Crimes
— Taking a
premise that might fit a Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode—a young billionaire
in a state of "anesthetic awareness" (i.e. conscious yet paralyzed) during
heart transplant surgery—and expanding it to where the audience is always
a step or two ahead of each twist.
— Seeming
needlessly overlong at 78 minutes, which is much shorter than non-animated
features are generally allowed to get.
— Having
Hayden Christensen narrate his metaphysical crisis with all the weak, whiny
petulance he brought to Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones.
Defender: Writer-director Joby Harold
Tone Of
Commentary: Intelligent,
measured, and bogged down in excruciating minutiae. Harold's commentary is a
reminder of how much thought and hard work goes into even dire entertainments.
There are incredibly detailed explanations of what specific colors, lens
choices, and camera movements signify, or how simple set-ups like a
conversation inside a limo made the most of cutting-edge digital technology. At
a certain point, you wonder if Harold couldn't see the forest for the trees:
While he was picking up on things that nobody in the audience would ever
notice, like Christensen's make-up ("He's a little orange here in my opinion")
or Terrence Howard's salt-and-pepper mustache ("We wanted him to look five or six
years older than he really is"), perhaps he missed the larger, more significant
problems that dogged his movie. Another case in point: When Christensen and his
mother (Lena Olin) have a conversation on the balcony, Harold's eyes drift to
the special green and red lights on the Empire State Building in the far
distance, noting that they were kept on a couple of hours later than usual just
for this production. Meanwhile, all the important stuff in the
foreground—you know, the movie—is falling flat.
What went
wrong: From the
sound of it, Awake
was test-screened within an inch of its life. A key confrontation between
Christensen's mother and his girlfriend, played by Jessica Alba, was cut after
testing poorly with audiences impatient to see him go under the knife. Another
critical tracking shot, which Harold believes featured one of Alba's finest and
most important bits of acting, was cut in half for time purposes. Of scenes
like these, Harold says, "You have to kill your children," but he sounds
wistful about it, as if he secretly regrets having a first act that he admits
is "truncated." He also admits to having a difficult time finding ways to get
inside the head of a hero who spends half the movie motionless on a slab; the
solutions—having Christensen narrate while shooting his face in extreme
close-up and later giving him a metaphysical "double"—didn't really solve
the problem.
Comments
on the cast: Harold
reserves most of his praise for Howard and Alba. Of Howard, he says that the
actor studied the ins and outs of heart transplant surgery so closely that
Harold would "probably trust my life with him. Kind Of. Maybe." Of Alba, he
comments on her looks ("There's Jessica, being cute again") and frequently
points out some subtle piece of acting, but he more often talks about her being
a good sport—during an awkward love scene, delivering a blood-curdling
scream that alarmed a building's occupants, and a shot that involved a rain
machine downpour. ("Poor Jessica had to watch Hayden with his umbrella… She
wasn't thrilled about it.") And back on the minutiae front, Harold points to an
obscured subway billboard featuring a financial analyst character played by
Denis O'Hare, who was cut from the film entirely. On the off chance
anyone should ever desire a three-hour director's cut of Awake, Harold probably
has enough footage for it on the cutting-room floor.
Inevitable
dash of pretension:
When Harold and his production designer were looking at how to transform the
usual bland hospital white into something more dynamic, they referenced Stanley
Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. So if you're thrown off by the bold swatches of
red—evoking blood, in a hospital—lining those stark-white corridors, there's
the reason.
Commentary
in a nutshell: "We
had a tear wrangler who worked diligently for many hours."