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All Eyes On Me
By bukkhead | March 10, 2008
FILM REVIEW: ‘VANTAGE POINT’
Written by Barry Levy
Directed by Pete Travis
Rated PG-13
90 mins.
How would you make a movie about a period of time that lasts only 25 minutes? You could stretch it out, get all Tom Clancy on the plot and go back to the dark ages if you wanted, setting up a series of otherwise unremarkable coincidences that makes for good flashbacks and that PBS show Connections with James Burke. Or you could go the Rashomon route, telling the same story several times from differing points of view. That’s the methodology of Vantage Point, and, to its credit, comparisons to Kurosawa can end right there, as the effect of this repetition is wholly different than in the 1951 classic.
Its now, it’s Spain, it’s a peace rally and the coming together of leaders to sign some treaty or another, led by the POTUS. That’s President of the United States of America, though lackeys assigned to his care and handling use the acronym, (which you’d know if you’d watched West Wing). Potus gets shot, a bomb explodes, then a few more, then it starts all over. And again four or five more times.
What Vantage Point avoids is making each “flashnow” solely from the point of view of just one character. More, each segment is mini movie, with a main character, but the requisite omniscient narrator. It’s a delicately, but well handled, gimmick, in that the viewer gets to be, at one time, either less knowledgeable than the characters, more knowledge, or both at once.
In this way, it’s the story telling device that ends up being the point, which writer Barry Levy and Director Pete Travis underscore with the use of so many “viewing” devices: cell phones, camcorders, TV cameras, television sets, radios, wireless microphones, and the like. Each person has a point of view, but the interplay of multiple “vantage points” for each one builds a multi-dimensional impression of the day’s events.
But that leaves not very much room for emotional attachment. Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox get the job done, but there’s little reason care for or hate either of them. Forrest Whitaker, accidentally, does such a good job that you do end up liking him, but its misplaced in a film that’s not about the heart, but about the eyes.
So here’s me saying the film loses a bit when one of the actors does an excellent job, while at the same time suggesting that the laughable suspension of disbelief required to accept the terrorists plot actually fits right in. Deep within the machinations of the movie, you don’t mind so much that the terrorists are felled not by morality but happenstance. You know the good guys are going to win, and they always do, except this time, you’re not waiting to see how.
What you’re waiting for, your investment, is just finding out what happened. With each new vantage point, you realize things had happened that you had noticed before, but dismissed or ignored. Twisting on itself, the final experience is satisfying and complete, whole unto itself.
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