The Ghost of Christie

Rating: Null/10 (27 July 2002)

Spoilers herein.
Speilberg continues in his reborn quest to be an intelligent filmmaker. Once again, he starts with an idea that is remarkably sophisticated. And once again his biggest enemy is himself as he lards on all the junk he is addicted to.
First the intelligent idea. The primary thing an smart filmmaker does is make certain basic decisions about the stance of the narrator and camera. The most sophisticated options are provided by the detective story. In the basic form, the filmmaker and viewer engage in a joint voyage where they both collaborate and compete to invent a world by discovery. But over time, this template has proven amazingly flexible and fertile. For instance the greatest experimenter of the form, Agatha Christie, once wrote a story that revealed at the end that the narrator was the murderer.
`D. O. A.' was a sweet turn on the form. In that film, the murdered man staggers into a police station. With moments to live before the poison finishes him off, he recounts his detective work to discover who killed him. In `Minority Report' we have the obverse: we learn early who the murderer is, and the story is one where he uses his detective powers to determine who and why he will kill. In literary recognition of the trick, the head `precog' is named Agatha. (The other two are also named after mystery writers whose styles salt the story.)
It is a very intelligent device extended in an even more intelligent, cinematic way: the precogs have visions that are `recorded' and sorted out with a futuristic display. The detective in this case mirrors the viewer who is presented with a collection of visual fragments and tries to make sense out of it. The screenwriter played a similar trick in `Dead Again.' So we have Cruise's detective spending lots of time shuffling through the images, looking for patterns and clues. He manipulates the images physically, which is precisely what an actor does as he works on-screen. Some of this ground was seeded by Greenaway in `the Pillow Book,' where the actor literally had the script written on his body -- an idea more commercially exploited with `Memento.' A fragment on this idea is preserved in the sequence where Cruise's eyes are removed and he is left in a room with huge old films projected on the walls.
Add to this the further notion -- dropped in production -- that the entire film may be recalled images from an imprisoned Cruise as he sorts through his own visions plus Agatha's. This trick, used to great effect in `Brazil' and in another form in `Forbidden Planet' was abandoned by Speilberg because it was `too intelligent' and not entirely accessible to a ten year old, his target mental demographic. Along the way, many similar compromises were made in the name of entertainment: certain thriller and science fiction conventions were adopted and the whole project sunk to just a `me too' commercial product. One great compromise was the use of Cruise, who like Speilberg was a promising talent mired in mawkish self-marketing and reliance on technique.
The problem is that if this film is judged as a science fiction thriller alone, it fails. The invented future isn't novel, consistent or even engaging. The chased hero routine lacks control in the pace. The unfolding of the logic is unrewarding -- our iconic doctor of evil inexplicably performed a murder that he is elaborately covering up. When all is revealed, it seems too thin an armature for all the flying sheet metal.
Agatha here is played by a remarkable actress who completely bests Cruise. She had played `Jane Eyre' in a vision of the book much like the original idea of this film: she plays both the author writing and the character written. In `Emma,' she was the character ineptly written upon. Speilberg has her stagger in an actorly manner and pop out of the water for amateurish utterances. But she finds all the emotional spaces he can't see and fills those well. Watch her here and in the future. I predict good things.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.