Waking Life

THERE ARE DIRECTORS and there are filmmakers. A director sends you home satisfied; a filmmaker gets in your head and stays there. Rather than obsess over the difference in this column, I'll suggest an experiment: go see the new science-fiction thriller The Final Cut, then go home and watch almost any film by Brian De Palma. If that doesn't clear things up, I don't know what will.

I'm not pulling De Palma's name out a hat. The writer and director of The Final Cut, first timer Omar Naim, repeatedly invokes Blow Out, The Fury, Home Movies and other De Palma movies, plus The Conversation, Blow-Up, Klute and other 1970s paranoid classics. Granted, quoting other people's movies isn't a crime, it's a ritual, and if the artist transforms his references into a personal statement, everybody wins. But if the quotes are just quotes-if they just lie there proclaiming "Look at me, I'm from Blow Out"-then the movie is a glorified trivia quiz, and the person who made it isn't a filmmaker, but a director with a good DVD collection.

Because Naim falls into the second category, The Final Cut is more fun to talk about than it is to watch. Film buffs-particularly De Palma obsessives-will find it interesting, but only mildly, and casual viewers will just be annoyed that Naim fails to capitalize on his many good ideas.

The Final Cut is set in a future where memory implants let people record every second of their waking lives. After death, the families retrieve the chip and give it to an editor, or "cutter," who prepares a "re-memory" to be screened at the deceased person's memorial. Cutters belong to an elite subclass governed by a rigorous code. They owe their allegiance to the living, which means the "delete" button on their editing console gets a workout, and they can't have chips in their own heads because the chips record whatever the waking mind sees, including dead peoples' memories unreeling on an screen. This vow of mnemonic poverty lends their profession a priest-like quality-a serious, empathetic, ascetic vibe, exemplified by Robin Williams' protagonist, cutter Alan Hackman (see The Conversation), a loner haunted by memories of a childhood trauma. (Williams, who spent much of the 90s spraying syrup in moviegoers' faces, is effective in another of his career-rehab roles-sad, furtive and grave, in an Anthony Perkins sort of way.)

Hackman's odyssey begins when a fellow cutter, the legendary Thelma (Mimi Kuzyk), brings him a plum job: cutting a re-memory for the late founder of Zoe Tech, the company that makes the implants. The gig leads to two discoveries: the dead corporate bigwig has a nasty secret, and his memories also contain brief glimpses of a man who looks as if he might be the grown-up version of someone Alan knew as a child. Alan is also being harassed by an ex-cutter named Fletcher (bearded, dark-eyed Jim Caviezel) who has renounced his old profession and hopes to shame Alan into turning over the late Zoe Tech founder's unedited memories. Fletcher is connected with an underground of dissenters who think implants promote alienation, moral decay and social control and who have opted out of the system by getting Maori-like implant tattoos that interfere with the chips' ability to record.

In case the above description sounds enticing, let me repeat: The Final Cut is more fun to talk about than it is to watch. Alan's dialogue includes a caveat that he cannot tell every story; he must pick one and follow through on it. Naim unfortunately failed to follow that advice. From Caviezel's underdeveloped psycho-cinematic revolutionary to Kuzyk's master cutter (who might have been named for Scorsese's regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker) The Final Cut is a stop-and-start movie, full of talky scenes, undeveloped ideas and subplots that sprout but don't flower. (The lamest is the relationship between Alan and a saintly bookseller played by Mira Sorvino, whose character amounts to a walking exposition machine. "You're like a mortician or a priest or a taxidermist," she says, caressing his editing table.) Worst of all, the film is prosaically imagined. More a director than a filmmaker, Naim is content to photograph actors swapping dialogue that spells out his themes. The film's few overtly cinematic moments refer directly to thematically similar but much better films.

The most frequently raided classic is De Palma's Blow Out, which Naim evokes through split-screen images and shot-reverse shots of Alan staring at (perhaps into) the images. But the evocation amounts to little more than a tip of the hat; calling it theft would pay Naim a compliment he doesn't deserve, because artists, like good thieves, understand the value of what they're stealing. Thanks to De Palma's seductive mastery of film grammar-which ensures that every De Palma film is, in some sense, about the artist's obsessive, at times futile search for truth-even in his most offhand moments he digs deeper than Naim could imagine.

Consider the elaborate, nearly wordless sections of Blow Out that show John Travolta's soundman photographing individual frames from a filmed record of a car crash, then synching it with audio recorded at the scene. This meticulous, hypnotic sequence doesn't just advance the plot; it sets up the film's principal themes (the difference between seeing and knowing, and knowing and acting) and serves as a primer on the basics of movie production circa 1981.

Naim is no De Palma, and some of his references are just cutesy (a briefly glimpsed marquee promises a "Situationist Film Series"). Yet The Final Cut is still full of touches that get one thinking about the untrustworthy, fleeting nature of memory and cinema's potential for manipulation. The director understands that a century of moving pictures has made us wish life were more like movies, and we cannot help being psychically contaminated by that wish. By detailing Alan's plight, he aims to demonstrate how one can alter an image's significance, or transform it from reportage into fiction, merely by tinkering with its context-changing the length of a shot; placing two shots together to create a new meaning; adding, changing or omitting music. (While watching an early cut of the re-memory reel, a client asks Alan, "What's that music you're using, man? It really gets his life somehow.")

Watching Alan cut and paste lives, I found myself trying to recall an Andre Bazin observation. When I got home, I found it in Bazin's What is Cinema? Vol. II. In Umberto D., writes Bazin, "The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis."

That a science-fiction movie starring Robin Williams would prompt me to rush home and dig out an old copy of What is Cinema? Vol. II made me wonder if I should remove Naim from De Palma's intimidating shadow and give him more credit. Then sense kicked in; after all, if you're sitting in the dark thinking about Bazin, the film's not working.

STAGE BEAUTY

DIRECTED BY RICHARD EYRE

THERE IS NOTHING in the period drama Stage Beauty that would set a semiotician's heart to racing. Director Richard Eyre started in the theater, and in his heart, he's still there. But this depiction of the London theater scene circa 1660 is a straightforward and intelligent piece of work, and it boasts two of the year's most impressive lead performances, by Billy Crudup and Claire Danes.

Crudup plays Edward Kynaston, an acclaimed actor whose specialty is women's roles (remember, this was a time when the theater was not only run by men, but prohibited women from appearing onstage). He's smashingly effective in what is, in a sense, a dual role. When he's onstage, Edward is quite simply a woman, utterly transformed and very much into the moment and the role; offstage, he's a man whose chosen specialty both confuses and enlightens him. It's a complex part that requires intelligence, subtlety and a lack of condescension, qualities Crudup displays in abundance. (Crudup's fluttering mannerisms during the onstage scenes will confuse and irritate viewers who can't imagine that there was a difference between 1660s stage acting and its modern cinematic equivalent.)

Danes is equally impressive as Kynaston's servant girl and dresser, Maria, a theater buff who develops a mentor-pupil relationship with Edward, and who will eventually become the first woman to play a woman on a London stage (Desdemona in Othello), thanks to the support of Charles II's mistress. Danes is as effective here as she was in Romeo + Juliet, U Turn, Little Women and almost everything else she's done. She and Crudup are a good pairing because they share a combustible mix of imagination and intense commitment to craft. o