The actors are nicely matched, and what a relief to like a new movie with Mr. Gyllenhaal after a run of groaners. In a sympathetic turn, he hits the dark and light notes right, bringing subtle differences to his performance, whether Stevens is questioning reality or riding that train of life and death and angling for what everyone wants: the chance to get it right.http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/movies/jake-gyllenhaal-in-source-code-review.html?src=dayp
Movie Review
Source Code (2011)
Don’t Know Who You Are, but
Don’t Know Who I Am
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: March 31, 2011
Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Source Code.” It doesn’t take long for
“Source Code,” a science-fiction thriller with a contemporary twist, to hook you. A smooth diversion directed by
Duncan Jones that bats around a few big ideas, the movie opens with a succession of overhead images of Chicago and its environs gleaming in the bright day. Again and again the camera swoops and soars above the doll-like houses, rushing past ribbons of freeway and nearly skimming the tops of silver skyscrapers. And again and again, and closer and closer, it returns to a speeding commuter train, a recurrence that artfully foreshadows the story’s nifty repetition compulsion.
In this case, the returnee in question isn’t reliving his own tragic past but someone else’s. When, after a few minutes, the nearing camera enters the train, it settles its sights on a man (
Jake Gyllenhaal) who jerks awake as if from a nightmare. No wonder. While he knows himself to be
Capt. Colter Stevens, an Army helicopter pilot who has recently been running sorties in Afghanistan,
Christina Warren (
Michelle Monaghan), the woman with the pretty smile opposite him, knows (and sees) him as
Sean (
Frédérick De Grandpré). Leaping up, Stevens insists that he isn’t who she believes him to be, even if the man looking back at him in a bathroom mirror (Mr. De Grandpré) suggests otherwise. Before Stevens has time to ask whozat, he and everyone else are blown up.
A few flashy, mind-trippy moments later, Stevens is wearing a military uniform and strapped to a seat in a dark capsule as a woman’s voice murmurs something about “beleaguered castle” (the name of a solitaire game and a nod at the movie’s narrative design). The voice belongs to the crisp, impersonal
Colleen Goodwin (
Vera Farmiga, spot on), an officer who takes orders from
Dr. Rutledge (an amusing
Jeffrey Wright). They explain that Stevens has zapped in from another time and space through a software program called
Source Code and will keep returning to the train — where he’ll continue to blow up — until he finds the bomber. Stevens’s face quavers in the darkness, here richly captured in digital, like a fading light.
What is it about our times (or cinema) that provokes existential crises in some of the more interesting action heroes? Like the running men in the
Bourne movies and in
“The Adjustment Bureau,” Stevens doesn’t just jump through action-flick hoops, he also confronts some Big Questions — Are we alone? Are we free? Do we have free will? — the importance of which become clear as the outlines of Stevens’s true circumstances are revealed. In classic films noirs, the characters rarely have real choices; their paths are riddled with bullets and preordained. “Build my gallows high, baby,”
Robert Mitchum says to the femme fatale (
Jane Greer) in the glorious
“Out of the Past.” She and her co-conspirator, fate, comply.
“Source Code” depends on something other than fate, which makes it a thematic (if lesser) cousin to “
Groundhog Day,” the great 1993
Harold Ramis comedy about a dyspeptic weatherman (
Bill Murray) who reaches enlightenment after he repeats the same day until he gets it right. Each morning he shuts off a clock radio playing
Sonny and Cher (
“I Got You Babe”) and ventures into a day that only changes because he does. As the Buddha says, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.” In “Source Code,” thinking is doing, which makes it a nice respite from standard action fare with its guys, grunts and guns (though there’s some of that here too).
Mr. Jones did lose me at the messy finish, if only on the level of logic (rarely a deal-breaker for me in science fiction), but he makes it easy to follow Stevens as he toggles between realities. Better still, he makes you want to do so. In crucial ways, “Source Code,” written by
Ben Ripley, recalls
“Moon,” Mr. Jones’s accomplished feature debut about a solitary astronaut played by
Sam Rockwell. “Source Code” is bigger, shinier, pricier. Yet both movies hinge on isolated, physically constrained men who are not what they seem, including, importantly, to themselves. And in each Mr. Jones creates a sense of intimacy that draws you to the characters, so that the tension comes from your feelings for them and not purely from plot twists.
This intimacy makes the movie feel more personal than industrial, and that’s also part of its appeal. Other than during the jolts of action when Mr. Jones cranks the volume, the performers speak rather than shout their lines, the default setting in too many thrillers. Just as you lean in to someone talking quietly, you lean in to Stevens and Christina as their chatter gives way to flirtation. The actors are nicely matched, and what a relief to like a new movie with Mr. Gyllenhaal after a run of groaners. In a sympathetic turn, he hits the dark and light notes right, bringing subtle differences to his performance, whether Stevens is questioning reality or riding that train of life and death and angling for what everyone wants: the chance to get it right.
“Source Code” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Bomb violence and gunplay.
SOURCE CODE
Opens on Friday nationwide. Directed by Duncan Jones; written by Ben Ripley; director of photography,
Don Burgess; edited by
Paul Hirsch; music by
Chris Bacon; production design by
Barry Chusid; costumes by
Renee April; produced by
Mark Gordon, Jordan Wynn and
Philippe Rousselet; released by
Summit Entertainment and
Vendôme Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.
WITH: Jake Gyllenhaal (Colter Stevens), Michelle Monaghan (Christina Warren), Vera Farmiga (Colleen Goodwin), Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Rutledge),
Michael Arden (Derek Frost),
Cas Anvar (Hazmi),
Russell Peters (Max Denoff) and Frédérick De Grandpré (Sean Fentress Reflection).
