Moral Characters
This is the premise of
Return to Paradise : Three young guys have a way-cool vacation in
Malaysia. They screw a lot of Asian babes in hammocks and smoke a lot of hash.
Two of them return to the United States, leaving behind their idealistic
acquaintance, who plans to continue on to Borneo and save orangutans from
poachers. Two years later, the men who went home are informed of what happened
after they boarded the plane: Police discovered their leftover hashish
(purchased for a ridiculously low sum in American dollars and tossed into the
garbage as they were leaving) and imprisoned the remaining Yank. The quantity
of drugs dictated that he be tried as a dealer; the punishment for dealing in
Malaysia is death. The friend didn't mention his buddies until his legal
appeals were exhausted. Now, the two have a choice: Return to Penang and serve
at least three years under barbaric conditions, or let a good and decent man be
hanged. If only one of them returns, the sentence jumps to six years.
Movies
that revolve around moral choices often have an aura of sanctimoniousness built
into them: The audience is presented with the issue in the starkest blacks and
whites and waits for the blinkered protagonist to "do the right thing." The
approach is certainly dramatic, but it can also be too comfy, allowing you to
pat yourself on the back for being nobler than the people you're observing.
That's the downside of Return to Paradise , which hinges on whether a
noncommittal ne'er-do-well swain (played by Vince Vaughn) "has it in him" to
submit to an imprisonment that will be at best harrowing and at worst fatal. If
he doesn't have it in him, there's no drama. If he does, there's no drama,
either. So he sort of doesn't but maybe sort of does, and the picture hinges on
whether he'll come to his (moral) senses before his buddy gets the chop.
Meanwhile, the condemned man's lawyer (Anne Heche) pleads; the prisoner
himself, Lewis (Joaquin Phoenix), shivers half-naked in his filthy quarters;
and you munch on your popcorn and say, "I'd be a hero. I would."
Return to Paradise doesn't boast many surprises. It's
straight-on, morally uncomplicated. Emotionally, though, it's dense and
twisty--and smashingly potent. Its fleetness comes from its director, Joseph
Ruben, who once made crackerjack, BS-free thrillers such as Dreamscape
(1984), The Stepfather (1987), and True Believer (1989). He lost
his way in the '90s with flagrantly commercial junk such as Sleeping With
the Enemy (1991) and The Money Train (1995); and so did his True
Believer screenwriter, the former Rolling Stone journalist Wesley
Strick, who made his fortune and lost his good name with the abominable Cape
Fear remake (1991), Wolf (1994), and The Saint (1997). With
Return to Paradise , both men have shed their commercial ornamentation
and gone back to their tabloid roots, aiming for stripped-down emotional
trajectories and back-against-the-wall dilemmas. The upshot might be melodrama,
but it's melodrama with heart, bones, sinews, and tear ducts.
Vaughn
( Swingers [1996]) is the flavor of the moment in Hollywood--just saying
his name ("I got Vince Vaughn!") makes you feel like a hipster. At first,
Vaughn does the sort of noncommittal wise guy stud stuff you can see on any
prime time soap, but the performance deepens and becomes extraordinary. He's
tall, and he uses his muscular body and good looks to show how his character,
Sheriff, keeps the world at bay; he's so handsome that he doesn't have to
communicate with anyone--even with us. Sheriff has no center, but Vaughn gives
him a roving mind that seems to circle around its own hollow core with
increasing--and compelling--desperation. Vaughn is so good that by the end of
the film his every gesture and step seems weighted, as if he has put on a
hundred pounds. The second buddy-on-the-spot, Tony (David Conrad), is more
superficially responsible and more inwardly aquiver. It's a thankless part, but
Conrad makes Tony's paralysis palpable, and you don't end up hating him. As his
fiancee, Vera Farmiga is seen only briefly but makes a searing impression:
She's fierce and legalistic, and she fixates on the bottom-line questions in a
way that frees her from looking at the moral ones.
It's Heche who does that--and who gives
Return to Paradise its soul. The lawyer, Beth Eastern, is clearly more
than a hired gun: She seems to be pleading as much for her own life as for her
client's. Waifish and vulnerable, Heche doesn't have an extra ounce of flab on
her, and you can read how high the stakes are in her taut body and hungrily
searching eyes. Heche gives herself so directly to her material that I think
she could animate anything. She was astonishingly intense as the backwoods
sister of a suicidal boy in the otherwise mediocre thriller I Know What You
Did Last Summer (1997), and her Carole Lombardish timing was a spark plug
for the tired Six Days, Seven Nights . She is the best thing to happen to
movies since Debra Winger; she might even be as good as Winger--which is as
good as movie actresses get.
The movie
wastes no time in venting its outrage at the Malaysian system of justice that
forces these absurd choices on the characters. Ruben and Strick (who rewrote
the first script by Bruce Robinson, itself based on a 1990 French film called
Force Majeure ) remind us of the American who was caned in Singapore for
writing graffiti and the Australian who was hanged in Malaysia for drug
dealing. The system is presented as a given and its government's intransigence
as something that no amount of diplomacy will soften. The real outrage is
directed at a big-deal journalist (Jada Pinkett Smith) who dogs Beth, insisting
that the way to free Lewis is to take her campaign to the media--a move Beth
fears will fix the Malaysians' resolve to keep from losing face. It's a sad
reflection on the times that officials of a lunatic system look like capricious
gods, whereas righteous journalists are parasites from hell.
Let me apologize to fellow Brooklynite Darren Aronofsky and
to
Slate
diarist of two weeks ago Sean Gullette for not seeing
Pi until the other day. If you haven't seen it either, hie thee hence.
This is very much a first feature, with all the hyperbolic, sometimes
indiscriminate cinematic energy of a student film. But it's also sensational, a
febrile meditation on the mathematics of existence. The hero (Gullette) is a
scurvy genius obsessed with finding a 216 digit number that's somehow at the
root of all life. Tortured by headaches and nosebleeds, he lives a life of
fractions and spinning tangents, and the metaphors are right there in the
filmmaking, captured in the furious montage and in flurries of talismanic
signs--the swirls of milk dissolving in a coffee cup, the smoke spiraling off a
cigarette. Pi is in genuine black-and-white--all the grays have been
cooked out of the images. With its echoes of Jorge Luis Borges, Stanley
Kubrick, even Frank Henenlotter's great splatter flick Brain Damage
(1988), the whole movie is so hyperalert that it seems pitched on the verge of
a stroke. I'm glad I'm not as smart as its hero, because it looks really
painful.
