TWELVE MONKEYS

Twelve Monkeys


1995 - USA - Psychological Sci - Fi
Reviewed by Janet Maslin





Type:
Features
Distributor:
Universal City Studios
Starring David Morse, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer, Madeleine Stowe, Bruce Willis. Directed by Terry Gilliam. (R, 131 minutes).

An intense film about time travel, this sci-fi entry was directed by Terry Gilliam, a member of the comedy troupe Monty Python. The film stars Bruce Willis as James Cole, a prisoner of the state in the year 2035 who can earn parole if he agrees to travel back in time and thwart a devastating plague. The virus has wiped out most of the Earth's population and the remainder live underground because the air is poisonous. Returning to the year 1990, six years before the start of the plague, Cole is soon imprisoned in a psychiatric facility because his warnings sound like mad ravings. There he meets a scientist named Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) and Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the mad son of an eminent virologist (Christopher Plummer). Cole is returned by the authorities to the year 2035, and finally ends up at his intended destination in 1996. He kidnaps Dr. Railly in order to enlist her help in his quest. Cole discovers graffiti by an apparent animal rights group called the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, but as he delves into the mystery, he hears voices, loses his bearings, and doubts his own sanity. He must figure out if Goines, who seems to be a raving lunatic, holds the key to the puzzle. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide




Twelve Monkeys was made by Terry Gilliam, a former member of the Monty Python troupe, nowadays better known as a director with films like Jabberwocky (1977), Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), The Fisher King (1991) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Gilliam’s films are not always easily accessible films - they are bleak and pessimistic and filled with a cruel sense of humour. They are often wildly over-scaled and self-indulgent, but they also achieve moments of visionary surrealism that few other films do. Gilliam seems to delight in puncturing heroism - this is perhaps the singular connecting theme of all his films. Most of Gilliam’s heroes - Michael Palin in Jabberwocky, Jonathan Pryce in Brazil, John Neville’s Baron in Baron Munchausen, Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King, and Bruce Willis here - seem heroes surrounded by an innately cruel universe which appears involved in some sort of conspiracy to thwart them at every turn. Their journey to heroism seems less one about overcoming insurmountable odds than about overcoming pessimism and failure inside themselves. Yet being thrust into the role of heroism in Gilliam’s universe is no guarantee of success either - in three of Gilliam’s six films up to this point the hero does not triumph at the end. [Also worth checking out here is Lost in La Mancha (2002) concerning Gilliam’s failed attempts to film Don Quixote].

With his previous film, The Fisher King, and here with Twelve Monkeys, it can be observed that Gilliam works better when operating from a script by somebody else rather than one he has had a hand in. Both The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys are much more focused as scripts, less all over the place and dominated by extravagant set-pieces as Gilliam-scripted efforts such as Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen were oft wont to do. Gilliam also has the good luck in these cases to be serviced by exceptional scriptwriters - in the case of The Fisher King, Richard LaGravanese, an Oscar nominee who has crafted works like The Bridges of Madison County (1995), A Little Princess (1995) and Beloved (1998), and in the case of Twelve Monkeys, David Webb Peoples, who co-wrote Blade Runner (1982) and had then just come from his Oscar-winning work on Clint Eastwood’s breathtakingly nihilistic anti-Western Unforgiven (1992).

On the other hand Twelve Monkeys, also like The Fisher King, is not an easily likable film. Gilliam seems to film with a willful emphasis on ugliness - camera angles are often distorted, the lighting schemes unattractive and washed out, and Gilliam has his big name star made up as a virtual derelict. But for both films, to bear with Gilliam’s vision is ultimately rewarding. First of all Gilliam has created here a deeply shocking vision of the end of the 20th Century - an image of a society that has totally fractured at the edges and fallen into a decay that seems beyond any hope.

As a time travel film Twelve Monkeys is almost the complete antithesis of anything like The Terminator (1984) or Back to the Future (1985). It is like a Terminator film gone to Hell - imagine The Terminator or Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)’s long intensive night of struggle without even the guarantee of either film’s triumph of humanism at the end. Bruce Willis’s hero is about as far away from Michael J. Fox’s skateboarding, hiply culture-quoting Marty McFly in the Back to the Future films as possible - he is not a hero, he spends most of the time running about naked or locked up as a psychiatric patient and seems to lack even the most elementary skills necessary to survive in the past. Furthermore the stress of surviving in two temporal eras creates insanity - in one startling turnabout he decides that he is mentally ill and the future he comes from is a delusion. And, unlike the heroes of The Terminator and Back to the Future, he has not come to save the future, for the future is fixed and unchangeable, which is something that leads to a beautifully fatalistic ending. The bleakness of this vision is startling.

What makes the film quite exceptional is not just the bleakness of its vision, but rather the intellectual game Gilliam and Peoples play. The time travel story plays like an interlocking jigsaw of teasing clues and tiny puzzles - throwaway pieces like the graffiti on the wall, the cryptic messages on the answer-phone, the list of plague destinations. Each maps over onto a later piece of the film, all culminating in a time-paradox ending that is mesmerizing in its gradually unfolding revelations and surprises.

Twelve Monkeys is a remake of Chris Marker’s little seen experimental short La Jetee (1962). Although it is less a remake than it is a variation on a similar plot. Twelve Monkeys keeps essentially the same plot structure but trims some aspects of La Jetee - like the trip into the future - and gives far greater substance in other areas - like the reasons for the trip into the past, plus fills out the romance and the background of the future. It also draws La Jetee’s plot out into a more dramatically structured film and extends the twist ending. Both are equally impressive films, although Monkeys is far better as a science-fiction film. La Jetee is construed as a languid, dreamy romance, wistful for an unattainable past; Monkeys adopts more of a thriller structure - its plot centers more around the paradoxes of time travel and the travelers plight in the past and it isn’t really interested in the romance. Despite its short 30 minute length La Jetee has a slower pace, while Twelve Monkeys feels more tight and concise despite its greater length. But both, while essentially the same story, are equally unique and equally impressive films.

Bruce Willis certainly takes a role decidedly non-commercial part here - his humour and he-man persona is almost completely buried in the dirtiness and confusion of his character, he almost spends the entire film walking about in bewildered fractured confusion. Brad Pitt goes totally over-the-top and plays the twitchy nervous psycho to end all twitchy psychos. The performance has its amusements but Pitt overacts totally - how such a visibly mentally unbalanced character could manage to unite and organize an activist campaign is beyond the film’s stretch of credibility. And why the Academy of Motion Pictures ended up nominating him for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar that year in the part is frankly bizarre.

































Type:
Fures







A career's worth of bizarre and elaborately spun fantasy films have brought Terry Gilliam ("Brazil," "The Fisher King," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen") his well-earned reputation as the movies' resident madman. There's always overripe method to his madness, but in the new "12 Monkeys" Mr. Gilliam's methods are uncommonly wrenching and strong.

This apocalyptic nightmare, a vigorous work of dark, surprise-filled science fiction, is much tougher and less fanciful than the director's films have often been. Mr. Gilliam usually writes his own screenplays, but the contributions of a writer (David Peoples) whose credits include "Unforgiven" and "Blade Runner" may have something to do with a leaner style. In any case, "12 Monkeys" is fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course. The film's hero fears that he's half-crazy, and for two hours Mr. Gilliam artfully keeps his audience feeling the same way.

Twelve Monkeys" trips unpredictably through time, moving backward from a bleak vision of 2035. In that year, as the film begins, civilization has been driven underground by the aftereffects of a terrible plague. All but 1 percent of the world's human population was wiped out in 1997, and now animals prowl through the wreckage of abandoned cities. Below Philadelphia, power belongs to a handful of oddly sinister scientists who have made James Cole (Bruce Willis) their favorite research tool.

Like the Terminator, James is being sent from a ravaged future back to pre-apocalyptic times. Unlike the Terminator, James does not have a superbeing's power to alter the world's fate. Instead, he's a frightened prisoner of people he neither trusts nor understands, people who prefer communicating with him through a sphere dotted with tiny television screens instead of face to face. Scientists of 2035 want to know where the deadly virus originated, and James has such keen powers of observation that he is being sent to the past for research purposes, to trace the disease to its source.

He goes back to several different points in time. (Since "12 Monkeys" has the junk heap aesthetic that Mr. Gilliam favors, nothing in the film is sleek or foolproof, certainly not its time-travel apparatus.) So James first arrives in 1990, where his erratic behavior and intimations of disaster are not considered unusual. Almost immediately, he is sent to a mental hospital where plenty of other people share his worries about the world. One of them is Jeffrey Goines, a young patient whose nutty mannerisms are unexpectedly charismatic. After all, Jeffrey is played by Brad Pitt.

Mr. Pitt's mere presence has been known to lure audiences into movies that are otherwise unwatchable, but this time his powers as a neo-matinee idol are expertly used. Giving a startlingly frenzied performance, he electrifies Jeffrey with a weird magnetism that becomes important later in the film, when Jeffrey goes on to lead a guerrilla band of animal-rights advocates called the Army of the 12 Monkeys. ("He's seriously crazy," someone later says of Jeffrey, intending a sincere compliment.) Meanwhile, Mr. Willis holds the film together with his poignant, battered physicality, the suffering of a man fighting desperately for sanity and survival. When a doctor studies him closely, she sees a Cassandra complex. He is said to be suffering "the agony of the knowledge combined with the impotence to do anything about it."

"Twelve Monkeys" features Madeleine Stowe as Dr. Kathryn Railly, the beautiful psychiatrist who stays with James long enough to learn that his symptoms are not so easily diagnosed or dismissed. She treats him as a patient in Baltimore in 1990, and she is kidnapped by him there again six years later. Her composure is further rattled by evidence that James, who strikes her as delusional, isn't lying when he says he has firsthand World War I experience. Mr. Gilliam makes dazzlingly apt use of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" to capture both the erotic pull that brings James and Dr. Railly together and the insidious mysteries that keep them apart.

As written by Mr. Peoples and Janet Peoples (who base their screenplay on Chris Marker's 1962 short film "La Jetee"), and as directed by Mr. Gilliam with great flair for keeping his audience off balance, "12 Monkeys" unfolds in the inexorable, layered fashion of an onion being peeled. And it doesn't always track, since some transitions are kept deliberately abrupt and bewildering to underscore James's terror. James senses doom; he hears strange voices; he is buffeted through time unexpectedly; he fights for survival while heavily sedated, and he is tormented by a recurring memory with the quality of deja vu. In this, the best of Mr. Gilliam's evocative nightmares about modern life, the film maker's vision has never seemed more real.




Reviewed by Janet Maslin





Type:
Features
(ONE HOUR AND FORTY minutes).