Gay Today: Entertainment

The Cell

By John Demetry

Vincent D'Onofrio as a serial killer in The Cell

It's the climax. A shot of a man cradling a woman. A shot of a woman cradling a boy. Water. The visual poetry of feature-debut director Tarsem Singh's "The Cell." During this sequence, a friend leaned over and whispered in my ear some piddling comment about the plot:

"Where are the rest of the cops?" she asked. She missed that if there were cops in the sequence, it would have messed up the complicated parallel structures of the shots. The rhyming that permeates this horror film evokes an unusual, perhaps visionary, beauty and mystery.

It's sad to think that people may find themselves getting too swept up in the plot--or worse, too swept up in poking holes into it. Like most of the spate of serial killer films of late, the film might as well be projected onto Swiss cheese. So, it's kind of a howler. A psychologist played by Jennifer Lopez must enter the unconscious of a serial killer in a coma in order to find the location of his last-and still living-victim.

Vincent D'Onofrio plays the schizophrenic serial killer--as well as his fantasy versions of himself (like a meta-sexual m.c. in a Marilyn Manson or NIN video). The music video comparison is an apt one, as Tarsem has graduated from the M-TV school of filmmaking to feature production with The Cell.

Unlike many others in this school such as Michael Bay, the cynically empty hack behind Armageddon and The Rock, Tarsem understands that editing isn't just for movement (Bay's ethical evasion), but for meaning (Tarsem's moral musicality). His jump-cuts aren't just flashy, but recreate mental states--reality manipulated by the mind.

And, as in the climactic sequence, Tarsem also understands how to combine and confuse--to connect-both reality and fantasy as well as individual dreamscapes. He suggests that we all share the tortures and temptations that created a monster out of D'Onofrio. (A notion ignored in the acclaimed gay-bashing pseudo-feminist slasher pretensions of Silence of the Lambs.)

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As in Joseph Rubin's 1984 Dreamscape, in which scientists enter the dreams of others, these fantasy constructions are based on works of art. Tarsem draws inspiration from Tales of Hoffmann (the film and the opera) and, as film critic Gregory Solman notes (www.dvdExpress.com), the cult surrealist films of Jan Svankmajer, music videos, and controversial art exhibitions.

It is truly inspiring to see how imaginatively Tarsem brings these visions to new life and meaning. They participate in a personal and moral vision that becomes expansive. To discover, it simply requires audience attention--and the complicated visuals attract that attention.

You are likely to forget the moral conflicts of the story represented by Lopez's faith in healing and FBI agent Vince Vaugn's belief in punishment; it's banal and not fully developed in the pastiche narrative. Its context is set in the lazy anti-religious, and vaguely classist, propaganda of D'Onofrio's childhood abuse at the hands of his fundamentalist father. The story leaves us unexamined. It frees society from blame. But Tarsem's visuals do not.

The Cell's Jennifer Lopez

This makes The Cell a questionable, confused work. It doesn't have the cohesive power of Brian De Palma's psychic poetry in The Fury or psychosexual nightmares in Dressed to Kill. Those films heightened audience understanding of movies and of life experiences in a pop cinema of cruelty. Tarsem doesn't transcend genre, but his visual expressiveness blurs easy genre formulations.

The Cell, along with Hollow Man and The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, is one of the only worthy films currently in the multiplex, itself both a prison and a potential domain for human growth. With all of its internal conflicts and contradictions, The Cell is aptly named.