Twelve Monkeys reviewed on Blu-ray
By Bill Warren
This dense, intricate and serious movie alienated some filmgoers, though it was popular and handsomely profitable. Generally speaking, mass audiences are not comfortable with films that make you think, and "Twelve Monkeys" is downright cerebral. It's a rich, detailed film that requires concentration to follow, as it respects the intelligence of those who watch it; if you don't pay attention, you're likely to regard the film as bleak, almost nihilistic. It does offer some traces of hope, but to realize that requires paying close attention. Debates about just what's going on in the movie, particularly in regard to the deliberately confusing time travel that's at the base of the story, continue online to this day--and the movie was released in 1995.
This was the first film as director from Terry Gilliam since 1991; he had a few false starts--"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," "Watchmen," others--but this one got off the ground rather quickly. Unusually for Gilliam, he has no (credited, anyway) part in writing the script, which is by David and Janet Peoples; he was a director for hire, hoping to show producers he could turn out a financially successful movie shot at a reasonable cost (the budget was $23 million, not high for the period). It is based on the odd French short of 1962, "La Jetee," the creation of Chris Marker. And it tells the same story, in essence, although it's more conventional than Marker's film, which was told almost entirely in still photographs.
On a basic level, the story is reasonably simple: James Cole (Willis), a prisoner in the year 2035, is sent back in time (repeatedly) to find a pure strain of the virus that wiped out 99% of humanity in the years 1996 and 1997. Scientists of 2035 hope that finding an unmutated strain of the virus will enable them to create an anti-viral agent for their time, enabling people to return to the surface of the world. They evidently do not believe that they can use time travel to prevent the plague (though this isn't discussed), but we obliquely learn that they're wrong in some of their assumptions. Cole himself is disturbed by childhood memories of seeing a man at an airport shot down before young James' eyes; these scenes recur several times in the film--but when we see the "real" event near the end, it doesn't quite match with the earlier memories. This is one clue that the scientists are wrong about the ability to change their past (the movie audience's present).
Cole is first accidentally sent to 1990, where he is promptly put into a mental institution in Philadelphia; anyone who claims to be from the future, and declares that 99% of humankind will die in a few years must be nuts. While in the asylum, Cole meets wild-eyed inmate Jeffrey Goines (Pitt), who is fascinated by some of Cole's drugged asides (this turns out to be a very subtle but major point). Cole is treated by baffled psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), who has a vague feeling she's seen him before.
From the vantage point of those in the year 1990, Cole vanishes; he's actually been plucked back to his own time, where the scientists try again to send him to 1996. He appears briefly in World War I, then turns up in the target year at last. He kidnaps Kathryn, hoping to get her to help him, and tracks down Jeffrey, now free from the institution and working for his famous biologist father (Christopher Plummer), the man known (in 2035) as person responsible for the virus that wiped out the world in 1996. Cole, and the eventually-convinced Kathryn, try to track "The Army of the 12 Monkeys," an underground organization seemingly responsible for loosing the plague in the world. (Actually, someone else is inadvertently responsible, in a clever time-loopy, paradoxical way. More could have been done with this, but that might have overburdened the idea, and a character.)
"Twelve Monkeys" is a dark and grim film, relieved occasionally by flashes of humor; on the other hand, if viewed from a particular perspective, it's funny enough often enough that it can verge on being an actual comedy. This works best when it's in character, as, for example, when a group of animal activists learn that Jeffrey (their supposed leader and inspiration) is actually totally wacko. The leader of the more sane animal activists has some good, dry-wit moments of shock. Sometimes, though, the humor seems to have drifted in from "Brazil;" a stunned Cole is awakened in the future by the scientists singing "Blueberry Hill" a capella. This is funny but out of character for this ordinarily very serious group.
Other elements, too, seem added more because Terry Gilliam gets off on this kind of thing than because they work for the movie. For example, the dismal underground "city" of the future (Jeffrey Beecroft was production designer) is mostly well-conceived if a little confusing; the sets were actually disused power plans in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Cole and other prisoners are housed in cages--without corridors; giant hooks lift them out when necessary. This seems like reasonable extrapolation, but when Cole is quizzed by the group of scientists, he's seated in a chair that ascends a wall, and he's confronted by a sphere with TV screens of different sizes. Some screens show eyes, others full faces, but what's the point? It doesn't seem to be psychologically intimidating; it's just there, and does look more like a prop left over from "Brazil" than anything else. This video ball, however, is amusing. The time machine itself is really just a hole in a wall; it's as if they're mailing Cole to the past.
There seems to be an effort so concerted as to be self-conscious to avoid making "Twelve Monkeys" look like a regular science fiction movie, at least in the 2035 scenes; the 1990/1996 scenes are imaginatively designed. That is, while it's easy to believe that after a plague that wipes out virtually everyone on Earth, forcing the survivors to live underground, things would exactly be polished and spiffy--but this grim and bleak and non-technological? Isn't there any metal that isn't rusty? Aren't there any rooms that are at least livable, if not pleasant? Perhaps the filmmakers thought that this underground junkpile future somehow made "Twelve Monkeys" seem distinctive, but alas, this future actually ends up resembling one of those trashy Italian knockoffs of "The Road Warrior."
But a movie is not its production design, and there's a great deal more to "Twelve Monkeys" than how it looks, though in a film as carefully, even heavily, designed as this one, the look of it is a part of what it is trying to say. Gilliam, originally a graphic artist, really began his career as a filmmaker when he became one of Monty Python's Flying Circus--the only American member; he did the frequent, wacky animation, as well as acting. And he carried over with him to directing films some ideas and approaches not uncommon in the graphic arts, but which are even rarer in standard commercial moviemaking. Gilliam employs recurring images--bears, monkeys, the Florida keys, even plastic sheeting--that turn up in varying contexts throughout the film, and they each have a symbolic role to play. Scenes from Hitchcock's "Vertigo" are used to comment on and extend ideas in "Twelve Monkeys;" that movie even seems to follow Willis and Stowe--they hide out temporarily in a theater where it's showing, but the Bernard Herrmann music from the Hitchcock film is used to score the scenes immediately after they leave the theater as well.
I suspect that one of the ideas in "Twelve Monkeys" that originally caught Gilliam's eye--and that's the right term--is that in 2035, mankind lives underground, while his cities have gone back to the animals. In an early scene, Cole, in a protective suit, is sent up to wintry, deserted Philadelphia to look for biological specimens (this in his own present). He encounters a grizzly bear, and sees a lion high up on a city building roaring to the snowy sky. These stunning, mysterious images, I suspect, attracted Gilliam's attention, because he delights in echoing them several times later in the film. In the extras, both Gilliam and producer Charles Roven claim the film doesn't fit any genre. Sorry, gentlemen, but it's science fiction straight down the line; however, it's more like written science fiction than other science fiction movies.
Furthermore, the very idea of time travel might have intrigued him, as it has many others over the years. Cole travels from his present to our present, but to him, it is the dead past, and cannot be changed. (As the scientists in 2035 are uninterested in preventing the spread of the plague; it isn't even an issue.) But there are small details scattered throughout the film, incidents, faces, brief moments, that suggest that Cole's trip is constantly altering the time he came from. (He may even be responsible for launching the plague virus.) These are not in the broad strokes used in action pictures like "TimeCop" or "Terminator 3," but more in the nature of implications, suggestions, hints, that small but significant changes are occurring. Watch the man in the pony tail in Cole's dreams/flashbacks: when we first see him, he's Brad Pitt; when we see him later, in "reality," he's David Morse. Why? The movie doesn't explain, nor does Cole speculate on this. (In the very good commentary track by Gilliam and Roven, they don't mention this at all, though they do discuss the implications of the scene on the plane at the end of the movie, though they don't explain what they intended.) Gilliam, Roven and the Peoples are not out to state things for certain; they want some ambiguity at the end of the film. American moviegoers are uncomfortable with ambiguity; they tend to want everything spelled out in concrete details.
But there's more to the movie than just the ending, too much movie, in fact, at 130 minutes. The scenes in the decrepit 1990 mental ward go on too long; the points are made clearly quite soon, with much of the rest of it seeming more like marking time than anything else. Also, you become impatient with Cole; he doesn't explain everything to Kathryn in 1996, and it's hard to see why. Some of the storytelling seems smudgy, as if there were one or two rewrites too many; ambiguity is interesting, but the inexplicable (as with the raspy voice that calls Cole "Bob") is merely frustrating.
I'm not sure Bruce Willis was the right person for the role of James Cole; he drools and babbles with the best of them, but he has a hard time suggesting that there's anything underlying the drooling and babbling. Someone who projects intelligence more readily than Willis might have been a better choice for the lead; at least then, you wouldn't become impatient with him as readily as you may with Willis. However, overall Willis is quite good; it was the first time he had a leading role that was more reactive, more acted upon, than active and in charge. He's convincingly vulnerable, and we can easily see, without any undue emphasis, that Cole is falling in love with Dr. Railly (Stowe).
At the end, when Cole reaches a logical if temporary conclusion about his shuttling back and forth in time--that he really is crazy--the story would work better if you had a sense of loss, and if Cole showed a sense of grateful surrender, but Willis instead seems primarily determined. He's better in roles where he can be sardonic, a little weary and rooted in reality; here, as a man cast adrift in time, he has few opportunities for humor (I did love the scene of him wading in a freezing pond), and resorts to a kind of troubled look too much of the time. Cole should have had an active imagination and intelligence, and still have been a pawn of circumstances. Willis is just the pawn. The success of the movie, however, did help him change the roles he was asked to play.
Brad Pitt was a real surprise as the lunatic Jeffrey Goines. There's a trace of the "actor's turn" to Pitt's performance--he seems a shade studied at times--but this was the first time he was this energetic and expressive before. He waves his arms and waggles his fingers, he babbles and chatters incessantly, he waggles his eyebrows and bulges his eyes. He's the Compleat Madman, and he's generally very convincing and often quite funny. His yattering raps about conformity and society and disease are the comic riffs of an informed loon. In the 1996 scenes, we see him in a tux at a prestigious dinner in his father's incredible mansion; Jeffrey is passing as sane, but when he meets Cole again, he happily allows the true madman within him to bubble to the surface. I suspect Pitt had a wonderful time playing this role; he's deeper into this part than I had seen him attempt before; since then, of course, he's established himself as an occasionally very good actor.
Madeleine Stowe, always a very strong actor, has the most difficult role in "Twelve Monkeys," because she has to play a normal woman of above-average intelligence who comes to believe something impossible--and falls in love with the man who brings her that revelation. Stowe hadn't really had a major role in a major film; she's usually either in a tricky thriller like "Blink" or "Unlawful Entry," or plays the main female role opposite a strong leading man, as in "The Two Jakes" and "The Last of the Mohicans." Since "Twelve Monkeys," she's acted only sporadically, which is a loss to the movie business. Here, she's always convincing, always real, and often passionate. She's a bedrock of reality that anchors the story in place.
Virtually no one else even gets a word in. Christopher Plummer is sleekly sardonic as Jeffrey's scientist father, and David Morse is unnerving as Dr. Goines' assistant. He has an especially good, if brief, scene in which he approaches Kathryn at an autograph party for her book. Morse is alive, vivid and real in that scene, and he has more good bits at the end of "Twelve Monkeys," too.
Technically, it's a striking film, though far, far from a beautiful one. It takes place almost entirely under gray winter skies, or at night, or both. Roger Pratt's photography is hard-edged and realistic, using a lot of Dutch angles to suggest disorientation. I can't really comment on the score by Paul Buckmaster, because I didn't entirely notice it, but the song score is interesting, particularly the uses of Fats Domino's recording of "Blueberry Hill," and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," which serves as a kind of ironic--or is it?--commentary on the entire film.
David Peoples was one of the writers of both "Blade Runner" and "Unforgiven," but he also wrote and directed "The Blood of Heroes," a sincere but clumsy misfire. I liked his script for "Hero," but few others did. It's hard to draw generalized conclusions about someone with so few credits as a writer; on most of his films, including "Twelve Monkeys," Peoples is not the only credited writer (he co-wrote this with his wife). He has not had many produced scripts since "Twelve Monkeys." Here, he and his wife used the plot of "La Jetee," that remarkable short by Chris Marker, as the spine for his script. Like many writers, Peoples does seem to prefer dealing with outsiders, the used-up, the discarded, those who are pawns in a greater game they don't necessarily understand, but which they can affect. His script for "Twelve Monkeys" is occasionally overcomplicated, strains for effect at times, and tends to be repetitious, but it's intelligent, imaginative and honest, too. There's not the slightest sense in this script that science fiction is something you play down to audiences; instead, the Peoples assume their audiences are intelligent.
Terry Gilliam seems somewhat constrained by the very grimness of the story and setting. In the commentary track, he says he was trying to not make "a Terry Gilliam movie," but rather a commercial film of appeal to mass audiences. He wryly points out that, however, the production team persisted in providing costuming, set dressing, etc. for "a Terry Gilliam movie." As mentioned earlier, his quirky wit pops up at times, but this film isn't conceptually a comedy, whereas even "Brazil" and "The Fisher King" are largely comic. Also, I had the sense that Gilliam wasn't really concerned with the narrative; he's drawn to premises, characters and images, but not stories. "Twelve Monkeys" has, despite its leaps in time and lack of a clear goal for the hero (how does he know when he's done?), a reasonably straight-line narrative, but doesn't generate any real suspense until the last twenty minutes or so. We're allowed to kind of wander in the story, and I suspect Gilliam is more comfortable with the wandering--but, to my surprise, he delivered the suspense in a traditional, hard-line manner when the film reaches its climax.
At times, the movie seems almost grimly purposeful, but it's unclear just what the purpose is; we never know, really, just what the scientists in the future want from Cole, or what they will do when they get it--and we're not sure what we're supposed to take away from "Twelve Monkeys" as a film at the end. It has something of the air of a serious satire, but I'm not sure what the target is. It's not simply a good story well told, as there are hints throughout that the film is striving for something larger than that--but what? It is a good story that is mostly well told, and for those attuned to its eccentric rhythms, it can be a powerful, gripping experience. And as a lover of filmed science fiction, I'm deeply grateful that there are some filmmakers out there who are still allowed to take it seriously. SF has become too often just a subset of the action genre; it's a lot more than that, or it can be. "Twelve Monkeys" may be flawed, but it's a brave, enterprising film, a science fiction movie for adults.
The Blu-ray presentation is a major success. All of Gilliam's movies have dense, complicated production designs and set dressing, and "Twelve Monkeys" is no different. Here, we can see all those details in the dark but still crisp photography--we can feel the warmth of the dark wood in the Goines mansion, we want to wipe the grime off after passing through some of the grungier environments, and the future scenes are cluttered, busy and sometimes amusing. The sound, too, is exceptional; it doesn't use the multiple channels showily but rather appropriately. However, some fun is had with that raspy, disembodied voice that calls Cole "Bob"--it wanders from speaker to speaker.
The extras are very good. The publicity campaign for "Twelve Monkeys" was extremely imaginative and intelligent, and we see here (in "Archives") the images from which it was developed. There's an outstanding documentary on the film, "The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys." Documentarians Keith Fulton and Lous Pepe followed Gilliam from the beginning of production to the release of the movie. They feature many interviews with the director, plus other contributors as well (but not Willis). It's intelligent, informative and clearly presented, not the usual "making of" at all. Gilliam is presented pretty much warts and all, sometimes short-tempered or confused, most of the time wry and amusing. This is one of the most thorough production movies available.
The commentary track by Gilliam and Roven is also excellent, although, as mentioned above, it dodges certain ideas that they evidently do not want to address. This, too, is way above average, a suitable adjunct to the puzzling, engrossing, funny and intelligent movie it graces.
James Cole.................................Bruce Willis
Dr. Kathryn Railly.........................Madeleine Stowe
Jeffrey Goines.............................Brad Pitt
Dr. Leland Goines..........................Christopher Plummer
Dr. Fletcher...............................Frank Gorshin
Jose.......................................Jon Seda
Dr. Peters.................................David Morse
Botanist...................................H. Michael Walls
Geologist..................................Bob Adrian
Zoologist..................................Simon Jones
Astrophysicist.............................Carol Florence
Microbiologist.............................Bill Raymond
Engineer...................................Ernest Abuba
Poet.......................................Irma St. Paule
Louie/Raspy voice..........................Harry O'Toole
Young James Cole...........................Joseph Melito
Selected cast (in order of appearance): Scarface: Michael Chance;
Tiny: Vernon Campbell; Detective Franki: Bruce Kirkpatrick; Billings:
Rozwill Young; Ward nurse: Nell Johnson; L.J. Washington: Fred
Strother; Dr. Casey: Rick Warner; Dr. Goodin: Anthony "Chip" Brienza;
World War I Captain: Pat Dias; World War I sergeant: Aaron Michael
Lacey; Anchorwoman: Janet L. Zappala; Evangelist: Thomas Roy; Thugs in
abandoned theater: Korchenko, Chuck Jeffreys; Teddy (animal activist):
Lisa Gay Hamilton; Fale (animal activist): Felix A. Pire; Bee (animal
activist): Mathew Ross; Lt. Halperin: Christopher Meloni; Detective
Dalva: Paul Meshejian; Wayne: Robert O'Neill; Kweskin: Kevin Thigpen;
Hotel clerk: Lee Golden; Wallace: Joseph McKenna; Woman cabbie: Annie
ð 7 3 ŠGolden; Airport detective: Stephen Bridgewater.
Director...................................Terry Gilliam
Screenplay.................................David Peoples
Janet Peoples
Producer...................................Charles Roven
Inspired by film "La Jetee" written & directed by
........................Chris Marker
Production designer........................Jeffrey Beecroft
Director of photography....................Roger Pratt
Film editor................................Mick Audsley
Costume designer...........................Julie Weiss
Music......................................Paul Buckmaster
Executive producers: Robert Cavalla, Gary Levinsohn, Robert Kosberg;
Co-producer: Lloyd Phillips; Associate producers: Kelley Smith-Wait,
Mark Egerton; Casting: Margery Simkin; Special Effects Mechanical &
Pyrotechnic Engineer: Vincent Montefusco; Stunt coordinator: Phil
Neilson.
Atlas/Classico & Universal Pictures; a Universal release; Rated R; 130
minutes.
Note: Although all the advertising and press material refers to the
film as "12 Monkeys," using numerals, on screen the title is spelled
out as two words: "Twelve Monkeys."
