LOOPER (Three  Stars)

U.S.: Rian Johnson, 2012

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.

Fredric Brown (The shortest short story ever written: Knock)

Rian Johnson’s Looper is a classy time-travel alternate-universe science fiction movie,  tricky as a con man, smart as a whip,  and bristling with paradoxes. Johnson’s show has also got a lot of violence, but the violence doesn’t swallow up the movie. On the contrary, the characters, and the story, get more sensitized and more human as they go along.  The movie is set in the future and in the future’s future, and it’s about trying to change the past — and it stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hit man, Bruce Willis as the hit man he will become, Jeff Daniels as the mob boss chasing them both, and Emily Blunt as the mother of a boy who may grow up into the killer who can maybe destroy everybody.

One of my favorite classic s.f. time-hopping tales is Robert Heinlein’s twisty and astonishing “All You Zombies,” in which a man

SPOILER ALERT

….manages to become his own father and mother,

END OF ALERT

But, to tell the truth, Looper has a plot almost as tricky and paradoxical enjoyable as Zombies — or as Heinlein’s earlier classic “By His Bootstraps,” or as Alfred Bester’s amazing “5,271,009,” or as Philip Dick’s (alternate universe) “Eye in the Sky,“ or as Fredric Brown’s well-named “Paradox Lost,“ or as Chris Marker’s melancholy French film-poem La Jetee, and the nightmarishly weird  American movie it inspired, Terry Gilliam‘s Twelve Monkeys (which also starred Bruce Willis).

Writer-director Looper takes us on such a wild, looping Moebius Strip of a ride, and his show has such a vaguely familiar but complex and ingenious story-line, that it might be better to skip any further synopses. (Though it’s a fun piece to synopsize.) Traversing Looper’s Nolanesque multi-express ride and its M. C. Escherian staircases and doorways of intricate narrative, and trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on, is one of the show‘s main pleasures. Everyone who likes it should probably watch it twice, and everyone who doesn’t (and I had problems myself at first) might  consider a reboot too. (Of course, the latter moviegoers could also travel back in time and kill the projectionist before Looper starts in the first place.) (Just kidding.)

Pay attention though. Writer-director Johnson — in the high school film noir Brick and now in Looper — is a classic double-shuffler and movie genre-bender. He likes to seemingly fulfill our expectations, and then upset them, to head down a familiar trail and then blow it up, to palm the ace and deal us a joker (or vice versa). In Looper, he’s imagined a world where time travel exists, but has been outlawed, and is therefore controlled by outlaws (which was the sad result of  both America‘s alcohol and drug Prohibitions). Organized crime uses time-hopping for mob executions: Victims are kidnapped in the present, and sent back to the past, where they will be executed by hit men, called “loopers,” who also destroy the bodies — and will eventually be kidnapped and executed themselves (called “closing the loop”) by other loopers.

The movie mostly takes place in 2044 and 2074, and Gordon-Levitt plays Young Joe the looper/hitman (in 2044), and Willis plays Old Joe, who is Young Joe thirty years later (in 2074), and who time-travels back to 2044, where Young Joe, who has a contract, tries to execute him in a stunningly fast scene near a canefield. No dice: Young Joe recognizes himself and hesitates. (Gordon -Levitt has cleverly integrated Willis’ speech patterns and mannerisms into his own performance, including the now oft-cited moment where Gordon-Levitt-who-will-become-Willis worriedly examines his possibly receding hairline.) So, capitalizing on his younger self’s moment of weakness or empathy,  Old Joe escapes and embarks on a lethal manhunt to find and kill the boy, Cid (Pierre Gagnon), whom he thinks  will grow up into the man, the mysterious Rainmaker, who will later murder  Joe‘s wife (Qing Xu) and many others in 2074, and who is now the little son of the sturdy woman Sara (Emily Blunt), who farms the canefield where Young Joe botched the hit. (Since she’s Emily Blunt, she may inspire paradoxes even knottier.) Meanwhile, mob boss Abe  — Jeff Daniels, in the best performance of a generally very well-acted movie — is after everybody. And you never know when another looper will pop up, Paul Dano maybe, and maybe close another plot loop.

Looper is a melancholy movie, partly because time travel itself is often a melancholy proposition — a fantasy about changing what can’t be changed, reclaiming what can’t be recovered, retreating into a past that’s gone, or maybe retreating into a psychotic fantasy of the past in order to escape the pain of the present. (That was the secret subtext of many a Twilight Zone.) Johnson, at any rate, takes us into a world of bloody violence that resembles a lot of the movies a lot of us see, and he tells a sometimes familiar but twisted tale that plays with the idea of violent, over-mechanized futures in those movies. (There are hints of The Terminator all the way through.) And then he turns the movie into something else, stranger and more human and more sad.

It’s sometimes crazily convoluted, and Steve Yedlin’s cinematography is sometimes a little too insistently misty and bleak. But it’s fun, and finally, it‘s moving. Many of the current action movies have gotten so trigger-happy, trying to cover up their clichés with near constant gunfire, carnage and swear words, that a movie like Looper, which requires a little more attention and thought, may strike some aficionados as too dense and unnecessarily complicated a story — which is why I suggested seeing it twice, something that may of course please the studio no end. (In the good old days, you could sit through a movie twice any time you wanted to, and many did, and some movie-watchers saw them over and over, all day long.)

Viewed as a regular picture, which of course it isn’t, Looper does sometimes seem a little tortuous and over-packed, especially since some characters occupy different time-strings, or alternate universes, which are sometimes destroyed if somebody is killed. (Remember that.) As  a twice-told tale though, it works much better — and it might also have helped if there was even more narration by Gordon-Levitt as Young Joe. But then, nobody ever claimed that life, much less a movie, much less a time-travel movie, were always supposed to be easily comprehensible. On the contrary, life is a riddle, and so is Looper.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•