Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
9/12/08
As
long as I can remember, I've had a dream that goes like this: I show
up in high school, having not attended a single class all year, on the
day of the finals. Not only must I take the tests with no idea what
the material was, but I have this great aching sense that if anyone notices
that I've never been there before, I'm screwed. I'm sure you have
a recurring dream or two like it yourself: maybe not the test-taking
part (my subconscious is such a cliche!), but certainly that nagging sense
that you're running behind, about to be caught. Perhaps it's this
part of our collective unconscious, that feeling of having our fight-or-flight
instinct caged by a society that will allow us neither option, that makes
train-bound tightening-noose thrillers like Transsiberian such an
enduring subgenre. There's something about the tight quarters of
a train, surrounded by strangers, with the relentless noise of the massive
machine rolling over tracks, that invites paranoia. And within those
confines, director Brad Anderson, backed by a great cast, knows how to
deliver suspense. The script he co-wrote with Will Conroy isn't half
as clever as it thinks it is, but it has a methodical energy and crackles
with the thrills of someone else's bad dream.
Roy
(Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) are a married couple taking
the Transsiberian Railroad back from a mission doing charity work in China.
He's a deeply religious do-gooder train nut, while she's been mostly along
for the ride in a marriage that saved her from a misspent, reckless youth.
While the trip was supposed to be the adventure that jump-starts their
troubled relationship, she finds her attention wandering to their cabin-mates
on the train. Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) is a relentlessly chatty world
traveler who makes no secret of his interest in Jessie. Abby (Kate
Mara) is a troubled kid from Seattle who bonds with the woman who sees
her as a younger version of herself. When Roy gets a little too caught
up in taking in the sights at one of the train's stops, he's left behind,
forcing Jessie to wait over a day for him at the next stop. Oh-so-helpful
Carlos and Abby stay with her, and she takes a fateful trip into the woods
with her admirer. Once she reunites with Roy and they get back on
the train, they have a new cabin-mate: Russian Police Detective Grinko
(Ben Kingsley), who's searching for drug mules who conceal heroin in nesting
dolls. Like the ones Jessie finds were slipped into her bags before
she got back aboard. By now, she's got too many secrets of her own
to come clean with the cop, and every lie she tells only digs her in deeper.
And you know how it is on these sinister trains: nothing is as it
seems.
OK,
here's the thing about Transsiberian: no matter how hard Anderson,
Conroy, and his highly capable cast try to keep us misdirected and off-balance,
everything pretty much IS what it seems because the twists and turns they
have up their sleeves are entirely too familiar to treat as twists.
If you can still approach a movie like this expecting the out-of-the-blue
new pals of a couple of Americans traveling abroad to honestly be good
and true, I admire you, because I've just seen too many movies at this
point to expect anything but the opposite. And it seems like the
more obvious Transsiberian's twists become, the harder the movie
works to hide them, resulting in its' single biggest misstep: the
key sequence that takes place in the forest when Jessie and Carlos are
alone is played far too subtly, making her reaction seem closer to a mental
breakdown than what it really is. It took me a lot of miles of train
track to realize how I was supposed to have processed that scene, and it's
not supported by the way it plays out on-screen.
That
Transsiberian
still works is a tribute both to Anderson's skills behind the camera and
a really great cast. Pulling off a thriller like this is all about
pacing, and this movie takes its' sweet time to pull you into the world
of the characters, building one ominous detail on top of another before
the movie even shifts into true thriller mode about halfway through.
You KNOW something bad's gonna happen, but until that midpoint jolt, nothing
was see actually rises above the level of “Man, you wouldn't believe what
happened to us on our trip!” But when it does, things escalate in
a hurry, and Anderson turns up his simmering tension to a relentless boil.
But
it's the cast that keeps us glued to these characters, led by Mortimer,
whose innate twitchiness can grate in the wrong role, but here she's the
perfect choice to play a woman who starts the movie ready to crawl out
of her own skin in boredom and ends up desperate for any way off a speeding
train. Throughout the movie, she never once speaks a word about what
happened in that fateful scene I didn't like, but Mortimer does such a
good job that she's able to bring it all into focus and keep us right with
what she's thinking. Harrelson calls skillfully on his inner square
to make the movie's one totally blameless character sing: just because
Roy's a relentlessly dorky do-gooder who cares WAY too much about trains
doesn't make me think for a second that he wouldn't be a fun guy to be
around. I really liked the way his even keel serves him well when
tensions escalate late in the game. Noriega oozes smarminess, but
also hits the right notes to make his cozying up to Roy and Jessie believable.
I still don't know whether to blame him or Anderson for the odd cues I
got from him in, you know, that scene. Mara is really good
at wistful sadness (for further evidence, see Brokeback Mountain
or
We Are Marshall), although I could
deduce most of her character's secrets from her choice of eye shadow no
matter how much she tried to steer me the other way. Kingsley is
very good in a role that could have been sheer scenery-chewing. Oh,
he still gets a matte or two stuck in his teeth, but Grinko feels like
a very real product of the vacuum created by the fall of the Soviet Union.
He's charming when he needs to be, scary when he needs to be, and always
convincingly plotting his next step.
It's
funny how times change: I couldn't help but think that Transsiberian
is being sold as an “art house” thriller even though it's exactly the kind
of movie that dominated mainstream moviegoing in the late 80's and early
90's. Sure, it takes its' sweet time, but the starpower, action and
thrills are there. It's even got a kinda suspect screenplay:
what could be more mainstream than that? I suppose it's another sign
that Hollywood sees no upside in catering to an adult audience who've increasingly
abandoned moviegoing. But those who do turn out will find that Transsiberian
is a trip through familiar ground that still finds a way to wring new jolts
out of our primal fears. Just like that crappy finals dream. |
