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Anne Hathaway does her best to float atop the dross as Claire Summers, an inexperienced grief counselor with personal issues, but this is no Rachel Getting Married. The film opens on a plane crash, and Summers is assigned by her mentor Perry (Andre Braugher, underused yet again) to help the few dazed passengers found wandering through the wreckage. Summers tried to help the passengers work through their pain via reconstructing the accident, yet almost immediately finds the situation complicated by conflicting stories, mysterious figures stalking around the edges of the frame and the disappearance of some of her charges. Suspecting a conspiracy to cover up a mechanical failure, she begins to dig deeper much to the consternation of taciturn airline official Arkin (David Morse) but finds herself ever more distracted by Eric, a live-wire survivor played by Patrick Wilson.
Wilson plays Eric as though he spent much of the pre-production period studying Jeff Bridges' performance in Fearless, and for a good portion of the running time it appears that Garcia's aims are similar to that previous study of emotional stress in the wake of a disaster. But Passengers lacks the sharp edge of Peter Weir's film, preferring instead to traffic in soggy melodrama. Wilson's carpe-diem shenanigans are too blatantly an avoidance mechanism, and the other passengers are nonentities. Hathaway has some nice moments - I've always liked her tart-sweet persona - and she salvages a couple interesting moments out of Ronnie Christensen's terrible screenplay, but the plot's engine burns itself out running in circles around the obvious.
Because the ultimate reveal - which I'll get to in a minute - is derivative and easy to guess, Christensen fills the script with misdirection in a frantic attempt to get us to think about something other than the well-worn and simple secret at its heart. The problem is that he stuffs it to bursting; there's the conspiracy subplot and the clumsy romantic subplot and the curious supernatural elements, plus there's a thread involving Hathaway's fractured relationship with her sister that feels more totemic than anything. An early thread about Wilson's possible development of ESP as an after-effect is quickly shunted off, and while Dianne Wiest's role is eventually important, her creepy-friendly turn as Hathaway's neighbor throws off the balance every time she appears. Passengers is a lumpy, stop-start venture that jumps to another plot strand every time it appears that one might start paying off; the lack of focus hurts, and overall Garcia could have used a scene like the one in Fearless where Bridges drives towards a wall bellowing, "Pray for us sinners now at the hour of our death!" if only to give it a jolt of life.
That, however, would give the game away completely, and it's here that I register my basic disgust at what should be plain from a mere glance at the synopsis. It turns out that Passengers is Carnival of Souls reconceived as a Lifetime Channel weepie. All the passengers are dead; this includes Hathaway, as a belated flashback reveals she was seated next to Wilson. This particular plot structure is one I find irksome and annoying, including in Carnival of Souls, because it is the basest expression of the Gimmick Movie: Instead of being about something, the hey-we're-dead plot is about not-something, in that the plot tends to define itself by how far it goes to avoid its central truth. The Sixth Sense, to which this will probably garner a couple of comparisons, is one of the more successful iterations of this plot simply because it was about Haley Joel Osment's coming to grips with his abilities as much as it was about Bruce Willis coming to grips with his deceased state.
Garcia and Christensen offer no such anchor; without such a grounding force, plots such as this become dull exercises in fooling the audience, and so it goes for Passengers. All the narrative kinks and complications, all the episodes of human behavior, all the windy dialogue and the touching and the feeling and the crying, all of it is absolutely fucking meaningless. If everyone is dead, then nothing is at stake except the filmmakers' cleverness. On this count, Garcia and Christensen fail spectacularly; there's the rare neat touch (the first shot of Hathaway shows her waking up), but the majority of the film is signposted with huge blinking neon lights like the fact that Hathaway, despite several phone calls and visits to her home, never exchanges a word with her estranged sister.
Garcia has built up a small reputation with Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her and Nine Lives as a go-to guy for sensitive and carefully-crafted emotional dramas about women, and you can see bits of that sensibility peeking through. At times, Passengers feels like that's what he thought he was making and the thriller elements were like organ transplants that the body was trying to reject. Instead, he's made a film whose sole purpose is to negate itself. He might as well have made nothing at all, and that would have been far preferable.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)