lurking
about the proceedings hoping we'd assume he's Pierce the whole time.
Sewell, who never gets to play nice or happy people, makes his last line
sing so beautifully I sincerely wished I had been watching HIS story instead.
The
basic skeleton of this story comes from a 2005 French film called Anthony
Zimmer, unseen by me so I cannot comment upon whether the tale's many
twists and turns seem to work there. But I certainly know they don't
work here. A Wikipedia synopsis makes Zimmer sound like more
of a cops & robbers thriller rather than an espionage romance like
The
Tourist, a genre where its backstabbing twistery would be far more
at home. It's certainly hard to imagine anyone being inspired to
remake THIS movie, so I'll give AZ the benefit of the doubt.
Which
brings us back around to that opening quote, and the fact that there are
movies like Buried that make a person say “That
was really good before it fell apart at the end” and movies like The
Tourist that make me demand refunds of money and time (neither of which
seems to be forthcoming) and will make me mutter their names like curses
for the rest of my natural life. Two stars seems kinda generous,
in retrospect... |
