It can be a really effective premise to confine your
characters to a single location fort eh duration of the drama. The ancient
Greeks were certainly aware of this as a narrative device. It can work best in
a thriller and there are many that throw a bunch of people together for a
single night and then dispatch them one by one.
James Mangold’s Identity
starts eerily and mysteriously with newspaper clippings of a motel murder and
voiceover recordings of a psychiatrist (Alfred Molina) talking to the alleged
perpetrator. Then suddenly we’re thrust into a motel office as a man bursts in
holding his bleeding wife shouting at the clerk to call an ambulance. Then in
overlapping flashbacks we see the sequence of events, involving a young call
girl, a limousine driver and an aging movie star, and a young boy who never
speaks, that led to the accident. Because of a terrible rain storm that has washed
out the road in both directions, all these characters and more wind up at the
motel together.
Right away the screenplay by Michael Cooney is
deliberately disorienting – are we seeing the motel murders featured in those
clips from the opening credits? But we’ve also seen a late-night hearing with a
judge to decide the fate of a man on death row who may have mental health
issues that preclude him from receiving the death penalty. So when a
corrections officer named Rhodes (Ray Liotta) turns up with a prisoner in
transit (Jake Busey) maybe we’re in the present and history will repeat itself.
That Identity
bears some resemblance to Psycho I’m
sure is no accident. Both use a secluded desert motel as the scene of
nightmares and both involve characters with some kind of identity crisis. And
remember that Marion Crane pulled into the Bates Motel because of torrential
rain.
The characters who wind up stranded at the motel are a
hodgepodge of misfits and distinct personalities. Apart from the
obsessive-compulsive George (John C. McGinley), his injured wife and the shy
little boy are John Cusack as Ed, the limo driver, and Rebecca De Mornay as his
charge. She is vain and selfish while he is quietly reflective, calm and
reasonable. He also knows far more about police procedures than any limo driver
should know. Amanda Peet plays the screenplay’s necessarily sympathetic female
lead, Paris, the hooker with a heart of gold who just want to get to Florida
and tend to an orange grove. Her character is also the target of the most
derision for her profession, particularly from the hotel clerk (John Hawkes)
and Lou (William Lee Scott) and his new bride Ginny (Clea DuVall).
You know it won’t be long before someone in this lineup
is killed. Then it’s a matter of tracking the culprit (is it Rhodes’ convict?)
and staying alive until the storm passes. Oh, and each new body comes with a
motel room key starting with 10, then 9… The whole thing is like a little boy’s
recollection of mysteries and thrillers, from the Psycho parallels to the Agatha Christie countdown. Perhaps there’s
some secret to be unlocked in that.
Identity is not
a film that treats mental disorders with a whole lot of subtlety. Instead they’re
a means to an end, a kind of tie that binds the whole story together. But if
you’re going into this looking for a fair representation of clinical disorders,
you’re starting from way behind. This is a haunting thriller, effective in its
use of creepy locations that nobody can run from – one character tries, but
finds himself circling back to where he started from – and an excellent
combination of light, shadow and sound design to establish an uneasy mood. The
whole movie rides on a tight rope of tension.
Usually in a movie like this the casting is an
afterthought, the stock roles filled out with a few stars and a couple of
newcomers. In this case it may seem that way on the surface, but upon deeper
reflection there’s a reason why Cusack’s part recalls several of his earlier
roles in terms of Ed’s mild-mannered nature. De Mornay, a fading star, was
chosen with intention to play the character of a washed-up actress. Busey, a terrible
actor with a gift for producing the same idiotic facial expression in every
role, is cast to recall his maniacal performances in Contact and The Frighteners.
Liotta’s performance borders on unhinged, like his most well-known role as
Henry Hill in Goodfellas. Hawkes, a
great character actor without traditional movie star looks, is gaunt, wiry and nervous
– qualities that help cast suspicion on his character. There’s a reason there’s
such a strong connection between the histories of these actors, their physical
appearances, and the characters they portray in this film.
Ultimately, the film’s big reveal is a bit facile and the
gotcha moment is, even if you don’t piece it together early, a bit obvious in
retrospect. Identity works well
enough because Mangold is a capable director who can take a premise this silly
and mold it into something interesting. Like John Dahl, he’s someone whose
films I will always take more interest in even if the subject matter is tired
and dull simply because I know he’s going to take it and do something more with
it than the average studio hack.
No comments:
Post a Comment