Directrospective: A LIFE LESS ORDINARY (1997)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
Laid-off janitor Ewan McGregor kidnaps unpleasant heiress Cameron Diaz in Boyle’s barely-conceived follw-up to TRAINSPOTTING.
There could be a movie in here, I think. There’s a pretty solid high-concept romantic black comedy in a first-time kidnapper who’s bad at it getting an assist from his snotty victim because she wants to spite the rich father she hates. Not an awful premise, could be cute depending on the cast. That’s not this.
Coming off of the blowout success of TRAINSPOTTING - critical favorite, most profitable film of 1996 - Boyle turned down an offer to direct ALIEN: RESURRECTION in order to stick with producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge, the team from his first two films. Then he did this. ALIEN: RESURRECTION kind of sucks, but this…the fuck is this?
Moving the action from the Glasgow-for-Edinburgh of his first two films to Utah-for-California, Boyle and Hodge keep much of their story in the same criminal hi-jinks neighborhood: Basement janitor Robert (Ewan McGregor) gets laid off and dumped all at once, goes to demand recompense from the head honcho (Ian Holm) all the way on the top floor, and ends up improvising a kidnapping of the honcho’s icy, mildly homicidal daughter Celine (Cameron Diaz). They go on the run, she sees he’s in over his head, and their roles reverse as she walks him through basic hostage taking and extortion. Holing up in a cabin in the mountains, they proceed to fall in love or whatever before hitting the road again.
Wrapped up in that story and confusing the lot of it is that all of these events are being manipulated by Delroy Lindo and Holly Hunter as Jackson and O’Reilly, two angels who work as some kind of angel cops in an all-in-white heavenly police department not far from A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. Angel cops, you see, are in charge of making sure people on Earth fall in love. These two angel cops are bad at it and have been given one final chance by angel cop chief Dan Hedaya to do their job right or else something angel cops don’t like will happen to them. But their interventions are never clearly motivated, either by comic incompetence or Rube Goldbergian cleverness. They tend to do things with the broad goal of making Robert and Celine like each other and it works out about as well as chance - but again, not comically so. Neither fully likable nor fully villainous, they vie for space and stretch out the runtime of a film that already drags. It’s like two scripts were chopped up and roughly taped together.
McGregor is largely functional as the underwritten sad-sack Robert. Diaz, who’s often been funny and likable, plays Celine as written: a downright sociopath, forcing a suitor to let her play William Tell with a loaded revolver. She schemes and cons well, but she’s the rich one, so instead of a charming rogue she reads as an asshole. I don’t like this person. When it’s time to root for the two attractive young leads to fall in love, she becomes much more of a human being, but only because story convention requires it. There’s some business with a poem, and another kidnapping, and people get shot, but Boyle bungles the balance of bitter and sweet from the start. We just don’t care about these people getting together, or getting their money, or not getting fired from the angel love squad.
Coming off two well-regarded small-scale films set in urban Scotland, the impulse to mix it up, go bigger, go to America, shoot in the mountains, all makes sense. But despite the presence of much of the production design and art direction teams from SHALLOW GRAVE and TRAINSPOTTING, those films’ smart, memorable sets and effective use of color and camera movement aren’t here.
A (remarkably fluid) stop-motion epilogue hints at one possible solution: a fully animated film, where the violence and magical realism and tonal wackiness might gel a little better. Of course, Diaz got to be in an animated film about going on the run with an under-prepared Scottish oaf soon enough.