« Kinky Boots | Main | Match Point »
March 15, 2006
The Passenger
The Passenger.
It is thirty years since I first saw this film staring Jack Nicholson in the role of a journalist who uses the death of a fellow hotel guest to change his identity and tries to escape his frustrated life, and I had more or less forgotten about it. However, with its huge reputation and the Astor playing it for two weeks in a restored version (It doesn’t look like they found the original negative, but worked from an OK print.) it was a good opportunity to compare The Passenger with more recent films about journalistic ethics such as Capote and Good Night and Good Luck.
Well how has stood the test of time? Firstly, this film is achingly slow. In the 70 year-old Astor the sound of the audience travels through the dress circle far more so than in a modern cinema, and the fidgetiness of the audience was clear. Leonard Maltin’s guide puts the film at 119 minutes and the new print comes in at 126 minutes. The first ten minutes of Nicholson’s character David Locke – a play on the films premise that we are locked into to our lives and it is impossible to escape our given identity – traveling through desert to unsuccessfully meet a band of rebels in an undisclosed northern African military state, seems to go on for ever and it is only when Locke’s temper explodes after bogging his Land Rover that the story really begins. Locke trades his identity for that of a gunrunner – Robertson (Charles Mulvehill). At this point we see Locke using Robertson’s to further his career as an investigative journalist - or do we? We are taken on a road trip through London, Germany, and Spain (lovely use of the Gaudi rooftops of Bacelona), with Locke befriending a young architecture student (whose name is never given.) played by a sultry Maria Schneider (Last Tango In Paris) - who more or less disappears after this film. Robinson is of course wanted by the authorities and together with his former wife (Jenny Runacre) and film editor (Ian Hendry) who eventually realise Locke has taken on Robinson’s identity follow him and “The Girl”. They all finally catch up with him in a dusty little town.
The film is best summed up by its final shot. Beginning with a very very slow zoom through the bars of the hotel room onto the dusty square where a series of small yet familiar events happen, but also the arrival of the African gun buyers. The shot then passes through the bars and follows the arrival of Locke’s former wife and the police. We then return to the window where Lock lays on his bed in the same position he found Robinson.
The film is brilliant in the way it depicts Locke as a man without direction, but its filmic style is purely early seventies, and as such very dated. Its early hand held camera work is very grainy and on the huge Astor screen difficult to watch. No doubt there were location difficulties, but it demonstrates just how far colour film stock has progressed. Although I disagree with the assertion that other people’s identities are never better than our own and that the world is a stark alien place, this is one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s more cohesive films – others include Blowup (1966) and Zabriske Point (1970). However, this might have made a better film if Locke had used his new identity to further his making of the film about the damaging struggle of the military against the people of Africa at the time of Idi Amin and apartheid. Overall, a very interesting film, but one that threw away many opportunities.
8 stars.
Posted by andrewrenaut at March 15, 2006 10:27 AM