The first thing to note about Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son, is that (as far as pictures on the internet show) he has not inherited his father’s careful grooming practices. The second thing is that he’s a fine movie director.
Source Code is his second feature film, coming after Moon and, before that, work in the commercials industry. It’s obviously not a low-budget calling-card quickie, given that it stars Jake Gyllenhaal, but it is not a bloated blockbuster either: it’s a rather clever time-bending thriller set in a possible near or nearish future.
The basic concept is that some military scientists of the super-technological kind so frequently found in American movies (if not the actual United States military) have found a way to transport agents back in time. This involves sending the agent’s mind into another persons body and into a key situation in which the now-possessed person finds him or herself.
The project is to collect important information, and naturally this information has enormous life-or-death implications; it wouldn’t be terribly interesting if it were just a quick time flip to find out if the rumours about, say, Britney Spears, were true. Or perhaps it would be, but it wouldn’t make much of a movie.
It’s all very well to have a “high concept” for your film, but you’ve also got to make that concept operate on a step-by-step narrative basis, working itself out through various plot permutations. We see a fair number of big Hollywood movies that take off from admirable concepts but are unable to develop them interestingly through the film.
But Jones and scriptwriter Ben Ripley (good name for a “believe it or not” story) do this very well. The bits are all very deftly combined — a Groundhog Day idea all thrillered up, the mind-bending Inception-type interventions, the past-future switchbacks of Next.
The Gyllenhaal character has his mind (presumably) popped into someone else’s body, somebody who’s sitting on a train. A disaster is about to happen to this train, thus the urgent need to get Jake in there to find out what’s going on and hopefully forestall further disaster. Oh, and there’s a bit of romance, too, on the side.
And that’s all I’m going to say about the storyline. It feels like too much already, though a few movie websites Ive looked at give more than that away — and in little more than two lines.
Gyllenhaal and co-star Michelle Monaghan do their jobs with gusto, though I have to confess to some slight irritation with Monaghan. She feels a bit fake to me, like one of those ladies over-cheerfully selling home-made jams at a church fête. Maybe it’s just me, or perhaps it’s the contrast with the other leading woman in the movie, Vera Farmiga, who may not be as conventionally pretty as Monaghan but comes across as a far more interesting character.
Source Code raises fascinating questions about the mind-body duality that has haunted Western thought for a millennium or two, as well as casting its feelers into a future in which the mind is transferable to computer. It reminded me, on the concept level, of Steve Martin’s hilarious comedy of mental transfer, All of Me, from back in the previous century when Martin was still amusing.
The movie also plays with unresolved and unsolvable issues that always come up when time travel is contemplated, not to mention the conundrums of tweaking past events and thus changing the future.
Last week’s release, The Adjustment Bureau, also tried to turn such questions into narrative, though far less successfully than Source Code; these are issues that have been giving writers of science fiction headaches since the time of HG Wells.
At any rate, these questions come up after one has seen the movie. Within its own compass the film makes enough sense of these notions in storytelling terms to keep moving forward and to keep the audience’s attention.
Source Code may not be great art, or even a thinky thriller with the kind of flash and impact produced by, say, Inception, but it is certainly clever and entertaining.
Now if I could just go back to that day in 1983…