gmbcorp today: FILM OF THE WEEK: Source Code

Monday, April 4, 2011

FILM OF THE WEEK: Source Code

by Steve Dollar Source Code

Anyone weaned on what now is called fantastic cinema should be warmed by the budding career of Duncan Jones. Like the best science-fiction writers, he understands the genre as an imaginative prism to reflect on the human condition. He knows that it's not about the hardware but the software: the emotions tied up inside of extreme existential situations made possible by weird science, and the philosophical what-ifs those scenarios provoke.

SOURCE CODE director Duncan Jones with MOON's Sam Rockwell

The melancholic Moon, Jones' 2009 debut, also revealed the director's reflexive awareness of the canon. Sam Rockwell plays a technician on a solitary, multi-year assignment to a lunar base who encounters a duplicate version of himself, amid other odd discoveries like... he's a clone. But even if his memories belong to someone else, his bio-engineered heart is real, as is his fragmenting mental state. The slow reveal isn't exactly a surprise, but it gives Jones plenty of time to evoke associations with outer space sagas like 2001, Silent Running and Solaris, even as Rockwell's knack for split-personality performances encourages empathy and even a few laughs.

Two years later, Jones goes Hollywood?after a fashion?with Source Code. The presence of Jake Gyllenhaal, America's sweetest hunk of leading mancake, pretty much guarantees box office. And the premise, silly as it may be, proves irresistible. A guy finds himself on a train sitting across from a pretty girl. He has no idea how he got there. As they interact, he realizes that he's not at all who he appears to be either, and as the camera notes a very specific chain of events, he wanders to the bathroom and gazes in the mirror. Yup, he's some other dude. WTF? Then everything blows up.

Boom. Gyllenhaal, playing an Army pilot named Colter Stevens, comes to, strapped inside a cramped module. On a flickering video screen, Vera Farmiga (in military garb that makes you wish her character's name was Lt. Svetlana) materializes and only gradually clues in Stevens on his mission. Through some esoteric mumbo-jumbo?It's the parabolas, man!?that only happens in movies like this, a top-secret government project has found a way to extract from the brains of dead people material that allows an instant replay of the last eight minutes of their lives. How scientists then manage to project a second individual into that now parallel reality isn't really explained and really doesn't matter because?zap!?Stevens is going back to that train again, replaying those fateful eight minutes in endless variations, until he finds a terrorist with plans to nuke Chicago. It's going to be a long day.

The train has already been blown to smithereens, which means Christina (Michelle Monaghan), the girl who flirts with him, is already dead. But Stevens is going to save her, altering time and space?even if a pompous scientist (Jeffrey Wright, in a tongue-in-cheek performance) tells him that's impossible. Jones gets away with so much more than he should given the preposterousness of all this. But it really goes back to the emotional thing. What starts out as a kind of Groundhog Day gone post-9/11 thriller (with a touch of La jet�e for flavor), turns out, in many ways, to be a variation on Moon (man on a lonely mission whose circumstances are not what he thinks they are). The film trades heavily on the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Monaghan, at times suggesting (quite incidentally and perhaps only to me) a kind of Certified Copy for mallrats?although the more profound relationship is with Farmiga's character. And it shamelessly tugs at the tear ducts even as the train speeds toward eternity. The real problem isn't the bomber, who mostly provides an excuse for the kind of sleuthing gamesmanship you see every week on TV. Nor is it even the girl, who lends the romantic appeal a movie like this needs to distract from the implausibility of even its own logic. It's how Stevens, whose last real memory is being airborne above Afghanistan, can get in touch with his father to tell him he loves him. And then: get the girl. And then: bend time and space. Hey, it?s Jake Gyllenhaal. No prob.

The story's cyberpunk conceits dovetail nicely with the romantic formula, basically giving Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley elbow room to explore the cosmic significance of it all while satisfying both parties in any potential date-movie situation. While Jones ain't exactly Tarkovsky, he shares a lot of the same source code as the Russian mystic. This time through the loop, it's sealed with a kiss.

[Further clicking: our SXSW podcast with co-star Vera Farmiga.]