CITY OF ANGELS
USA. 1998. Director - Brad Silberling, Screenplay - Dana Stevens, Based on the film `Wings of Desire' written by Peter Handke & Wim Wenders, Producers - Charles Roven & Dawn Steel, Photography - John Seale, Music - Gabriel Yared, Visual Effects - Sony Pictures Imageworks (Supervisor - John Nelson), Special Effects Supervisor - David Blitstein, Makeup Effects - The Burman Studio, Production Design - Lilly Kilvert. Production Company - Regency Enterprises/Atlas Entertainment. Nicolas Cage (Seth), Meg Ryan (Dr Maggie Rice), Dennis Franz (Nathaniel Messinger), Colm Feore (Dr Jordan Ferris), Andre Braugher (Cassiel), Robin Bartlett (Annie)
Plot: Angels hover invisibly over LA, listening in on people's thoughts. One angel, Seth, aches to touch and feel the things that ordinary people do. He is drawn to Maggie Rice, a heart surgeon whose life starts falling apart after a patient she cared about died, and appears to her, offering comfort and solace. Gradually the two fall in love and Seth faces the choice of whether or not to to elect to fall from being an angel and become an ordinary mortal so he can be with her.
Wim Wenders' `Wings of Desire' (1987) was one of the great fantasy films of the 1980s. It lacked anything appreciable in the way of trite moral epiphanies like any traditional Hollywood angel fantasy, but instead used angels as an extraordinary and beautiful poetic meditation on the human condition. Now of course comes `City of Angels', the Hollywood remake of `Wings of Desire', which is sadly exactly the banalizing that one would expect when a European arthouse film having been passed through the studio grinder. In `Wings' the romance was one of, but not necessarily the primary, subplot, but in `City' it is propelled to the forefront and told in the most shameless Hollywood romantic sentiments conceivable. At which, one must admit, it conducts itself passably. There are some passages which come with a tenderly written feeling - most especially the opening scene where Cage takes the soul of a child from a hospital operating theatre ("Will Mummy understand ?" "She will"). It is just that when you compare it to `Wings' it cannot help but seem an inferior effort. Director Silberling ably imitates Wenders' camera moves serenely circling through the air as though operated by angels. And there are even moments when the film seems to play with the double meaninged title and the visual iconography that one might associate with it in a very Wenders-esque way - angels casually holding conversations atop downtown street signs or sitting atop the Hollywood sign. And indeed it even takes the ending to further places than `Wings' ever went to by opting for a tragic ending to the romance to add the comment that the joy of life entails pain as well (a corollary that Wenders left it to his sequel `Faraway! So Close' before getting around to making).
But where Wenders achieved a kind of numinously divine poetry about the aching fragility and beauty of the human condition, `City' is left straining at romantic cliche. Silberling just cannot help but overplay his hand. One of the most haunting images in `Wings' was one beautiful tracking shot showing angels invisibly sitting amongst the people in a library. Silberling repeats it in `City' but overplays it to the point of absurdity - it becomes a focal location in the story and gets tricked out with absurdly heavy-handed shots like having all the angels sinisterly looking down from the balconies. And where the film really loses it altogether is in the disastrous casting. Nicolas Cage is appallingly miscast as an angel - where he should radiate a beatific divine grace and drift through listening to human thoughts with a boundless empathy, Cage comes across as rather dopey. And most laughably when it comes to the film's celebration of the joy of life, his attempts at running about animated by the ecstasy of sensation make him look like a total lunatic. Equally Meg Ryan is completely miscast in the part of a heart surgeon. Ryan is a light comedy actress and is almost impossible to believe as a surgeon on the emotional brink. (And she is not exactly helped by poorly motivated script - it is hard to believe an experienced surgeon would just suddenly go to pieces for no well-defined reason after the medically inexplicable death of a child she never knew). Between this absurd box-office oriented miscasting and Silberling's heavy-handed mishandling of the story, the serene, almost divine poetry of Wenders's original topples into risibility.
Reviewed by Richard Scheib
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