director
Danny Boyle
screenwriter
John Hodge
producer
Andrew Macdonald
cinematographer
Brian Tufano
music
David Arnold
editor
Masahiro Hirakubo
cast
Ewan McGregor (Robert Lewis)
Cameron Diaz (Celine Naville)
Holly Hunter (O'Reilly)
Delroy Lindo (Jackson)
Dan Hedaya (Gabriel)
Stanley Tucci (Elliot Zweikel)
Tony Shalhoub (Al)
Ian Holm (Naville)
Maury Chaykin (Tod)
Timothy Olyphant (Hiker)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 103m
u.s.
release: October 24,
1997
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other danny
boyle films
reviewed on this website:
- the
beach
- shallow
Grave
- trainspotting
- 28
days later
|
The
cheerfully daft A Life Less Ordinary reminded me of another,
far less enjoyable film that came out a year ago -- Feeling
Minnesota, a hipster piffle featuring guns, tough guys,
a scruffy male lead, and Cameron Diaz. That movie just sat on
the screen waiting to die of lameness. A Life Less Ordinary
could easily have been just as bad. It's one of those ironic
crime comedies pitched at the young and jaded (Pulp
Fiction was the template), but it isn't the Tarantino
swipe the ads lead you to expect.
This is the third collaboration between four guys from Britain:
director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge, producer Andrew Macdonald,
and star Ewan McGregor. Their first effort was 1994's nasty,
off-putting thriller Shallow
Grave; last year they took U.K. and U.S. art-houses by
storm with Trainspotting.
A calculatedly shocking comedy like Trainspotting is a
hard act to follow, and Boyle et al. have done the properly
perverse thing: They've made a romantic comedy crammed with five
movies' worth of Hollywood cheese -- lovers on the lam, kidnapping,
gunplay, even angels, for God's sake. The movie is a joke
on big studios (Fox paid for this one) and the mass audience.
The indie bad-boys are saying, "You want lightweight escapism?
We'll give you lightweight escapism." But they've
done it their way.
McGregor is Robert, a janitor and aspiring "trash novelist"
who gets fired -- replaced by a robot. Robert storms into the
office of his boss (Ian Holm), waving a gun and demanding his
job back. After a melee with a pack of security guards, he abducts
the boss's daughter Celine (Diaz), who has recently disabled
her dentist fiancé (Stanley Tucci) in a William Tell scene
that may be a parody of Naked Lunch. Celine goes with
Robert willingly; it's not like she has anything better to do.
All of this is monitored by two angels (the hilariously cast
Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo), who are assigned to play Cupids
for Robert and Celine; God isn't happy with the divorce rate
on Earth. The angels also pose as assassins who offer their services
to Celine's dad -- he wants Celine back and Robert dead. Since
the movie begins in Heaven, we know we're not meant to take it
straight. Yet real feeling does develop between the mismatched
lovers.
That's because McGregor and Diaz make a fine off-center couple.
Diaz's sexiness is played down (except for her opening bit in
a bikini, when Boyle seems to be saying "Right, let's get
this out of the way early"), and McGregor spends the film
in a dorky shag haircut. Yet they also have a brazenly romantic
karaoke number in a club, belting out "Beyond the Sea,"
and you smile as you realize that Boyle is having his cake and
eating it too. The scene is a goof, but it gets to the heart
of the lovers' fantasies with a peppy directness beyond the reach
of most Hollywood movies.
What's fresh about A Life Less Ordinary is that we get
to see weary romantic clichés through the eyes of cinema's
new Fab Four -- clichés mocked, celebrated and, finally,
abandoned in favor of an odd kind of honesty. Celine and Robert
pose side by side, talking directly to us and to each other,
and in the end they turn into Claymation versions of themselves.
Like everything else in the film, this is both a goof and not
a goof: People are clay in the hands of God, shaped by fate ....
Aah, forget it. The Claymation is just fun. And any movie
featuring Holly Hunter as a blood-spattered angel, grinning homicidally
as she clings to the hood of a speeding car, is just about impossible
to dislike. |