I can't quite remember exactly when and where, but many years ago I ran across an article that talked about all the different story tropes that existed within literature, and that there was only a basic, limited number of such tropes. Thus for every story the narrative could easily be categorized by one of the known types. I think that if you watch enough films, after awhile you can see glimpses of this concept in action. From my perspective, even using randomness to watch films has not kept me from contemplating this notion.
For instance after watching Kind Hearts and Coronets, I had a rather crazy thought that the narrative is essentially a copy of the standard 'ambitious anti-villain' trope seen in a number of American gangster films, which would include one of my earlier selections Scarface. Apart from the elegance of his demeanor and diction, there is not a lot that separates Louis Mazzini from Tony Camonte. Both are seen as completely driven men who have no qualms about killing their way to the top of their respective social structures. Kind Hearts and Coronets even has Joan Greenwood in what could be considered the Ann Dvorak role; a woman from Louis's past who brings about his downfall. Because of these similarities I had given some consideration to using this film as my comparison, but decided against it in order to find a film I hadn't yet talked about. Still to equate nobility to that of a gangster syndicate is a devilish idea, and one I can probably enjoy a little more living in a country that has never had any use for royal titles.
Another crazy thought I had recently was to ponder what the specific order in which I watch these films does to my brain. After watching Eddie Murphy play 6 characters in The Nutty Professor, only to be followed later by Alec Guinness who played 8 distinct roles in my last entry, I'm suddenly wondering how often this type of stuff has been done in films. I’m also wondering if I’m the only person in the world who watched Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets and in doing so, sparked a thought about Eddie Murphy. Perhaps. Anyway let's see what the next selection does to erode my sanity.
Transsiberian
The cover shows a dreary, winter scene with a strong theme of blinding whiteness. The ground is blanketed in white snow so thick that only the steel rails of a train track are visible. The sky has a cloudy, white hue that matches the snow covered field. Even the lush pine trees in the middle of this scene have a dusty, powdery tint to its normal green shades. We see a train in the distance flashing a bright white light and two people dressed in drab, gray clothing running away from the tracks while holding hands. The title appears in the middle of the sky with drop shadows proving the illusion of quick, horizontal movement. Above the title are the names and pictures of 6 performers, of whom only Woody Harrleson and Ben Kingsley I have ever heard of before. The most striking picture probably belongs to Kate Mara, who seems miscast having a face that looks like it has seen more sun than the other 5 actors combined.
The movie begins on the remote east coast of Russia, where we are taken to a loading dock during the harsh cold of winter. The sun is about to set as a car drives up and parks next to a fishing boat. Out comes Inspector Grinko who meets with two local cops and then enters the boat to investigate the scene. The boat’s resident has been left frozen in time, both literally and figuratively, at the moment of his death when a sharp knife was jammed into the back of his head. He was staring at what turns out to be a secret compartment on the inside wall of the boat which, when Grinko opens it, reveals nothing. Whatever had been stashed there is gone and most likely left in the arms of the murderer.
The movie then abruptly transitions to the warm glow of a Chinese afternoon, where a group of Americans have met to hear some middle aged man sprout motivational, quasi-religious nonsense, albeit to his audience’s mild approval. One young couple from this gathering, Roy and Jessie, head to the train station once this meeting is over. At one point, Jessie stands in front of a station map, setting the stage for their journey. It is to be a weeklong sojourn abroad a train traveling from Beijing to Moscow, with most of the journey traversing the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Jessie has a camera with her and passes the time taking pictures of the other passengers, a strange, eclectic mix of mostly Russian citizens. During an early scene in the dining cart a European man forewarns the couple about tangling with the police in either China or Russia. On the second day of the journey they are joined by cabin mates, a casually friendly, Spanish-speaking man named Carlos and his laconic, more reserved American companion Abby. During a stop at the border, as the trains switch wheels, Jessie begins to have suspicions about the young couple they suddenly share a cabin with. As the journey gradually winds its way west, we see small samples of a more malicious nature. Carlos mentions to the couple about the trouble with brand new passports, and reveals his secret for getting across borders, don’t stand out. Later he mentions that he sells matryoshka dolls to shops in Amsterdam, a fact that visibly perturbs Abby when she learns about their presence later. Still Carlos’s carefree, gregarious nature quickly wins Roy’s friendship, while Jessie slowly builds a modest relationship with Abby.
The story really starts to pick up steam during a stop in Irkustsk. After the train leaves the station, Jessie realizes that Roy did not get back on. The train agents arrange to get Roy on the next train which arrives the following day. Jessie, Carlos and Abby then get off at the next stop, Ulyanovsk, and stay at a hotel near the station. Carlos manages to get the currently reformed and sober Jessie to have a drink and the next day convinces her to take a side trip to see an old dilapidated cathedral out in the middle of the forest. Here Carlos attempts to seduce Jessie and nearly succeeds. When a wooden plank falls from the roof Jessie suddenly snaps back to reality and chooses to remain faithful to her husband. Carlos however continues his pursuit and chases Jessie into the forest where she grabs a wooden fence post and smacks him in the head enough times to kill him. She then hurries back to Ulyanovsk and boards the train where she reconnects with Roy. Abby just barely misses the train and Jessie momentarily thinks that she has gotten on scot free. Unfortunately for her, Carlos had sneaked the matryoshka dolls into Jessie’s suitcase before their sightseeing escapade and the couple have a brand new cabin mate, Inspector Elia Grinko.
When Jessie opens her suitcase and makes her horrific discovery, she tries desperately to get rid of the dolls, but can’t get away from Grinko or the train attendants long enough to do so. Roy eventually learns about her discovery and convinces her to hand the dolls over to the Inspector peacefully. What Roy doesn’t realize is that Grinko is after more than just the drugs and that Jessie has more to confess to than just being an unwitting mule. After another stop Roy and Jessie switch trains again, this time they board one operated only by Grinko and his assistant Kolzak. The Russian cops hold the couple captive in order to find out where Carlos is, something that Jessie obviously doesn’t want to reveal. They end up escorting the couple to a warehouse, where they torture a heavily bruised Abby in an attempt to get the truth out of Jessie. The couple manage to escape and get back on their train. Roy gets the train moving and ultimately crashes it before Grinko and Kolzak can get the information that they were looking for. Grinko sees an army of Russian soldiers on the other train and makes a play to look innocent and escape, not before finding out of course that Jessie had killed Carlos. The couple eventually makes it to Moscow, where US officials fill them in on all the characters that they had met. Inspired by an electronic billboard, Jessie decides to visit Abby in the hospital to let her in on her dirty little secret. The movie ends with Abby visiting the old Russian church, where she removes the money belt from Carlos’s frozen corpse.
The first thing I noticed about this film was the cinematography which was beautifully photographed. It was distinguished by a more artsy, ultra-realistic feel, aided by the shaky and sometimes quick hand-held camera movements and quick jump cutting. The hand held approach spoke as much to the unsteady and turbulent nature of the characters as it did to one of the more identifiable kinks of train travel. Another distinctive feature was it's close, tight framing, which I really liked in this case because it was extremely well suited to the setting, that being the claustrophobic space aboard the train. In the early stages of Jessie and Carlos's meeting, the viewer can experience the same awkward, uncomfortable closeness that the characters appear to feel for each other. When the film had a rare chance to get outside and get some fresh air, the visual imagery of the cold, desolate, harsh snow covered landscapes really helped set the mood for the story. This aspect is even developed early in the film with a short sequence in Vladivostok that offers an excellent introduction into the film. The framing was good as was the mise-en-scène, although my one complaint in this area was the inclusion of certain shots that gave too much away in the exposition. Near the end, the close up shot of the billboard featured an extremely obvious focus on the cottage pier, a reference to an earlier conversation. Also during the stay at the hotel, when Jessie leaves the room there’s a quick pan down to Jessie's suitcase, a camera movement that to me did not come off as random. Between the staging of the shots, the rather transparent acting and the unoriginal narrative, this not a film that will keep you guessing, other than perhaps what will happen next.
Speaking of the acting, I was neither dissatisfied, nor really blown away by any of the performers. Overall they lacked a certain depth and complexity to their portrayals, with rare exceptions, and in the end didn't leave much of an impression on me. Woody Harrelson was consistent at least in his portrayal of Roy, the standard American doofus who never really fits in when travelling abroad. It's a character trope that is played in a rather stereotypical way, as a good-natured simpleton who maintains his earnestness even during his abduction by Grinko and Kolzak. As an American I take a slight offence to how such characters are played, even though I can't completely deny that such people do actually exist. Although I do have to give Harrleson credit for effectively playing such a guileless schmuck, allowing one to easily believe why Carlos would choose him for his plotting. The other American characters were far less offensive to my sensibilities but not much better acting wise. Kate Mara plays Abby as a more moody, introspective, somber character. It was a persona that Mara never really breaks away from in a rather one-dimensional performance. The scene of Abby revealing her dream of buying a Canadian cottage, Mara’s lone effort to add some depth, never felt all that convincing when considering how Mara played the character elsewhere. Emily Mortimer as Jessie gives a more multi-faceted performance that combines some of Roy's affable, naïve warmth, with some of Abby's dark, sour disposition. Mortimer though too often was overly sentimental, expressing her guilt in a painfully transparent fashion. For me the problem with Mortimer's performance was that it never really lived up to the ‘chica mala’ back story that she describes. There was only one time when Mortimer does tap into this aspect, and that's when she leaves the bathroom and gives the attendant a surly look of contempt. This small peek into her past is highly effective not only in that she successfully cloaks her guilt, but in the ease in which she switches to this bluff.
One of the few actors who came close to achieving some depth in their portrayal was Eduardo Noriega who spends most of his screen time playing Carlos in a pleasant and warmly sociable manner, sometimes aping Roy’s own facetious body language. Still he subtly sneaks in touches of his more sinister aims, as seen when he cites the dubious circumstances in which to use Jessie's shower. During the pit stop in Irkutsk Noriega really gives credence to his villainy with his suddenly grave countenance while grasping the bent pipe in the train yard. The character clearly has some evil in him, but Noriega for the most part doesn't reveal too much of this. Ben Kingsley as Grinko also straddles the boundary between friend and foe and was more enigmatic in his true nature than Noriega. The one problem with Kingsley here is that he leans too much on his character's overly friendly inclination, which obscures his character’s hidden agenda and lessens the impact of his performance. I felt like there was a bit more ruthlessness to the character of Grinko, a quality that Kingsley for some reason kept largely restrained. A good example of this was in the scene where Jessie gives up the dolls. Grinko has successfully caught Jessie in her lies and basically lets her slip away with an almost jolly remark about fear and irrationality. Thomas Kretschmann, as Kolzak, doesn't enter the film until very late and barely has any lines, making him not much more than a scary face. The rude Russian train attendant left a bigger mark on this film than Kretschmann did.
The dialogue certainly wasn't as good as my last entry, but it still found ways to sneak in some excellent wisdom. Kingsley had a lot of great lines like “With lies you may go ahead in the world, but you may never go back”. Of course an earlier comment “People who look innocent, but are really not” might be the most pertinent embodiment of the film’s theme. At other times the dialogue was incredibly weak, and it seems as if all the dud lines went to Harrleson. Not only was his lame John Deere joke awful, but during the escape his character has to announce that he knows how to operate a train, a line that felt as if it was said as much to the viewer, in a tepid attempt at validation, then to anyone else. The trips down memory lane in Irkutsk were not particularly well written either. These were a bit mawkish and seemed a little forced, once again spoken as much to the audience as to anyone else.
Attempting to build the back story through dialogue and not flashback scenes though might have been a blessing in disguise, since the two flashback scenes that appear in the film where rather pointless. One scene shows Carlos loading the matryoshka dolls into Jessie's suitcase, which was totally unnecessary. The pan shot of the suitcase during the original scene was no accident; it clearly conveys the idea that Carlos will use this to hide his contraband. Why do a flashback to show something that most people would have been able to easily deduce? The other flashback scene shows Jessie remembering Carlos’s peculiar affection for the sad doll leading her to the realization that the other dolls were the corrupted ones. Once again the original scene, along with Abby’s reaction when finding out about the dolls, had already done enough to confirm what Carlos was really up to. This is a film where the characters have to catch up to the viewer in their knowledge, and this is rarely a mark of a quality film. The story was so straightforward and predictable (emulating a train latching onto the tracks that have been laid down for it to follow) that it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to put the pieces together. The story was at best suspenseful, but certainly not mysterious. Other disparaging adjectives that I would use to describe the narrative would be jejune, boring, groan-inducing (the best example of this was the near-miss as Grinko hands the camera back before seeing a photo of Carlos), contrived (one sees this all over the place, in the exaggerated slower pace as Grinko views Jessie's photos building some faux suspense, in Jessie's inability to secretly get rid of the dolls, and in the climax where Grinko points his gun at the couple before shooting Kolzak instead in what was a weak attempt at a twist), and at times just plain stupid (this is seen in Carlos's death and in the couple's barefoot escape which is made possible by the sheer idiocy of their captors, who take a smoke break while leaving them unsupervised and unrestrained).
The themes and ideas floating through the film were a little more interesting, although not really original. One idea was the crisis of identity existing within most of the characters. This is rather blatantly invoked with the presence of matryoshka dolls, suggesting reserves of alternate identities existing below the surface of these people. The problem with this is that when you start peeling off the layers; one finds nothing but morally repulsive, awful people with hardly any socially redeemable values whatsoever. Granted each character may be horrible in their own unique ways, but in the end they're all unlikeable. There is no one here I could really identify with, no one I could root for, no one to garner any sympathy towards. The film presents a bland conflict between all sorts of unsavory characters. It’s a cookie cutter suspense thriller about little more than the logistics of thieves, liars, drugs and money that seems rather par for the course these days with nothing new or interesting to say about such ventures. With the characters of different nations involved there is perhaps some geo-political allegory, especially since it ends with the Americans failing to be held accountable for their crimes and with another American obtaining the windfall from this episode, but apart from this the film has nothing even remotely interesting to comment on.
Another idea that was invoked early in the film was the notion that there are only two paths; good and evil; light and dark, and so forth, an idea that the film does nothing to support. There is nothing black and white about this film, it's all gray.
Movie Comparison. One film that is a little more colorful is Michel Welterlin's Wolves in the Snow, a film that also centers itself on the notions of lies and deceit. Here Marie-Josée Croze plays a dull, bored housewife, Lucie, who gets into a heated argument with her husband, one that ends with her impulsively killing him. She hides his body in the bathtub and then starts to construct stories in order to make her seem innocent. In doing this she learns of her husband's own lies and secrets and comes into contact with his old associates who are after the money that he hid from them. One of the crooks learns of Lucie’s deed, but becomes infatuated with her and offers a friendly hand to help navigate her through this affair. The story is slightly better and certainly has more intrigue with some genuinely satisfying twists. In the early part of the film, none of the characters could truly trust each other and the set of dynamics that it presents is wonderfully complex. Even when Lucie confesses her crime, it's a story that isn't believed. The dialogue didn't have the wisdom that Transsiberian contained and at times got a little too pretentious; however its strength was in its depth. This is a world where the real communication exists in the subtexts of what is said. The story does get weaker in the last half as the pace slows down and depends more on suspense thriller clichés, especially the ending where we see one of the crooks shoot his partner in order to save Lucie. I'm starting to wonder if there is a screenwriter's handbook out there that lists of all these types of twists. As the film gets more moody and introspective in the last half, it also addresses themes of personal identity. Near the end, the film is no longer really about the money, but rather other facets of the crooks' desires, which Lucie's presence seems to ignite. In their lust for Lucie they ponder a life beyond a world of crime, even as she ironically gets pulled deeper into their world, and this element made Wolves in the Snow more interesting. Carlos's tryst with Jessie might have come close to this idea, but his ploy clearly had some ulterior motives behind it making his desires seem less genuine. With this in mind the acting was better and more effective at capturing the character's depth with Croze, Romano Orzari, and Jean-Philippe Écoffey all giving rich performances. The cinematography was better as well. It also utilized the hand-held, cinema-vérité approach and was able to wonderfully capture a real lurid and gritty side to Montreal. The most notable feature though was the strong and yet colorful use of light, not only to accentuate the different shades to these characters, but also to highlight the strong contrasts, as seen with the red glowing light of a low-rent hotel hallway. The film even ends with an almost angelic shot of bright light shining down on Lucie after her life is spared which I have to admit did feel somewhat inappropriate. Much like Transsiberian, this is a film where the villains aren’t quite as evil as they should be, and the heroes are far from innocent.