Terry Gilliam (1995)
Gruelling (there’s plenty of bludgeoning violence and gore) and dull. I wanted to see it because I’ve seen nothing by Terry Gilliam other than what might be thought of as his Holy Grail diptych (the Monty Python one and The Fisher King) and because Twelve Monkeys was inspired, as the opening credits acknowledge, by Chris Marker’s brilliant La Jetée. (I’ve been lucky enough to see this twice in the last year in BFI double bills – before main courses of Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour). At the start of Twelve Monkeys, a legend explains that in 1997 a deadly virus killed many millions and the humankind that survived moved ‘from the face of the planet’ (they went underground), leaving animals free to dominate the abandoned post-viral landscape. The recurring sequence that illustrates the film’s debt to La Jetée also appears early – a boy witnesses his own death, as a man, in an airport setting. The vision is experienced by James Cole, the main character of Twelve Monkeys. Cole is a convicted criminal living in the subterranean, post-apocalyptic future, and trying to earn a pardon for his crimes by agreeing to be sent by scientists on time-travelling missions to track down the pure form of the devastating virus, from which a cure can be developed.
On Cole’s first expedition, he arrives in a Baltimore mental hospital in 1990, where he’s treated by a psychiatrist called Kathryn Railly and where his fellow inmates include an animal rights activist called Jeffrey Goines. The scientists get Cole back (I didn’t follow how this process worked) then send him to 1996 – it seems via a First World War battlefield – instead. Although we don’t see Cole’s face in the airport nightmare, we do see that the girl silently screaming in grief and horror as the body of a man falls to the ground is Kathryn Railly (with a different hairdo), who, when she meets up with Cole again in 1996, comes to believe in what he’s trying to do, and more or less falls in love with him. In other words (and even if you don’t know La Jetée), it’s soon clear what the end of Twelve Monkeys is destined to be. The tone of the picture is grim (at times comically grim but very rarely funny). I didn’t expect a happy ending but, because of the plot complications and the ease of travel between past and future, I rather expected Cole’s eventual fate, even if not avoided, to turn out less straightforward than it looked set to be.
The look of Twelve Monkeys is bleakly compelling (Roger Pratt was the cinematographer and Jeffrey Beecroft the production designer); and this is science fiction with a doomsday flavour that remains powerful because, nearly fifteen years after its release, the world is more nervous about (various kinds of) apocalypse than it was in the mid-1990s. I can’t see that the film, from a screenplay by David and Janet Peoples, amounts to much more than this. You don’t care about the characters and I kept reminding myself that I shouldn’t expect to, that the piece was plot- and theme-driven (although the themes were a closed book to me). But the ending left me baffled: because what happened was what appeared bound to happen throughout, I came out thinking that I had after all been supposed to care about Cole and Kathryn – and that Twelve Monkeys depended largely on being caught up in their frantically doomed fight to avoid the inevitable. Bruce Willis as Cole is proficient and physically game for anything but he’s curiously lacking in personality: he’s convincing as a type of action hero rather than expressive as an individual. As Kathryn, Madeleine Stowe is well partnered with him – she has a lovely but impersonal presence. Both Willis and Stowe register as something other than competently generic only when they’re listening to the radio in her car (Willis as he reacts enthusiastically to pop songs, Stowe as she gives him a humorously reproving nod during a news report about Cole’s abducting Kathryn). As the animal rights activist, Brad Pitt’s idea of playing someone crazy may be obvious but it’s a spectacular turn – and surprising, in retrospect at least, to see him perform with such gestural flair. Christopher Plummer is droll as Jeffrey’s virologist father. Even allowing for the fact that they’re seemingly meant to be comically sinister (but why?), the scientists who send Cole on his missions are played crudely. As I’d expect in sci-fi, that goes for most of the rest of the cast too.
21 August 2009
