Part of the appeal of cinema/narrative is the space between the scenes, the B we have to fill in to get from A to C. It's about economy, allows more to be said with less words. Simple stuff. Language is similarly streamlined, and can be streamlined as such because both speaker and listener know the codes, or, in cinema again, the conventions. We're native to the medium, so to speak. The trick for the movie-maker, now, is to say the most in the least amount of time, which means make the B-spaces as wide as possible without losing the audience. And there's so many ways to lose the audience. Simple confusion is one ('C? What, how'd we get here already?'). At the other end of the spectrum is director Bruce Beresford's Double Jeopardy, more or less insulting us by glossing over the past six years (etc) via putting the explanation for those six years awkwardly in some supporting character's mouth. Meaning that character is no longer talking to another character, as s/he should be, but to us, for us. And this doesn't happen just once. But back to the beginning. Double Jeopardy opens on Libby (Ashley Judd) and Nick Parsons (Nowhere Man himself, Bruce Greenwood), going through the motions of a relationship so peachy-keen that it has to take a left turn somewhere else. As the trailer gives away, it does: soon enough Nick's 'dead,' and, as a result, Libby's rushed through an indictment/trial/ sentencing/imprisonment sequence, all time-compressed to the point that there's very little substance left to it at all, it just becomes the obligatory prelude for what was evidently intended to be the real meat of the movie: the double-jeopardy loophole. But still, it's unforgivable, takes up a good twenty minutes, which is to say Double Jeopardy takes far too long to get started. Once it does, however, it's what we expect in a movie which pairs Tommy Lee Jones and Ashley Judd: the Fugitive meets Kiss the Girls--Tommy Lee all about compassion, duty, Ashley Judd all about resolve, determination. And of course they both play their respective roles as well as can be expected, and are great on-screen together. The problem with Double Jeopardy isn't with them, but with the writing, or rather, the lack of writing. When Double Jeopardy isn't skipping heedlessly from moment to moment (A to C), neverminding causality, it's putting Libby in some Rocky-ish workout sequence. Or having her make an early promise to a child about how the movie will end. And of course these promises to children are never broken. Which does a lot to not surprise us with the ending. But so be it. In a movie with this little suspense, we tend to look to the stunts for gratification (see: Fair Game). David Weisberg and Douglas Cook did get writing credit for The Rock, after all (while Beresford directed another prison movie, Last Dance...), which had all kinds of explosives. The thing is, though, aside from a couple of car catastrophes, Double Jeopardy falls short on the action-end as well. Or rather, it does with it what it does with the first twenty minutes: skips over all the good parts. On the upside, there is a cool James-Bond-ish New Orleans funeral, which is even capped by Nick not killing Libby, but leaving her to die, Spectre-fashion. Maybe it's an in-joke. Or, maybe the whole movie's a joke, one of those where the concept (of double-jeopardy as plot device) preceded the script, but financed it nevertheless. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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