Stuck in the sleeping car

Let’s say you were busy getting settled in your seat during the opening moments of The Railway Man, in which Eric Lomax (Colin Firth) is lying on the floor, muttering some eerie rhyme to himself. This would mean that, for you, the film would begin, more or less, with Eric meeting Patti (Nicole Kidman) on a train. It’s all rather comforting at this point: the Technicolor tones of the cinematography, the two attractive stars sharing a table as the landscape passes between them, swapping travel routes as a way of making love. How old-fashioned! There’s even mention of Brief Encounter. Firth almost looks like Robert Donat in that moustache. Perhaps the rail-riding lovers-in-waiting are playing a variation on North by Northwest. Though the truth is that Eric is far too tormented to be Cary Grant, and Patti, a nurse, will come to more closely resemble Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound, the single-minded woman determined to heal her damaged man. But Bergman had a personality and authority. She liked liverwurst. And she was in a movie that, however artificial, even silly, had gravitas. All The Railway Man has is gravity, and that gravity comes entirely from the source material, not from this awkwardly structured, numbingly somber piece of prestige cinema.

My reservations are in no way meant to make light of the suffering of the real Eric Lomax, an engineer who served the British Army in the war, was taken prisoner and tortured, and who never recovered his psychic health until his spouse made his recovery her mission, and until Lomax went back to Southeast Asia to confront his chief tormentor and, amazingly, wound up becoming his tormentor’s friend. That last part, the confrontation that turned into reconciliation that turned into camaraderie, deserves a smart, lucid, searching movie, yet this entire development, the most extraordinary chapter in an extraordinary story, is barely even touched on here. It’s all but reduced to a closing title card.

At first it seems like Patti might be out protagonist. While tight-lipped Eric is going semi-catatonic or lunging at strangers with a box-cutter, Patti is relentlessly questioning Eric’s wartime buddy (Stellan Skarsgård) about what really happened. “Wherever there’s been a war there are nurses like me to put people back together,” she declares. We know Patti’s something of a bossy pants from the very start of their romance—right after their first kiss she’s already giving Eric the moustache ultimatum. But whatever promise Patti had of turning into a real and active character quickly dissolves under the film’s poorly handled flashbacks, which are spread out as evenly and indiscriminately as David Hirschfelder’s overly busy, obtrusive score. Why is Kidman even in this thing? Firth at least gets to flail and be agonized, though the character’s lack of texture and the film’s lack of curiosity does no favours to Firth or anyone else. Lomax died in 2012, but his memoir is still in print. 

               

Heist gone wrong just gets wronger and wronger

Trance begins with a heist gone wrong. Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 127 Hours) loves to explore different kinds of kicks, and in the slickly photographed opening sequence of Trance he revels in the depiction of what promises to be an inventively planned clean getaway—before throwing in the wrench and supplying a visceral jolt. The goods to be stolen aren’t jewels or currency but rather a great work of art: Goya’s Witches in the Air. Don’t let this give you the impression that Trance will have anything to do with the specifics of the art world, or art theft, or with art in general, or with anything that makes any sense or means anything. Boyle’s latest adrenaline-confection is hokum—extremely complicated hokum. Rarely does a story work this hard to be this dumb.

Franck (Vincent Cassel) leads the crew of crooks. Simon (James McAvoy), a gambling addict whose debts Franck took care of, is the inside man: he works for the auction house overseeing the Goya’s sale. During the heist Simon inexplicably Tasers Franck, Franck beats Simon senseless; somewhere along the way the Goya is lost. No one knows where it wound up, not even Simon, because he wakes up in hospital with amnesia. Franck orders Simon to visit Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), a gorgeous hypnotherapist, presuming that she can unlock his busted memory. Elizabeth rapidly kens on to the fact that Simon’s in trouble, but rather than try to get him out of it she deals herself in: she’ll help the gang find the painting if she gets a cut. So everybody’s on the take, but, alas, nothing is as it seems. Yes, Trance is one of those movies where “nothing is as it seems,” which means that the plot is going to bend over backwards and characters are going to be turned inside-out so as to accommodate surprise at all costs.

For a little while it seems that Boyle, working from Joe Aheame and John Hodge’s script, is going for a blippy, pulsating new spin on Hitchcock’s Spellbound, but gradually things careen into a territory that owes more to the untrustworthy narrators of Jim Thompson novels. Which brings us to the film’s key deficiency, one even more problematic than the script itself. Dawson does her best with a ridiculous role and Cassel is actually quite fun as the ruthless villain who turns out to be the most sympathetic character of the lot—the film actually ends in such a way that he sort of becomes the protagonist. But McAvoy is way in over his injured head. The limp line-readings he gives to the more ploddingly cryptic bits in the opening voice-over (“…the event of a situation…”), the over-rehearsed cracks in his voice that say, “I’m nervous!”: he’s either without any colour or trying way too hard, and in the end, when the character’s full backstory is revealed, nothing in McAvoy’s boyish performance adds up to anything but a confusing mess. I feel somewhat bad about dumping all over McAvoy—he’s done well in certain naïve parts—but he’s badly miscast here, and makes one pine for the days when Boyle’s steady leading man was Ewan McGregor, an actor who can convey a much higher degree of genuine mischief. 

         

You must remember this: Gregory Peck wrestles with his cagey brain (again) in Mirage, now on DVD

When the lights suddenly go out in New York City, David Stillwell (Gregory Peck) begins groping in the dark for answers. The blackout becomes something almost supernatural, a catalytic event, afflicting David with some sort of amnesia. He meets a beautiful raven-haired stranger (Diane Baker) in a stairwell who says she knows him and then flees when he doesn’t reciprocate. He descends into subterranean floors that later vanish inexplicably. His apartment is weirdly empty and is rearranged in his absence. He sees flashes of things—a man falling to his death, shadowy figures whispering below a tree—that don’t add up. A rabid wrestling fan attempts to abduct him, claiming David possesses some item of great value to an unnamed party. David goes to the cops, to a shrink, to a private dick (Walter Matthau), but almost no one seems able to help him, and everyone cracks wise. His life is in danger and he can’t remember why, and that strange woman reappears, more beautiful and glowing with doom that before, and offers cold comfort: it’s precisely his forgetting that’s keeping him alive.

Though ostensibly riddled with Cold War paranoia, Mirage (1965), directed by Edward Dmytryk, is too slight and warmly lit to be as noir as the set-up promises, but it is terrific fun, particularly while the ambiguity holds and we know as little about what the hell is going on as David does. This is a movie about a man who can’t come to terms with the very recent past and turns to others to coax him slowly into it. And you’ve got to wonder what it is about Peck’s handsomely furrowed brow that makes him such a perfect, sympathetic embodiment of repressed memory. He was rendered so helpless by amnesia in Spellbound (45) that Ingrid Bergman fell in love with him even when he proved to be a potentially murderous imposter. There was some profound darkness in Peck that cut through the outer decency he so often exuded, and beautiful women always seemed willing to shine a light into that darkness and root around.

The music, by Quincy Jones, is irritating, and the bursts of violence are silly, which is probably why Dmytryk cuts to the TV to watch wrestling for a bit while David is supposed to be disarming and knocking out a gun-wielding heavy. The movie’s too long, and the dispatching of clues too piecemeal for a resolution that’s inevitably less exciting than what leads to it. But Peter Stone’s dialogue crackles, Peck and Matthau are a highly enjoyably matched team of would-be sleuths in over their heads, Baker is sexy and mysterious enough in her array of hats, and Dmtryk’s unusual use of silent flashbacks is nicely creepy, foreshadowing stylistic efforts soon to come from the likes of Nicolas Roeg. Overall, Mirage is much like the spooky little girl that offers David temporary refuge and a cup of invisible coffee: there’s not much substance there, but the presentation is enticing.