Regular readers of these pages will be familiar with the frequent disparagement of Hollywood. Usually, what one is referring to is that movie factory’s tendency to endlessly recycle its own narrative clichés, and its willingness to construct morality tales of the most simplistic nature. The latter is often more annoying: many a mainstream Hollywood movie is a competent, enjoyable piece of storytelling, marred by an insultingly crude sense of right and wrong — of who deserves what in the final godlike disbursement of rewards. Hollywood is rather like George W Bush: very keen to sort the goodies from the baddies and then make sure each gets his or her appropriate ending. The point of such moralising is to make the viewer feel that he or she has somehow participated in a righteous undertaking. This is hypocritical and misleading. It is also unnecessary.
Sometimes, though, a Hollywood movie comes along that manages to refresh the clichés for long enough to provide a fun movie-going experience, and to keep the join-the-dots moralising to a minimum. Such a movie is Cellular.
The fact that Cellular is a thriller helps. Hollywood is best at narrative for its own sake, narrative as rollercoaster ride, stripped of its emotional and other encumbrances, and the plot-driven, event-laden thriller is the best example of that.
Within the first few minutes of Cellular, teacher Jessica (Kim Basinger) is kidnapped. We aren’t told why (yet). She is locked away in the attic of a house with a smashed phone extension. Yet she has the courage and the skill to piece this broken phone together sufficiently to enable her to call someone, anyone, for help. She can make the phone work because she’s a science teacher, and science teachers can do such things.
The person she calls has already been established, in about two minutes, as a rather flighty young man prepared to be devious to get his ex-girlfriend back. He has also been established, even quicker than that, as a good-looking fellow with a nice torso, which usually means he is the hero of the story, or will become the hero. Here, in fact, is the main moral issue in Cellular: how this chap will be tested and come out a better person. Never mind that the equation of problem-solving competence and moral growth is spurious. Such is Hollywood.
At any rate, once we viewers have formed those basic attachments, we can proceed with the narrative. Jessica calls frantically from her makeshift phone, and the young man, Ryan (Chris Evans, for whom I hereby predict a great future in Hollywood), rushes around Los Angeles trying to help her, making truly excellent time in a far-flung city with intractable traffic issues. The suspense is ratcheted up and up again — which is what’s important in this kind of storytelling. Ryan can’t let the connection break because then Jessica would lose him and have to start again at zero. Gradually the underlying explanations emerge, a desk-bound cop (William H Macy) gets involved, and the story surges on towards its climax. It’s all engrossing, very tense, often funny, and satisfying in the end. In short, a good Hollywood thriller.
There is a mini-essay to be written in the use of the telephone in movies — see such classics as Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, in which a phone call is essential to a murderer’s alibi. (Those were the days before itemised billing.) Now, with the advent of the cellphone, we have a whole new chapter for such an essay. Yet the cellphone has hitherto been rather under-used in films. We have had many movies that don’t know what to do with cellphones except get them out the way in case they spoil the plot: ”I can’t get a signal!” screams the chick about to be chainsawed, and so on.
Now cellphone-related phrases will increasingly be part of our moviegoing experience. You will no doubt hear ”My battery’s dying!” more than once, and Cellular makes good use of ”Do you have a charger?” By which is meant an ordinary cellphone charger, of course, but perhaps there is a hidden or unconscious pun — as in the creatures that carried the knightly heroes of old riding to the rescue of damsels in distress. When Jessica asks Ryan, ”Do you have a charger?” one half-expects him to reply: ”Of course I do — a white charger!”