Adventure of the Mind
FILM: The Cell
DIRECTOR: Tarsem Singh
STARRING: Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn
GRADE: C+
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BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? JENNIFER LOPEZ BATTLES BAD GUYS AND BAD DREAMS IN TARSEM SINGH'S HYPER-STYLIZED THRILLER, THE CELL.
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On one level, I understand the praise Tarsem Singh has drawn for The
Cell. On another level, I find the extent of that praise quite mad.
Certainly, notions that this is one of the year's best films are altogether
cockeyed.
The story in The Cell centers on a beautiful and caring
psychologist named Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez, who, yes, just as in Out
of Sight, in one particular "back" shot assures her fans that she's holding
on to a fundamental asset). Using a new chemical and electrical technology,
Catherine has pioneered a new kind of psychotherapy in which she is actually
able to enter the psyche of a troubled patient. Heretofore, Catherine has only
practiced this technique on a comatose child. But when a sadistic serial killer
turns up in a coma while his latest victim remains alive but imminently
imperiled in an undiscovered automated torture chamber, FBI agent Peter Novak
(Vince Vaughn) enlists Catherine's assistance. Her mission: enter the diseased
mind of Carl Stargher (the gifted Vincent D'Onofrio wasting his talents on an
astonishingly under-imagined psychopath) and figure out where the killer
stashed the pretty girl (Tara Subkoff) he planned to violate sexually and
emotionally.
Once inside Stargher's nutcake brain, Catherine encounters such
horrors that agent Novak has to go in after her. And you thought menage a
trois was 1) French, and 2) a dream come true. Basically this picture is
like an acid trip without having to actually take drugs. You get the
nightmarish scenarios without having to think you're losing your mind. You get
lots of lush colors. And you get a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't make a
lick of sense.
Those who have liked this picture must have done so because of its
series of arresting images, images so starkly different from reality, so
brimming with color and so innately fascinating that you could well stare at
them individually for the great length of time you might devote to standing
before a compelling painting.
The picture starts with such an image that we later learn is the
product of the child's mind. Catherine is dressed in a gown of white feathers,
her smooth, tawny skin a vivid contrast to the texture and color of her dress.
She is standing in a barren landscape of rust-colored sand, a sand mountain
rising behind her like a painted backdrop. But then she turns, a character
out of something imagined by Salvador Dali, and climbs the plummeting ridge of
that sand mountain, walking bolding toward a cobalt sky, leaving elephantine
footprints in her wake as she rises into the distance. The whole sequence is
breathtaking, no question.
But I'll be damned if I have a clue as to what it means or how it
fits with what follows. Throughout the movie, we get other moments of painterly
wonder that approximate (but never quite equal) this first one. All are
pleasurable to behold. And for that reason, The Cell is worth seeing.
But does this work as a movie? Not at all. In fact, the story that incorporates
these striking individual images is so pedestrian it serves largely to diminish
them. In short, from what I see in The Cell, Tarsem Singh is working in
the wrong medium.
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