STRANGE DAYS
A film review by Allan Toombs
Copyright 1996 Allan Toombs
THE TIME: It's the end of 1999, just under 4 years in the future and a few days before the end of the century. Producer James Cameron really has produced a realistic projection of the millenial celebrations and the fevered craziness that goes along with it. From the opening sequence with a radio call-in christian squawking about 'the last days' to the climactic '2K' party, the atmosphere is right. This movie makes you feel the weird buzz of the century passing into a new millenium. The only feeling that'll come close will be the real thing, which gets nearer every day.
THE PLACE: Los Angeles, the wrong side of the tracks; now coming from Britain I don't know what it's like in the sleazier districts of LA but that's where this film is based, there isn't much of the suburbs and mall-culture on display, I guess you'd call it the street. Prostitutes, bar-flies, pushers; society's flotsam clinging onto that one last dream, none more so than the film's protagonist - Lenny Nero.
THE HARDWARE: It's called Playback or doing The Wire, officially the acronym is SQUID, sub-quantum something but all you really need to know is it can record human experience. No attempt is made to truly provide a technical explanation for the Playback devices, it's deus-ex-machina take it or leave it, indeed whatever leap in current research is posited it can fit 20 minutes of 'being there' onto an ordinary Sony Mini-Disc. Stronger than Crack. An electronic drug made real.
THE CRIMES: Somebody has murdered Jeriko One, controversial rapper and firebrand activist for the black community. Glen Plummer plays this character cross between Snoop Doggy Dog and Louis Farrakhan with conviction. The rap and the rhetoric are just right. Unrelated to this, there is a brutal rape where the Playback technology is employed with sick inventiness. I'm tempted to condemn Cameron's sadistic narrative here but I can't, the scene is filmed with terrifying clarity by Director Kathryn Bigelow, I have to trust her judgement that the footage included is necessary to establish the prescence of a sick-killer in the plot. Certainly I felt repulsed and disgusted by the act and it's voyeurism; nuff said.
THE MAN: Ralph Fiennes is absolutely convincing as Lenny Nero, Playback dealer, a shameless pimp for little silver discs of people's lives. He's strung out, making an easy living with a hot, contraband product but unable to get his life together. He's still in love with his ex-girlfriend Faith, but she now despises him, a love made no easier by his shoe-box full of recordings of their moments together. He is pitiably addicted to a Playback past. You may remember that in my review of JOHNNY MNEMONIC (http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/bt18/johnnym.htm) I criticised the reversal of the classic Gibson 'screwed-up man/strong woman' formula. Well here it is executed perfectly by James Cameron's skillfull storyline. Making this film more Cyberpunk than the definate article itself. Which brings me round to Lornette 'Mace' Mason.
THE WOMAN: Angela Bassett is as beautiful and hard as ebony in the role of Mace. She's a black woman holding down a job driving businessmen round LA 1999's wreck-strewn streets. Lenny is supposed to be a friend; he was good to her kids the day the LAPD arrested their father. Where Nero is effusive and spontaneous, she's a woman of reality, a mother and a survivor. Maybe once he got her set up in the security car line but now he's a leech bumming one too many free-rides. Angela Bassett is a wonderful new talent in a great part. She's stunningly cool under pressure yet pulls off all the fight scenes with a sharp grace and calculating intelligence. With her hair in thin braids she's as sassy as a younger Whoopi Goldberg, as physical as Grace Jones but with warmth and humanity. A pity Ms.Bassett had to wear a dumb 'hooker' dress as a subertuge for the film's climax because she looks truly amazing in a cleancut 'designer chauffeur suit' that is totally in-character. A star.
THE ISSUES: At this movies heart are concerns about emotional truth, delusion and race. Cameron has obviously been thinking long and hard about the Rodney King beating and LA's riots. The key question is 'What have we to celebrate if armed police are necessary for a public celebration?'. Certainly it's hard to imagine how the millenium parties will take place without incident in an America which is 'browning' rapidly yet clinging to a white 'apple-pie' vision of life. Lenny Nero is that rare thing a white-guy who's at home in the racial mix of the inner-city. Yet he's blind to Macey's unselfish devotion. Instead of seeing her love he sits in a squalid pad fast-forwarding a tape of Faith making love to him in a beach hut. Fiennes plays a fool dazzled by the smoke and mirrors of a new technology. Like the men in SEX, LIES & VIDEOTAPE or FLATLINERS he's getting off on a recording and not confronting the truth that it's just a more-detailed, personalised form of pornography.
THE VERDICT: This is a James Cameron hollywood blockbuster first and foremost. High on action, adventure and adrenaline. Cameron knows just how to work a storyline chock full of twists and surprises. Added to this Kathryn Bigelow brings a sharp focus, quick-cut sophisticated direction that avoids cliche then uses it to just the right effect. I was left exhausted by the sheer pace and relentless punch of STRANGE DAYS. It's just a hairs-breadth on the right side of OTT but then this is a *BIG* movie dealing with the big issues of today. It takes the personal, the political, the sexual, the spiritual and makes them all hang on one split-second bullet. Maybe this is the last big action movie; I can't see how more is possible without lapsing into the tongue-in-cheek of TRUE LIES or Bond. However it deserves support for it's bravery in tackling drugs and race head on. Movie of the year, so far.
"Tonight we're going to party like it's 1999" mailto:toombs@cityscape.co.uk http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/bt18/atoombs.html Allan Toombs
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