Many people first experienced director Tarsem Singh’s distinctive visual style with his 1991 MTV Award-winning video for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” which matched the soul-searching, mandolin-led tune with discombobulating flashes of surrealistic religious imagery, garishly saturated colors and interesting camera angles of singer Michael Stipe’s oblong, bald head.
The clip mesmerized for its four-minute duration, but as many video-makers-turned-movie-directors beforehand have learned, sustaining such a flashy approach over a feature-film length is a different kettle of monkeys.
So the news flash here is that Tarsem, who likes to be referred to by first name only, has accomplished that rare feat with his feature debut. “The Cell” is a remarkably assured work, a visual feast overflowing with beautiful, strange, haunting images. This is a true art movie, not because it’s esoteric or inaccessible but because you watch wishing you could capture individual frames and plaster them across your walls.
If motion pictures were judged solely by the quality of the pictures in motion, “The Cell” might be some sort of masterpiece. But movies must do more than just wow our senses; they also must engage us in a compelling story.
“The Cell” is gripping in its own way for quite a while. But eventually the fear you feel for the characters in this creepy tale gives way to a different kind of fear: that the stunning visuals are simply diverting you from the realization that the story is a patchwork of shopworn ideas.
The film, written by former Chicagoan Mark Protosevich, finds Jennifer Lopez as a psychologist, Catherine Deane, who uses a radically experimental therapy: She and the patient are both drugged and attached to dozens of sensor wires, which suspend them in mid-air on their backs and allow her to enter and explore the patient’s unconscious mind.
Then one day FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) and his partner (Jake Weber) bring in a floppy-haired serial killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio), whom they have just captured after a lengthy manhunt. He is catatonic, and, what’s more, the agents know he recently has kidnapped his latest female victim and hidden her in a solid-walled cell that is rigged to fill with water the next day.
So Catherine agrees to take on this patient so she can find out where he has hidden the girl before time expires, even though her journeys into his twisted mind could put her in peril.
The idea of being able to enter someone else’s unconscious has been explored before, in “Brainstorm” (1983), “Dreamscape” (1984) and other films. “The Cell” also owes a big debt to “The Silence of the Lambs” for its race-against-time structure in which a perverted killer’s mind must be penetrated so a trapped woman can be found before she’s killed for grotesque reasons.
Does the world need another pulpy serial-killer thriller? Heck, no. What keeps “The Cell” going is that it appears to be working on a different level. Saving the woman is an important part of the equation, but discovering some hidden truths about Stargher seems just as urgent.
The killer’s mind, no surprise, is a scary terrain. Catherine interacts with Stargher the child, who is brutalized by his father, as well as with a demonic version of the adult, who acts out his depravity in the chambers of some Eastern-style palace.
Nonetheless, these are dream sequences like you’ve never seen, both in their visual glory and the jagged rhythms of the editing. Punching up the blazing colors with computer-graphics effects, Tarsem delivers striking composition after striking composition, heightening the drama of one key interaction by having red, green and gold garlands grow around the frame’s edges and into the picture.
The splendor carries over to the so-called real world, where Tarsem turns a helicopter passing by an oil rig into an eye-grabbing tableau. Costume designers Eiko Ishioka and April Napier deserve a special nod for the form-fitting suits that make Lopez and the patients look like they’re wearing their muscles on the outside as they lie suspended over the floor.
The performances are uniformly sober and credible, and as in “Out of Sight,” Lopez conveys an appealing natural sympathy that enables her to carry scenes of significant dramatic weight. Tarsem also takes full advantage of Lopez’s beauty in creating his eye candy.
The movie hints at making some observations about the origins of psychosis; the subdued Vaughn has a particularly effective moment when his Agent Novak stresses to Catherine that someone can endure horrible childhood abuse without turning into a murderer. The way the plot splits toward the end also indicates that the movie is reaching for some profundity beyond the thriller plot — or is growing incoherent.
After the onslaught of religious symbols, grotesque visions and psychedelic light shows has passed, does the viewer really have any more grasp of the inner workings of a serial killer? I sure didn’t.
Not that you expect a movie to explain psychosis, but if it doesn’t have any insight to offer, why put us through another serial-killer tale that revels in repellent details?
The serial-killer plot seems an excuse for self-importance and pretentiousness, a way to take the joy out of a movie designed like a joyride. The movie impresses more than it entertains, conjuring up a head full of evocative images that don’t evoke all that much. There’s less here than meets the eye.
`THE CELL’
(star)(star) 1/2
Directed by Tarsem Singh; written by Mark Protosevich; photographed by Paul Laufer; edited by Paul Rubell, Robert Duffy; production designed by Tom Foden; music by Howard Shore; produced by Julio Caro, Eric McLeod. A New Line Cinema release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:48. MPAA rating: R (bizarre violence and sexual images, nudity and language).
THE CAST
Catherine Deane ……….. Jennifer Lopez
Peter Novak …………… Vince Vaughn
Carl Stargher …………. Vincent D’Onofrio
Dr. Kent ……………… Marianne Jean-Baptiste
Gordon Ramsey …………. Jake Weber
Henry West ……………. Dylan Baker
