SATURATION
by Chris Knipp

I saw Vantage Point six different ways—before I'd even seen it. That's because it's one of those movies so heavily promoted that for a while nearly every public screening begins with the trailer for it. Trailers nowadays know how to wreck a film for you because they are cleverly—but actually stupidly—edited in such a way as to include not only a complete outline of the plot, but the key revelations of events or characters and most of the memorable lines. Except that in this case I can't say that Vantage Point even has memorable lines. In fact all it really has is events, characters, and plot points.

The repetitions of the trailer, which is a very condensed version of the whole film, seemed different to me on successive occasions because every time I was in a different mood--mainly more annoyed at having to watch yet again the noisy, over-emphatic advertisement. No doubt the movie has some key revelations. But what are they? All I know is that events mainly happen in a big public plaza in Spain crowded for a ceremonial occasion, where the American President is introduced—and promptly shot by a sniper. Off the plaza are streets, and these are used for car chases and little girls with ice cream cones walking into traffic. William Hurt is the President who gets shot, only it's not really him—not the President, that is; it is William Hurt every time, because he plays both the President and his double; but it's his double who gets shot, and that's embarrassing because the authorities need to reassure the world that the President's alive, but that will mean giving away that he allowed a double to be set up to get shot and setting his would-be assassins after him again. Sigourney Weaver is some kind of important TV news editor. Forest Whitaker is an American tourist standing in the crowd near the podium with a little video camera and he sees something when the shooting happens. Dennis Quaid is some kind of important cop who rushes around. There are other people—lots of other people—but I don't know who they are.

The extraordinary, but maddening, thing is that I got all this from the trailer (once was enough; but I saw it six times, remember?), and that watching the film itself added very little in the way of certain knowledge and still less of enjoyment. Oh, sure, it's true as David Denby wrote, this film is a kind of splendid machine—a lot of action shot from different angles and presented in six different ways with coordination of the narrative time-line with each version, more or less. There are plenty of holes in the storytelling. What I got from successive viewings of the trailer was an increasing sense that these scenes were all noise and flash and that the plot wasn't going to be very clear, no matter how many times I watched either the trailer or the whole movie. That proved to be true.

So now let us pass, reluctantly, to the movie itself. After the twelve minutes or so of violent events, the movie goes back over them six times. Obviously this is inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, the 1950 film that made the great Japanese director famous in the West and that tells about a rape and murder from five points of view—six, actually, since one person comes back and reviews the events again. Each time we "see" the sequence of events, or variations of them, from the different person's angle.

The first thing to say is that Kurosawa is an incomparable master, his Rashomon is one of his great works, and it is based on two stories by a notable writer, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Pete Travis is a mediocre television director using the book of the hitherto unknown writer Barry Levy in an expensive but unsubtle and unconvincing thriller which has been called a 23-minute movie dragged out to 90 minutes. (Rashomon is only 88 minutes long and feels richer and more haunting every time you watch it.)

Nowadays it's not even clear that "Rashomon" means much because the name has been simplified into a vague sense that things come out different if you see them from different points of view, which is called "the Rashomon effect."

The essential weakness of Vantage Point is that in its six "versions" of the main events—the shooting of the president; the chaos that follows in the crowd; a bomb that goes off under a table, resulting in further chaos; the flight of the perpetrators and pursuit by American and other agents; the attempt of the real President to get away—aren't really shown consistently from each different point of view at all. The return to the beginning of the sequence, signaled by an on-screen time line, and a shot of the plaza and the podium—which soon began to elicit a groan from the audience as it returned with monotonous regularity—just meant that new information would come, but not with any very clear sense of different people seeing things differently, as we get from the stories in Rashomon.

The movie of Vantage Point, as opposed to the more condensed, quickly-done-with version that is the trailer, does have a few surprises, sort of. One of these is that Forest Whitaker, tall and top-heavy though he would appear, can sure cover a lot of ground in a hurry, at least in this movie, because when the little girl he's befriended runs off, separated from her mother, he runs after her. Or is he running after an assassin? I forget. Anyway he's preposterously quick on his feet.

As Denby himself says, "The soul of this new machine is the machine itself," which is to say this movie has no human soul. Without a sense of clearly different viewpoints, in the human sense of various sensibilities and worlds of feeling, the successive re-"tellings" of events have no point and only give the audience (hence its groans) a sense of having been served up a lot of sequences that have been sliced in a Cuisinart.

©2008 Chris Knipp
CineScene