Danny Boyle's 'Trance' is what is known as a
'Mind Bending Thriller'. When these types of movies
work… man… they tend to be amongst the best that cinema has to
offer. But there is so much involved in making them
work, and because this particular genre is usually built on a
flimsy house of plot hole-ridden cards to begin with, these
types of movies usually have to blow past these plot holes
with break neck speed, or cover them up in glossy sheen, or
maybe even find a way to not have them in the first
place. 'Trance', I think, aims to cover up its foibles
with glossy style. It was a good effort. And while
'Trance' was enjoyable enough, I wouldn't call it amongst the
best of the genre.
James McAvoy narrates, at least for a couple of minutes, as
the character of Simon the art auctioneer. He's going on
about art and art heists and whatnot, but it doesn't really
matter because Vincent Cassel shows up in a minute as the
character of Franck and if Vincent Cassel shows up in your
movie, then there's a 95.8% chance that he's up to no good.
Guess what? Franck is up to no good. The heist is
on, and it goes off without a hitch. Except for the
little incident where Simon tazes Franck for some reason
causing Franck to crush Simon's skull with the butt of his
rifle, but otherwise, it went well. This tazing was a
little peculiar since Simon was in on the heist and all, but
there it is.
Now the problem is that when Vincent and his crew get back to
the hideout, they find this painting is missing from its
frame. Clearly Simon, who is recovering from that nasty
bump, has taken the painting, but where did he put it.
Simon has no clue where he put it, despite the forced removal
of his fingernails, this sudden amnesia no doubt caused by
getting his skull crushed by the butt of a rifle.
Now what? Word is that hypnosis works
and completely at random Simon picks a local hypnotist named
Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) to help jog his memory. I'm
thinking if I just stole something I wouldn't go to some
random hypnotherapist to tell me where I placed this fifty
million dollar thing I just stole, and they did try to explain
this off to us, but I found the rationale
unsatisfactory. Now this is the point in the movie where
things get a little squapity as Elizabeth digs into Simon's
brain to unlock the secrets of his mind. As well as Franck's
mind and the mind of his thug sidekicks. It's
Elizabeth's mind that we probably should be worried
about. And to say anything more would spoil the fun
which should be experienced, of course, organically.
If nothing else, 'Trance' is a supreme exercise in style and
the visual craft of filmmaking. I mean this is film that
looks good, sounds good, feels good, and it's one of those
movies that, while you're watching it, makes you feel three
levels cooler just sitting in front of it. If I were
throwing a dinner party, I'd put 'Trance' on in the background
as Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography, James McAvoy's accent,
Vincent Cassel's existence and Rosario Dawson's lips would
give me an artificial level of class that would be impossible
to reproduce on my own. But as to the content that is
encased within this glossy style? Well….
As the film plays on, it doesn't take long for the audience to
realize that our minds are being tampered with by the
filmmakers, which kinds of gives a slight pass on a lot of the
implausibility that we are seeing, but as pointed to earlier,
everything feels so right in this movie, it's still quite
enjoyable. Then we enter a phase where have to start
questioning what is real and what isn't real, and then
characters start doing things, particularly the character of
Elizabeth which don't seem to make much sense, even when we
get to our big reveal. In fact it makes negative
sense. The whole crux of what we are experiencing in
this movie pretty much hinges on the character of Elizabeth
and she's about as ill-defined a main character in a movie
that we have seen in some time. The problem with this is
that we are left to guess as to a lot of what her motivation
is. At least that which she doesn't explicitly explain
to us.
This brings to my main issue with this film, the end.
Not so much how it ended, but how it was delivered.
There was that word 'organically' I used earlier, and the best
of these kinds of movies allow the twists and turns to be
delivered and experienced by the audience in just that
way. What we had here was a variation of the talking
killer. That characters that explains everything before
the end of the movie, instead of just putting a bullet in the
head of our hero. So while everything that was going was
being laid out for us in excruciating detail, I just imagine
how much better it would've been if the audience could've
experienced this awesome twistiness that has been setup for
the last 100 or so minutes via the actual narrative, instead
of having somebody just run it down for us like they were
reading a grocery list. I know that's hard to pull off,
but this is what makes these kinds of movies great.
Again, I enjoyed 'Trance' well enough, a stylish exercise
executed by a master story teller, oh… but I'm thinking there
was an opportunity here for something really special.
