As someone who
has always been detached from the idea that the Star Wars franchise is the
be-all and end-all of pop culture and who has proudly spent much of the last
quarter of a century avoiding, whenever possible, seeing any film or TV series
related to this universe I have no real stake in the argument about Episode
8 being the worst film in the most recent trilogy. However from the
perspective of the film critic as well as an admirer of talent I’m not entirely
surprised that Rian Johnson’s vision was, shall we say, disparate from the one
that J.J. Abrams had introduced in The Force Awakens.
Anyone who has
read my column on other subjects over the years knows that I am a huge admirer
of both Abrams and Johnson, both in terms of their work for movies and
television. And while I think both men are geniuses I’ve seen enough of their
work to know that they each have a different niche where they are masters.
From the moment
he broke on to the scene with Felicity in 1998 J.J. Abrams has been a
master of both wonder as well as the idea of community in all of the television
series he has created. We see at the heart of the relationships Sydney Bristow
forms in Alias, the basic ideas at the center of Lost (even
though his involvement stopped after the Pilot) and the unlikely bond that
forms between the Bishop family and their team in Fringe. One clearly
gets a sense of it in his reboot of Star Trek as well as a very clear
vision in Super 8. One even gets a sense of it in his entry in Mission
Impossible. Abrams has always been more comfortable in the world of sci-fi
and fantasy.
By contrast
Johnson’s sweet spot throughout his somewhat shorter career (he’s only 50) has
always been far more in the noir genre. When he has ventured into television as
a director and writer he has always been in the seedy underbelly of crime. His
work on Breaking Bad – including Ozymandias, considering arguably the
greatest episode of television ever made – as well as the brilliant Poker
Face makes this very clear. It’s always been clear in the handful of movies
he made before and after as well, though considering he is now the force behind
the knew Knives Out mystery satire probably told you that in advance.
I first came
into contact with him back in 2005 with his very first movie Brick. This
is the story of a contemporary high school students search for his former
girlfriend written entirely in the style of a 1930s film noir. Joseph
Gordon-Levitt played the lead in what could well be considered the first adult
role he plays. This film absolutely should not have worked by any nature but
somehow it flows perfectly. When Gordon-Levitt says: “Throw one at me if you
want, hash head. I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me
six up on the lot of you” it sounds just as normal as any of the dialogue we
were hearing on Deadwood at the time. The film made $2 million dollars
on a budget of less that half a million and it put Johnson on the map. However
his next film The Brothers Bloom which featured Adrian Brody and Mark
Ruffalo as two con men who swindle millionaires was a box office bomb, even
though it was relatively cheap to make.
Johnson had to
go back to TV for a while before he managed to get Looper greenlit. It
was well received critically and more than managed to make its money back at
the box office (it grossed over $175 million worldwide). Still the decision
that Johnson should have been allowed to handle a Star Wars film was
clearly a poor one because while Looper is at least on the surface a
sci-fi film, it is as much in the noir genre as everything else Johnson did
before or since. There’s none of the wonder that we see in Abrams’s movie or
show and that’s clear from the opening shot and the narration of it. This is a
movie that takes one of the most wondrous ideas in science fiction – time
travel – and basically says upfront that the only purpose it has is for crime
syndicates to dispose of dead bodies in the past.
The film is set
in 2044 – thirty two years from the date the movie was originally released –
but if anything the future looks bleaker than we get from the world of Blade
Runner or Steven Spielberg’s various inputs. We see speeders that are close
to hoverbikes and they are mocked by Joe the second he sees them. Occasionally
we see signs of hovering cars or jet packs but they’re basically being used as
tools. Even the idea of telekinesis is outright mocked by Joe in the narration.
“We thought we’d all be getting superpowers. Turns out all we got was a bunch
of guys who could float quarters.”
The film takes
place almost entirely in Kansas and I’m pretty sure Johnson is making this a
deliberate choice: you can see this is not a place that Dorothy would ever want
to go back to. The city is unnamed but we basically see a world that looks
worse than the one we live in today: the streets are filthy, people live in
poverty and shoot each other at random, almost everybody is some kind of drugs
(Joe is a junkie when we meet him). Halfway through the movie we get a look at
China and the only thing that looks different is the streets are slightly
cleaner. Abe (Jeff Daniels) is the crime boss from Kansas who has been sent
from 30 years in the future as a representative of one of the syndicates and if
anything he sounds more depressed about it than anything. Perhaps it’s the
nature of his job. Joe tells us he runs the state and “that would be impressive
if it were any other state.”
Joseph
Gordon-Levitt plays Joe. In Johnson’s version of the world no one seems to have
a last name. We’ll learn that Joe was sold by his mother to a crime syndicate,
spent his teenage years in robberies and when he broke into the wrong
storefront Abe saw something in him and made him a looper. That he thought this
was a noble path shows the narrowness of his vision but it’s clear from Joe’s
description that ‘loopers don’t attract a lot of forward thinkers’.
Joe’s job is to
dispose of bodies and when he does so he collects a reward in silver.
Eventually he knows he will be hired to ‘close his loop’. In order to tie up
lose ends 30 years from when a looper starts his job he will be captured, tied
up and sent back in time to kill himself. This naturally causes all loopers and
we see Joe with his gang to spend their lives drowning in cheap pleasures and
frequently becoming addicts. At a critical point in the film we are shown what
Joe’s life will be like when he closes his loop and we see how miserable it is:
he will get deeper into drugs, spend all the money he has, go back to
becoming a hit man and eventually become
a bigger monster. One gets the feeling this is the traditional trajectory for
any looper as well as this being the best case scenario. We get a clear sense
of the worst case through Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) who is sent to close
his loop and can’t follow through with it. He comes to Joe and begs to hide and
while Joe does so temporarily after a meeting with Abe he gives him up when his
fortune is threatened. We never learn what happens to Seth in the present - Abe has no intention of messing the
timeline – but we know its not going to be great.
We get a sense
of Joe’s existence in the first half-hour of the film and it is truly
miserable. He goes to his site in the wheat fields; he kills his target, he
collects his silver, he gets high, he sleeps with Suzie (Piper Perabo). The
clearest idea he has of the future is learning French and going to France,
maybe with Suzie. Suzie has a clearer perspective of reality than Joe does and
just wants ‘services rendered’ . Joe was a dead man walking long before his
loop was closed.
And at the
half-hour point, he has to close his own loop. Except his older self is clearer
on what’s going to come and is prepared. Joe is more determined to make things
right with his gang then the life of himself: he doesn’t even care why he’s
determined to escape.
I should
mention that watching Gordon-Levitt throughout the movie he does take on the
behavior or a young Bruce Willis in so much of his mannerisms. His haircut and tone sound very much like
Willis in Die Hard and Moonlighting
but he also has the someone deader tones that we saw him use in the works
of M. Night Shyamalan. I remember reading an end-of-year Best-Of-List in
Entertainment Weekly saying that Gordon-Levitt’s performance in Looper was
‘the best Bruce Willis performance in 2012’. That’s not entirely a joke.
Gordon-Levitt does embody much of Willis in his work.
And it’s worth
noting that his work here gives Willis a chance to flex his acting muscles in a
way that he hadn’t to in a very long time, say, since Lucky Number Slevin. When
Willis and Gordon-Levitt confront each other in the diner both men are angry
but Willis’s is far more deserving. He looks down at himself – literally – and
sees the kind of horrible person he already is. He’s a killer and a junkie with
a child mentality and he knows that he is dealing with a monster. Willis is
filled with self-loathing in this scene and its clear why. As we’ve seen in the
montage he found a woman who loved him, saw through his massive flaws and the
two of them got married. They’d built a future together. He might have been
fine dying for his sins but when his wife becomes an inadvertent victim, it
sends him on a mission.
It’s here we
learn the story of ‘The Rainmaker’ who in six months took control of the five
major syndicates – alone. No one knows how he did it, no one knows what he
looks like and we certainly don’t know the kind of person he is to the rest of
humanity. What we do know is that he has begun to close all the loops and
Willis was his target. The day before Willis got a lead on who he was. He’s
alive in this time period and Willis intends to kill him.
There’s a flaw
in Willis’s thinking, of course: the one in common with all time travel movies.
If Willis succeeds in his mission and kills the Rainmaker as a child, then how
will the timeline align itself so that he can be sent back to kill him in the
first place. The movie makes a point by having Gordon-Levitt say that this flaw
isn’t relevant scientifically but because Willis believes it will happen that’s
what matters.
The emotional
center of the film takes place in the second half when Gordon-Levitt rides
through the wheatfields he’s been using to dispose of bodies and reaches one of
the addresses Willis thinks ‘The Rainmaker’ is. It’s there he meets Sarah
(Emily Blunt) the only character in the entire movie with a moral compass and a
soul. Sarah was both a junkie and a prostitute at one point and she abandoned
her son as a child for his own good. I will not reveal the circumstances as to
why and how she came back: all that matters is that she has love and her heart
and compassion in a way no one else in the movie does. Everything she does is
to protect her son and she makes it very clear that it is her only priority.
This is, to be
very clear, a bleak vision of the world one that is more at home with Ridley
Scott’s visions of the future. It has the kind of intellectual puzzles that are
at the center of so many Christopher Nolan films but unlike Nolan (who didn’t
seem willing to confront them until Interstellar) Scott looks at the
harsh consequences. This is clearest in the fact that The Rainmaker in 2044 is
five years old. The information Willis has received tells him that there are
three possibilities as to who he might be. Sarah asks the inevitable question:
is he going to kill them all? And unlike most filmmakers Johnson actually
answers it by having Willis go to one of his possibilities first. He doesn’t
show the actual moment of the murder – I don’t think he could have gotten the
film made if he included it – but he shows every moment leading up to it and
most critically Willis’s reaction after it. We see a man in utter grief at what
he has done, perhaps because it hasn’t work but just as likely because he has
killed a complete innocent for nothing.
Perhaps the
real reason that Johnson was not suited for Star Wars is seen in the
final confrontation. Johnson has never believed in easy answers in any of his
work and that is very clear in Looper’s final minutes. Gordon-Levitt
finally gets a clear version of how the Rainmaker will come to be and not only
all of the horrible consequences but that it is an unending cycle. That may
very well be why this movie is called Looper because what is a loop but
a circle that never ends? Joe doesn’t know that anything will change in his
final action but he knows enough to know if things do proceed they never will.
I will close
this review with a reminder that Gordon-Levitt was very active in 2012. Just a
couple of months previous he had played Jon Blake in The Dark Knight Rises the
movies that brought an end to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. At Bruce Wayne’s memorial Commissioner Gordon
reads the final passage from A Tale of Two Cities which ends with: “It
is a far, far better thing I do then I have ever done, it is a far, far better
rest I go to than I have ever known.” Blake hears these same lines and while I
seriously doubt Joe has ever read Dickens, I can’t help but think that when he
does his final act in the film, something like that very thought is playing
through his head.
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