Before I switched jobs, I used to drive 25 miles to work, each way, most of it on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It’s a straight shot and I can do it in less than 30 minutes door-to-door in theory. But the turnpike can be an unforgiving mistress – you don’t want to be stuck on a 30 mile stretch of road that has only four exits when there’s an accident up ahead.
There is always an accident up ahead.
When there is, I sit there bleeding my 20s out of my ears as I browse the bumper stickers ahead of me.
(Favorite bumper sticker: “If you’re going to ride my ass, at least pull my hair.” This person lives on my street, as I see his or her car there all the time. I was thinking of replacing that sticker with one that says “If you’re going to ride me, at least mow the lawn while you’re at it.” It’s better for the kids.)
So I like to think that there’s just one person, who, every day, turns the Turnpike into a Living Museum of Contemporary Automobiles (with admission charge, no less). Yeah, the same person. Every day.
It’s fun, because I get an arch nemesis. One who has no regard for his safety or others, an unlimited supply of late 90s Honda Accords, and insurance premiums the size of a small country’s GNP. Same guy, every time. Some times he’s talking on a cell phone, making a claim from yesterday. Some times he spills hot coffee all over himself. And some times, he does it because he just cannot escape his destiny.
Nor can I escape my destiny to pass by him, slowly, as his mimics the same “Gosh, is that your bumper over there?” facial expression standing on the shoulder, all the while harboring a secret kink for repentance.
More than anything, this same guy adds an element of danger to my otherwise sleepy weekday morning. On a good day, I get to work in 35 minutes. On a bad day, it can be 70. I never know. He has a habit of going Ricky Bobby style into the wall five minutes after I leave, rendering the traffic helicopter functionally useless.
It was during one of these 70 minute sessions that I listened to a book-on-tape version of “Paycheck,” the Phillip K. Dick story.
Short version of “Paycheck”: Engineer/mechanic wakes up in room in the pseudo-future. Realizes he can’t remember a couple of years. Remembers that part of his contract with employer is that he’d have his memory erased when his job is over. Instead of money, he’s “paid” himself with an envelope full of Stuff. Pissed, he almost discards Stuff until he realizes that the stuff is keeping him from being killed by Shadowy Government Agents, Employer, and Pretty Much Everybody Else. Finds out that what he worked on was a machine that can see the future, and he saw his own future and sent himself Stuff to save his life.
It worked pretty well as a short story, and it is always fun to read Dick’s stories which have the same protagonist (grizzled, chain-smoking, thoughtful) and same female lead (gorgeous, chain-smoking, not to be trusted). But wait! There’s a movie. So I borrowed the DVD from the Bristol Public Library here, and checked it out.
What was essentially a creepy time travel story became, before my eyes, a John Woo action movie. I haven’t really enjoyed a John Woo movie since he did Face\Off (or Face/Off, possibly just Face Off), a movie in which John Travolta switches faces with Nicolas Cage to infiltrate his crime ring (I would have held out for Jude Law, but whatever). They do this face-switching because they live in a pseudo future that has seamless face transplants but not wiretapping. Face/Off had great action scenes that made little sense and no morally redeeming subplots (other than a weirdo family bond in Travolta’s family that involved doing a face touching movie not unlike the Giant Panter’s Iron Claw from Nintendo Pro Wrestling). Awesome.
Woo’s Paycheck, though, sucked. Mostly because I didn’t like Ben Affleck.
No, I’m not one of those people who “hates” certain celebrities because of what they do in their personal life. I don’t know Ben Affleck, I likely won’t know Ben Affleck, so he can be Ty Cobb for all I care. I liked Good Will Hunting, and I think Changing Lanes is a total sleeper. What I mean by “not liking” him is that I didn’t like his character.
And that’s a big problem. Kurt Vonnegut called it the only rule of writing: make sure your main character is someone the audience likes.
Think about it. Andy Dufresne from Shawshank, Wesley from Princess Bride, even sniveling Lloyd Dobbler from Say Anything were guys we liked. We might not be friends with them if they actually evidence, but we at least wouldn’t plot their downfall. Some great main characters, like Rick Blaine from Casablanca, Han and Chewie, and (most notably) The Dude from Lebowski are people we’d want to hang out with if they really existed. We like them so much they seem like friends. We actually care about them, even though they’re not real. That’s a level of transcendence that elevates movies to an art form.
Affleck didn’t do this in Paycheck. His character, the Engineer, seems rich and spoiled, mildly abusive to Stock Bitch Buddy Character Guy (played by Paul Giamatti, speaking of “Paychecks”). In the movies most awkward scene he tries to proposition Uma Thurman in the first two minutes of meeting her, with all the tack of a drunk middle-aged man at a Denny’s in the wee hours of the morning. Seriously. They talk for 110 seconds and he tries to take her home, like it’s 3 A.M. at the Kappa Delta House. (Said out loud to the TV: “Dude, at least do shots with her and wait a little bit first.”)
I know that the screenplay was trying to make him have an “edge.” A deleted scene confirms this as it mentions that he was married and lost his wife and the baby in pregnancy (wife’s, not his). But the scene in which this happens is so clumsy and inarticulate that, in the first 15 crucial minutes where you decide if you even care about this character, you think he’s a tool. Maybe some of the 14-year old guys in the audience were impressed, and tried it out immediately on their friend’s cousins. But probably not.
Also, the movie was trying to plant a line about “second chances” so that it could bring it back in act three. This is, after all, a movie about time travel (sort of). But that’s the problem. Planting a line and brining it back – cyclical writing – only works to the extent that you can bury what you’ve planted. Not too far, so that the audience misses it, and not too shallow, that everyone knows you’re planting it. But just enough to trigger a reaction of surprise and delight. You can have people in a movie about time travel talk about “second chances” in the first act. It’s too obvious. Affleck might as well have said “Man, I wish I could have traveled back in time and started this conversation all over again,” followed by Uma saying, snarkily, “Why don’t you go build a time machine, then?”
Then again, Paycheck really seemed to think that its audience had the attention span of a Labrador puppy in a field of squirrels, chew toys and table scraps. Forty minutes in, Affleck sits in his apartment and reflects on the first Act of the movie. We know this because we see it in a two-minute recap. What the hell? Why not just put a title up on the screen that this is the Plot Recap For People Who Just Went Potty, Got Food, or Have Raging ADHD. It’s Paycheck, not Primer. The plot wasn’t all that hard to follow. The rest of the movie had flow-breaking moments where one character would ask “what’s he doing?” and we’d get a totally unnecessary explanation that really should have been spoken directly into the camera.
But mostly, Affleck’s character was just a jerk. They try to put some altruism in the movie, but really he looks into the future and sends himself all that he needs to keep the girl, stay rich and not die.
Which makes sense, I guess. That’s what everyone goes back in time for: to right the wrongs, save Doc Brown or their girlfriend from dying, or otherwise profit somehow.
Me? I’d go back in time, every morning, to one-half hour before that my arch nemesis crashes his car, and drive to work in smooth, cruise controlled serenity. Because, screw that guy.
Monday, January 22, 2007
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