TRAPPED
by Ed Owens

THE CELL is a difficult movie to pin down. Part sci-fi, part horror film, part police procedural, its narrative winds through bits and pieces of all of these genres without resting predominantly in any of them. While that doesn't necessarily make it a bad movie, it does make it a hard sell...and an easy candidate for an August release.

In the film, Jennifer Lopez plays Catherine Deane, a child psychologist participating in an experimental program in shared consciousness. Basically, she is able to enter the mind of a comatose child and interact with his internal world in an attempt to bring him out of his current state. Vince Vaughn, meanwhile, is Peter Novak, a driven FBI agent pursuing a particularly vile serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio as Carl Stargher) who drowns his victims in a large tank before painting them like dolls and depositing their bodies in local riverbeds. When Stargher is brought in comatose, it is up to Deane and her team to go in and discover the whereabouts of his latest victim (the tank fills over time).

As you could probably gather from the trailers, the cinematography is stunning, with some of the most artfully conceived shots in recent memory. The dream sequences (especially the early ones) have a very surreal feel that works beautifully in building anxiety. As long as Deane is inside, everything comes together, from the strident notes of Howard Shore's score to the staccato rhythms of Robert Duffy and Paul Rubell's editing. The anxiety is nearly tangible, and the images are truly visionary, albeit disturbing, like an animated series of Dali paintings. If your expectation is to see things you haven't seen before, prepare to be satisfied.

Unfortunately, the film's visual accomplishments are almost equally paralleled by its narrative failures. The reality outside Stargher's head is all too familiar. The script by Mark Protosevich suffers from a preponderance of cliches and loose ends. While it attempts to be everybody's story, it ends up being nobody's, with occasional character tidbits thrown out at appropriate times, but without any further development (what is the odd relationship between Novak and his partner? what is the source of Baine's animosity towards Deane?). In this sense, The Cell feels cut, as if the answers to these questions (and many more) were themselves tragic victims of some scissor-happy action in the editing room. While many of these shortcomings could easily be attributed to the collective inexperience of the crew, that doesn't make it easier to forgive in the theater.

Another problem is the script's tendency to cheat, which manifests itself in two ways. The first is the way characters discover things through a coincidental chain of events rather than any sort of intelligent deduction. Attempts to explain away certain coincidences in the dialogue end up having quite the opposite effect, pointing them out and emphasizing their nature as coincidence. While some would argue (and some have) that the film is, in fact, commenting on the coincidental nature of life itself, the film's explicitly stated ideology is too firmly rooted in psychological notions of cause and effect to allow it, leaving you with the feeling that much of the narrative is only there as plot device.

The above mentioned ideology is precisely where the film cheats in a second way. The characters' motivations are so deeply mired in pop psychology that the script can deliver little more than oft-heard platitudes in place of substantial dialogue. The age old nature/nurture argument is briefly rehashed, arriving at the most predictable of conclusions, and then shuffled into the background only to be called up when needed to serve as a convenient explanation. Especially maddening in this respect are the film's occasional attempts to overcome this limitation, particularly in one exchange between Novak and Deane. The points raised are unfortunately forgotten almost as soon as they are uttered and the narrative falls back in step with its trite motivations.

There is one other thing worth noting. As the film winds towards its inevitable conclusion, there is a striking contrast between Deane's experiences inside and Novak's race against time outside, a worthy attempt at the kind of depth the film has lacked up to this point. However, what could (and should) have ultimately been provocative ends up coming across as pretentious and contrived because of its relative isolation. Too bad, as it really did add some desperately needed weight to the film.

It is all too fitting that the film ends with a whimper rather than the bang with which it started. Much of the first hour of The Cell sets a standard which the remainder struggles (and fails) to live up to. The result of all this is a visionary film trapped in a cell of its own.

CineScene 2000