Sunday, April 10, 2011
In all of cinema, the time-travel movie is perhaps the one subgenre that asks the most of its audience in terms of suspending disbelief. It’s not enough for us to want to be entertained or to want to believe that time travel is possible. The most successful time-travel movies must meet the audience at least halfway, by doing two things:
1. As preposterous and scientifically impossible as the idea is in reality, it must be cinematically plausible — i.e., the rules by which it is possible in the movie you are watching must be watertight and must be delivered with a straight face.
2. The movie must be wholly committed to the premise it supposes and play strictly by the rules it has established to govern that premise.
Duncan Jones’ sophomore feature, Source Code, supposes time travel with a twist, its premise being that, after a person dies, the last eight minutes of that person’s life remain imprinted on his or her brain. By connecting a living subject to the memory receptors in the decedent’s brain, that subject can repeatedly access those eight minutes, not merely to relive them but to construct an alternate, parallel reality, interacting with the physical surroundings in the dead person’s memory instead of being a passive observer.
Ridiculous? Of course. Confusing? Certainly. Cinematically plausible? Surprisingly, yes.
Our subject, Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a soldier who wakes up on a Chicago-bound commuter train with no idea how he got there. Christina (Michelle Monaghan), the beautiful passenger seated opposite him, seems to know him, although he’s never seen her before. Their first eight minutes together don’t go so smoothly, because Stevens is unaware that he is inside the memory — and the body, as it were — of a teacher named Sean Fentress, who died with Christina and everyone else aboard that train when a bomb exploded onboard.
The explosion jars Stevens back to consciousness, inside a capsule that he believes is a simulator of some kind. His handler, Capt. Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), doesn’t have time to explain what he’s doing there because she needs urgently to know everything he saw onboard the train before the explosion. It’s the calling card, Goodwin says, of a bomber who has something much bigger planned for downtown Chicago. Stevens can’t do anything to save the people on that commuter train, but he can gather information about the people on the train, locate the bomb and perhaps identify the person who planted it in time to stop the next attack. So back he goes, into the titular “source code” that allows him to relive Sean Fentress’ final eight minutes.
At first, the movie seems in danger of dragging us through an infuriating, never-ending loop, but after the first few abortive attempts — and one humorous, obligatory nod to Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day — Stevens finds his footing and commits to the mission like the good soldier he is, piecing together information and weighing all the likely scenarios eight minutes at a time.
Meanwhile, Stevens is also making the most of those eight minutes with Christina, and here the movie again accomplishes the improbable: drawing us into and making us root for a truly doomed romance. Over the course of their repeated encounters, Stevens begins to care for Christina, and her attraction to Sean becomes more apparent as she sees this new, more assertive side of her colleague and fellow commuter. Make of this complicated love triangle what you will; as an audience, we are drawn to the chemistry of our leads, and fortunately, Gyllenhaal and Monaghan have it.
In service of this high concept, the acting is generally solid: Gyllenhaal is much less wooden and one-dimensional than I have found him to be in previous films. Monaghan is typically appealing in a necessarily redundant and underwritten role. Back at the command post, Farmiga and the excellent Jeffrey Wright (as the source code’s developer, Dr. Rutledge) don’t move around a lot, spending most of their screen time in close-up, but still manage to convey the urgency, authority and, occasionally, deceit necessary to propel both a mission and a plot in which information must be meted out on a need-to-know basis.
The movie falters only at the very end. I will tell you only that, for all its impossible science and improbable leaps of logic, Source Code culminates in a very satisfying ending that makes perfect sense within the rules established at the outset by Ben Ripley’s fast-paced screenplay … after which it tacks on an utterly ridiculous epilogue that I believe to be the “contribution” of one studio executive or a roomful of them who, adhering to the prime directive of all studio executives, refused to leave well enough alone.
Duncan Jones and Ben Ripley should be rightfully proud of the smart, engaging popcorn thriller they’ve made. Neither of them should stoop to participate in the sequel this epilogue so flagrantly promises.
