Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
In 1986, British police officers changed the face of law enforcement forever. Baffled by two brutal rape-murders, the police decided to take blood samples from every young man in the area. The search for the murderer, dramatized in Joseph Wambaugh's "The Blooding", ended in the apprehension and conviction of a suspect based solely on genetic identification.
The same concept is carried to a fare-thee-well in "Gattaca", a cautionary fable about the dangers of genetic discrimination. Our hero is Ethan Hawke, a genetically disadvantaged social climber trying to join the genetically perfect elite in a futuristic society where it's not what you know, or even who you know, but who you are that counts. The only "network" you use to get a job at Gattaca, Inc. is the double-helix network of your DNA strand. Like a light-skinned African-American "passing" for white in a racist society, Hawke is forced to live a precarious double existence, buying tissue and blood from a disabled person with superior gene structure (Jude Law) and living in what looks like a Danish modern genetics lab. When the murder of a co-worker puts the law onto Hawke's genetic trail, a game of cat-and-mouse ensues.
The futuristic trappings aside, the plot of "Gattaca" doesn't differ from "The Blooding" in any appreciable way. Hawke, innocent of the crime of murder, has committed the crime of genetic impersonation, and it's just a question of how long he can evade the constant genetic probes before his own genetic structure gives him away. That's not interesting. The characters aren't interesting, either. Hawke plays his poor-man's-Tom-Cruise part to the best of his abilities, but he does nothing to hold the audience's interest. Uma Thurman is wasted as a genetically superior ice princess. The supporting cast isn't much better, with a raft of refugees from NBC's Thursday night schedule (Tony Shalhoub, Ernest Borgnine, Blair Underwood) and not much else. All the performances are strictly room-temperature, save for Jude Law's turn as the sarcastic wheelchair-bound tissue donor.
My question is this. You're parents, right? You can make your kid into anything you want to be, whether he's a pianist with twelve fingers or a prototype NFL quarterback. You would think that billions of different people would make different choices, right? But in "Gattaca", it looks like everyone has bought the same showroom model -- the Yuppie LX. (The set design looks just like an Infiniti ad.) The "Gattaca" employees are bland, dull, Organization Men in identical designer suits. Looks as though they've edited the gene for non-conformity right out of the genome. If this is the point of the movie -- and it may well be -- it may not be worth making.
And if they're going to show one side of the coin -- the genetic elite setting orbital patterns in a Bauhaus office complex -- I think the filmmakers have an obligation to show the dark side of genetic tampering. I was driving down Guadalupe Avenue in Austin this evening and got a good look at what the GenX college students are doing as far as hair color and tattoos -- I wonder what would happen if they gave these kids their own gene splicer to play with? But there's no subversive cyberpunks anywhere to counterbalance the bland conformity that is "Gattaca".
"Gattaca" (the name, by the way, derives from the letters G, A, T, and C in genetic coding) is a serious, almost humorless movie. To it's credit, the film does a good job in raising questions about the intersection of human rights and genetic technology, almost before they've been asked. But as entertainment, it's a snooze, and as a thriller, it's a flat out disappointment.
Grade: B- -- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
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