TIMECODE (Screen Gems) Starring: Jeanne Tripplehorn, Salma Hayek, Stellan Skarsgaard, Saffron Burrows, Leslie Mann, Kyle MacLachlan, Richard Edson, Holly Hunter. Story: Mike Figgis. Producers: Mike Figgis and Annie Stewart. Director: Mike Figgis. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, sexual situations, drug use, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 97 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Late in Mike Figgis' experimental drama TIMECODE, a young would-be film-maker pitches an idea to a Hollywood production company for a film shot on digital video, following four characters in real time in one uninterrupted take ... at which suggestion one of the production executives bursts into laughter and calls the idea "pretentious." It seems like Figgis is trying to have a little fun at his own expense, since that pitched idea is exactly the idea behind TIMECODE: four characters followed in real time, the screen divided into four quadrants to follow their individual stories. And it would be easier to buy Figgis' self-deprecation as genuine if he didn't then begin his closing credits with a caption describing exactly how the film had been made. "Look what an interesting and original film you've just watched," Figgis says to us out of one corner of his mouth, while the other mutters, "And it was all just a big pretentious joke."
Figgis has been on a kick in the last couple of years of trying to stretch cinematic boundaries, but it's too often too difficult to get past his art-for-art's-sake bluster. In TIMECODE, he takes a fairly mundane 90-minutes-in-the-life story and tries to spice it up with his four-play. One segment of his screen opens with a therapy session involving a woman named Emma (Saffron Burrows), describing her marital dissatisfaction. Eventually we learn that her husband is Alex Green (Stellan Skarsgaard), the aforementioned chuckling production executive. Alex is an addict and an alcoholic barely hanging on to awareness of his business, though he has enough time for an affair with aspiring actress Rose (Salma Hayek). Unfortunately, Rose's lover and sugar mama Lauren (Jeanne Tripplehorn) suspects that something is up, and spends the afternoon checking up on Rose after planting a microphone on her.
TIMECODE was essentially improvised around a loose plot structure, leading to a predictably ragged feel to the film. And while Figgis would probably emphasize that raggedness as a function of the film's realism and immediacy, it simply doesn't make for particularly engrossing viewing a lot of the time. At times TIMECODE is a satire of film industry poseurs, and occasionally a very funny one. Steven Weber does a great straight-faced description of a potential Matt Stone-Trey Parker project called TIME TOILET -- a comedy about a janitor who discovers a portal through time in a commode -- as having "educational value," all while a masseur (Julian Sands) caresses his earlobes. Then Figgis will turn up the volume on Burrows pining over her unhappy life, and we'll take a quick right turn into melodrama. Most intrusive of all is the use of a series of earthquakes as a device to shake up the lives of the characters. In a more conventional film, it might have been easier to forgive the obvious and repetitive symbolism. In a film like TIMECODE, you begin wondering when Figgis will ever take off his avant-garde hat and just let a story be a story.
I might have considered TIMECODE a thoroughly failed experiment if not for a development that briefly justifies the entire structure. During one stretch of the film, Tripplehorn listens in on a tryst between Rose and Alex that takes place behind the screen of a screening room while other executives watch audition clips of actresses playing a sex scene. In a conventionally edited film, the director might cut back and forth between the encounter and the jealous lover in her headphones, giving us only the moment of realization as a payoff. In TIMECODE, I was able to watch Tripplehorn throughout the scene, from her puzzled but intent face as the background noise from the screening room prevents her from hearing Rose, to the anguish that overwhelms her once it's impossible to deny the truth. Film too rarely allows us to watch actors do purely physical acting. I was so fascinated by Tripplehorn's wordless performance that I rarely took my eyes off of her quadrant of the screen, even when there was dialogue coming from elsewhere.
I'd gladly accept a structure like that in TIMECODE if it meant I could spend time following interesting supporting characters instead of blank-faced bores like Burrows' depressed Hollywood wife. Of course, I'd prefer it if a film-maker acknowledged the importance of developing character and story, rather than assuming falsely that improvisation is always the best way to get at the "truth" of a situation. No moment makes that fallacy more evident than a scene at a production meeting when a musician responds with a snicker to an Asian woman's introduction of herself as "Connie Ling." The snicker itself was a completely believable reaction; the woman's puzzled expression, as though she had never before in her life heard a joke about her name, strains all credulity. A director doing the job of directing might have taken that opportunity to coach the actress that anyone who grew up on Planet Earth would have been taunted mercilessly throughout her adolescence for having the name "Connie Ling," and therefore might not respond as thought the character had just been dropped from the sky that afternoon. Figgis, however, never intrudes on his experiment in realism, not even so it might make more real-world sense. All that remains is his self-congratulation at doing something entirely new, even if it ultimately feels mostly like a big pretentious joke.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 quadrantphenias: 5.
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