The Cell
Tarsem Singh’s “The Cell” is a film I responded to very much so in 2000- the images, the score, the use of sound, the performances by Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D’Onofrio. I think this marked the first time since that initial theatrical viewing that I had seen it, and man, have my thoughts changed upon revisiting it. Singh still creates some fantastic imagery, and the music by Howard Shore is still terrific, but they really do a lot of over-compensating when it comes to the screenplay by Mark Protosevich. There are interesting ideas here, but the disparity in the material where the visuals really pop, and where the film meanders, is fairly significant, and doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny.
The movie begins with Lopez, in a ravishing white dress, in the desert. The cinematography by Paul Laufer is like something out of a music video, and naturally, that is the world Singh came from when he made this film. She meets a young boy, and they have a familiarity with one another. At a moment, she touches something in her hand, and we then see her in a sterile room, suspended off the floor, in a red rubber suit. Lopez’s character, Catherine Deane, is a child therapist whom is using an experimental technology that allows her to go into the mind of another human being, and converse with their subconscious; in this case, a boy who has been in a coma for months. This is a strong, and interesting, set up for some psychological ideas to come, and easily the best part of the movie. Lopez is good in the role, which allows her room for some depth, while also giving her an opportunity to look stunning.
On the other side of “The Cell” is D’Onofrio’s Carl Stargher. He is a serial killer, who tortures his victims in cells which fill with water, and hangs himself from clamps as a penance, of sorts. We will come to find out that he came from an abusive home, which led to his wicked, and disturbed, pathology. He also suffers from a schizophrenic disorder that has triggered his brain after he captured his latest victim, and dumped the one prior to that. A hair from his albino German Shepard has tipped the police, led by Vince Vaughn’s Peter Novak, to him, and when they find him, he is in a coma. They do not know where his latest victim is, however; they take him to Catherine, and hope she will be able to get through to him, and find out clues to the location of the victim. What she finds in his mind will make it even more difficult to get through to him.
“The Cell” is, essentially, “Inception” but a serial killer thriller. I think Protosevich has some interesting sci-fi, genre ideas at work here when it comes to futuristic therapeutic techniques, and the ways that trauma can trap people in a mindset, but he’s wrapped it in a wholly generic police procedural structure that ways the film down a lot when it comes to finding the killer, and then, finding the victim, and save for a couple of key sequences, there is not a lot of overlap between them. What results is a film that is disjointed, and with too many sequences where Tarsem is trying to gloss over the formula of the cop stuff with style that is just out of place. He cannot quite make me as interested in this material, except when it runs counter to the psychological parts of the film, which is where “The Cell” really shines.
There’s a strong vision Singh brings to the psychological, inside the mind material. It really allows him to production design and shoot the crap out of this, creating theatrical moments for J Lo to look great, D’Onofrio to be menacing under some crazy makeup, and Shore to bring his A-game in scoring it all. If you were to take these sequences out, you would have some fascinating experimental cinema, even if they wouldn’t have much depth to them without the surrounding story. The ideas are born out of pop psychology, and the images out of Hieronymus Bosch, but Tarsem makes that combination work with the empathy that Catherine has for Carl, and the desire to reach him. This is something we don’t always find in serial killer movies, and it’s one of the things that is most interesting here. Unfortunately, it has to spend time with the mechanics of plot and story; otherwise, this would be a movie that maintains the powerful hold it did have on me in 2000.
