The Cell (2000)

THE CELL (2000)

Grade: C+

Director: Tarsem Singh

Screenplay: Mark Protosevich

Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dylan Baker, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, James Gammon, Jake Weber, Patrick Bauchau, Gerry Becker, Tara Sunkoff, Jake Thomas, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Catherine Sutherland

THE CELL is chock full of some of the most repulsive imagery I've ever seen in a major motion picture. Also some of the most creative. Its director, Tarsem Singh, who comes from a music video and commercial background, is a visual stylist of the highest order and in some scenes he's orchestrated what could be called visual poetry. THE CELL is often a feast for the eyes though unfortunately almost never a feast for the soul.

Last week Roger Ebert and his smarmy co-host Richard Roeper breathlessly raved, deeming it a masterwork, one of the best films of the year. Just a week prior, Ebert panned COYOTE UGLY, exclaiming "There has to be something for the gray matter. Something". Well I've seen THE CELL and I don't recall it offering much of anything for the gray matter. It had promise (but doesn't every movie, hell, TEACHING MRS. TINGLE had promise), but it's more interested in operatic images than it is in story (the same of which could be said for a music video). The scenes between its characters feel oddly cold and removed like in many Stanley Kubrick films, but in those the stiffness served a purpose, Kubrick made satire and Tarsem has made a straight genre film, which should have likeable characters in order to make us, you know, give a damn. Whatever artistry the director brings to his visual palettes he clearly lacks with his actors; all their voices might as well be dubbed in seeing as how their delivery lacks discernable emotion. Tarsem is clearly not at all interested in them, but he realizes that he has to give those pesky characters some screen time before getting to his visual feast. And he complies, though obviously quite begrudgingly. So I find myself in something of a quandary. While parts of THE CELL disgusted and even offended me, parts of it thrilled me and served as a reminder of what this medium is really capable of. THE CELL plays it safe with its story line, already described by some as SILENCE OF THE LAMBS meets MATRIX, but it doesn't in individual sequences, which is refreshing after one of the most conventional movie summers in some time.

Tarsem may not be much of human storyteller, but he manages to capture the dream state better here than in any other film I've seen. When the picture opens, Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez under pounds of make-up), a progressive child psychologist, has been placed into her patient's subconscious by a group of scientists testing out a revolutionary new dream therapy that enables the patient to interact with their therapist in their own head, thus uncovering secrets that may be too painful to be revealed consciously. Once in the patient's head, Deane finds herself decked out in a flowing white gown amid a serene desert vista that could've been spliced in from a Calvin Klein ad. She's trailing up a sandy dune as Tarsem's camera lingers, watching from afar. Next she's on a black horse riding to her patient, jump to her with the patient, the horse behind her, now an inanimate life-size figurine. Tarsem captures the odd incongruous shifts that we encounter in our dreams, a state where unbelievable things occur and seem downright believable as they transpire…until we wake and ponder; wait a minute, I can't fly. In the world Tarsem creates, anything is possible.

For its first thirty five minutes THE CELL shows a great deal of promise, expertly cutting between three separate stories so as they build to their inevitable interlocking we feel tension from each overlapping into the other. In one, dogged FBI agent Peter Novak (a dulled Vince Vaughn) is narrowing in on Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), a schizophrenic killer who performs some of the most revolting acts I've ever seen get past the MPAA with an R rating of approval. Stargher has constructed a cell encased in glass, containing only a toilet and a bench. He kidnaps women and locks them within it. He leaves them there, alone, setting a timer for water to intermittently shower down from the ceiling. He films them from a stationary camera as they drown, slowly. Later, after they've died, he takes their nude bodies, places them on a slab and levitates above them (you see this wacko has inserted steel rings into his back which he connects to chains that hold him above the bodies, his own skin stretching out like molten latex) while he masturbates over their corpses.

Audiences have always had a morbid fascination with how serial killers operate, and these sort of films have been growing decidedly more gruesome and kinky with their killer's fetishes, but THE CELL has crossed boundaries that I didn't have any desire to see crossed. I don't mind perversion if it has a point (as it did in SEVEN and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) but here it serves no purpose other than to titillate and jolt an audience that's probably sat through everything from KISS THE GIRLS to THE BONE COLLECTOR. THE CELL has gladly matched the evil we've seen in all those films and now we can sit and wait to see someone match it.

After discovering several clues that lead to the killer, the FBI tracks Stargher down, who lays in a coma, passed out after failing to get to his medication. The agents have discovered he has another victim in his cell, and it's only a matter of time before she drowns. Problem is they don't know where Stargher keeps the cell and since he isn't conscious they have no way of finding out. This is when the stories collide. The cops go to the revolutionary scientists with the proposition to put the progressive psychologist inside the killer's mind, befriend him and get him to confess the location of his cell. Thus begins the visual orgy. Amongst the madness is Jennifer Lopez, who, here, lacks everything that made her so charming in OUT OF SIGHT. Lopez looks stunning always, her hair perfect, even when mussed it's stylishly so. Here, she truly gives a star performance, and I mean that in the worst way. Gone is the energy and glow, in its place a Melanie Griffith acting job complete with cotton candy affect and adorned with a small country's supply of lip gloss.

Another acting causality is the usually immensely likeable Vince Vaughn, a highly individual actor who's managed to inject personality in even the most banal roles (his cowboy serial killer in CLAY PIGEONS), though in this film he walks through the part looking tired, speaking in measured tones, not really doing much of anything. If you're gonna cast a talent like Vaughn why not give him something to do besides a tired Charlie Sheen impersonation?

Not to mention (but I'll do so anyway since it's sorta my job) the myriad of character actors given nothing roles, like Dylan Baker, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Pruitt Taylor Vince, though in a major motion picture this is to be expected. Vincent D'Onofrio manages to make something of an impression in early scenes when he plays his schizoid killer like a nerdy mouth breather type, seemingly more afraid of human interaction than death itself. Though once we get into his mind D'Onofrio's performance becomes more typically over the top.

The script's attempts to give us hints as to why Stargher turned out the way he did are awfully pretentious (you see, he was abused by his father who took to calling him "faggot"), but writer Mark Protosevich and director Tarsem Singh nonetheless deserve credit for birthing some of the most oddly compelling (and deeply disturbing visuals) I've ever seen in a picture not directed by Fellini or Argento. The visuals aren't total originals, but they come to life as such with Tarsem's world combining Tarot card images with odd religious torture devices into the grimmest fairy tale universe since CINDERELLA before it was sanitized. But ultimately, all those smoke and mirrors weren't enough to tide me over. I mean, there has to be something for the gray matter. Something. Doesn't there?

http://www.geocities.com/incongruity98 Reeling (Ron Small)