Gotta keep running!
Tom Tom Tom TOM. He is everywhere: Time,
Premiere, CNN, Oprah, Entertainment Weekly,
flashing his braces, laughing loudly, loving his life with
Penelope, taking phone calls from his kids -- and all this more
than a month after he mowed Rosie O'Donnell's lawn and
made her lemonade! No doubt about it, Tom is most terrific.
The occasion for the current hubbub, of course, is Cruise's
teaming with Steven Spielberg for the definitively ambitious,
aggressively affected and strangely affecting Minority
Report. While the one-two star punch is surely enough to
draw attention to the project, what's even more striking about
it is the earnestness of their collaboration, at least as it's
presented in the press. To hear these enthusiastic Stanley
Kubrick aficionados tell it, they are dedicated to making
quality, quirky, non-standard art. Coming from two of the
blockbusteriest men in the business, such an assertion is either
predictably self-inflating or commendably heroic. And,
unsurprisingly, their first joint effort suggests the truth lies
somewhere in between.
Based on a story published by Philip K. Dick in 1956,
Minority Report is science-fiction of the sort that Dick
preferred to write -- set in the future, but all wrapped up in
concerns that are immediately relevant to the present moment
(that the same concerns were relevant back in 1956 is not a
little unnerving, as will become clear). These concerns have
been updated by screenwriters Scott Frank (Out of Sight)
and Jon Cohen, and reshaped by Spielberg, whose anxieties about
the future inhumanity received a more strained treatment in
A.I. Still, the concerns are drawn from Dick's, and
include privacy, surveillance, human rights (and/as property),
addictions and obsessions, child abuse, political intrigue and
purpose, and legal definitions of criminality.
The film is set in Washington DC, 2054, a time when murder, for
all intents and purposes, has been eliminated. The opening scene
thrillingly displays the science fictional technology that will
become the film's major metaphor and plot-driver. At the Justice
Department's elite Pre-crime unit, detective John Anderton
(Cruise) is downloading information from the pre-cogs, a trio of
humans who spend their time floating in a vat of conducting
fluid, wired to one another and to a big computer that reads
images of murders about to happen, that come to them because
they are so marvelously ESP-endowed.
This process looks jazzy, as John "scrubs" the images on a huge
screen before him, moving his hands so the pictures slip and
slide and become clearer or pull out for longer views, so that
the information -- where, when, and who is involved, exactly,
can be determined in time, so a SWAT-type squad can roar into
the area to arrest the perpetrator before he or she completes
the deed. After arrest, the pre-criminal is "haloed" (fitted
with a head gizmo that leaves you aware and able to dream, but
tractable), then whisked off to a warehouse full of tanks, where
you're stored, Matrix-like, apparently forever. (It
hardly helps that the prisoners' guardian is the creepily inept
Gideon, played by Tim Blake Nelson in pasty makeup).
Since Pre-crime has been in existence for some 6 years at this
point, the murders tend never to be premeditated (everyone knows
they'll be busted), but imminent crimes of passion still crop
up, usually only some few hours or minutes before actual
occurrence. And so, John's skills are necessary and revered --
he's good at reading the signs quickly and accurately. He's
also, on his off-hours, a drug addict, miserable because his
young son was kidnapped years ago. His anguish and focus make
him a determined criminalist/policeman, a la John Walsh. His
addictions -- to a synthetic he cops off the street, and to
holographic discs of his son (who significantly asks his
athletic dad to teach him to run fast: "Gotta keep running!"),
which he watches incessantly, night after night -- make him
sappy and tragic, a la Ralph Fiennes' Lenny in Strange
Days.
For those depending on him, John's "problems" work out fine:
he's driven, meticulous, and increasingly easy to upset. His
friends and co-workers call him "chief," and depend on his
instincts, for instance, team member Fletcher (Neal McDonough)
and Pre-crime info dispatcher Jad (Steve Harris, with little to
do here but manipulate some technological falderal and look
serious). John's superiors have taken note of his good work as
well: no murder in the nation's capital means that Pre-crime
founder Lamar Burgess (the exquisite Max Von Sydow) might pursue
a political future.
The hitch comes when John sees himself in a Pre-crime vision,
shooting a man he's never met. Instantly, his life comes undone:
his own team, plus straight-arrow Justice Department Agent
Witwer (Colin Farrell), is hunting him. "You don't have to run,"
says Fletcher; "Everybody runs," observes John, just before
mounting a spectacular escape. Not quite Mission Impossible
2 spectacular, but speedy and digital enough to compare
favorably with this season's impressively slamming action
sequences.
Conveniently, following this daring escape, John knows just
where to find the research scientist whose work led to
Pre-crime, wise and crotchety Iris (Lois Smith). She's peeved at
the way it's turned into a political platform, because she knows
that Pre-crime is an inherently fallible system. This potential
for error is human, embodied by the pre-cogs and ignored by
those who use them. Mysteriously, their gift is related to their
being the children of drug addicts. (And the fact that they are
stolen from their mothers to serve in this soupy capacity
certainly makes the whole Pre-crime business look shady, not
least because it recalls historical "experiments," in which
human subjects were culled from minority or otherwise
disempowered populations.)
Even aside from the crooked politics, the system is flawed in
its basic design. That is, the pre-cogs don't always share the
same vision, and when this happens, in order to cover it up, the
odd vision, called the "minority report," is filed away, never
to be read (just why imperfect systems overseers maintain
records of their failures remains unclear). As it happens, the
lone female pre-cog, Agatha (Samantha Morton, who is luminous),
is at once the "most gifted" and the most likely to register one
of these odd visions.
The possibility that Pre-crime might be defective has
apparently never occurred to John, since his investment in the
system is so wrapped up in his own guilt and rage over his
missing son (a flashback shows that he takes his eyes off his
son for a few seconds at a public pool, and the child is gone --
certainly a timely issue, and yet another version of Spielberg's
usual torture-the-kids-to-get-to-the-parents plotline). Now that
John's been enlightened, he's wondering if he's haloed people
who weren't pre-perps. And hey, what about the fundamental
cruelty of keeping the pre-cogs, like pets, in their tank?
A neat solution presents itself: to find the presumed minority
report on his own pre-crime (to "prove" he isn't going to commit
it), he must free Agatha and get access to her memories, or
rather, her visions of crimes that end up not happening because
the villains are stopped before they can commit them.
Unfortunately, these compelling logical and legal issues don't
get much play beyond plot points, for they up the ante in
everything else going on in Minority Report, from the
ethics of taking predictions as "facts" to the political and
ideological ramifications of a society premised on surveillance.
Instead, the film remains rather resolutely focused on John's
personal predicament -- his own simultaneous obsession with
avoidance of his past, his self-pity and outrage, his
determination to make his world "right" (as if such a thing is
possible). And so, John -- that is, Tom Cruise -- provides a
charismatic, chiseled, thoroughly Hollywood point of
identification, one that is surely talented and pretty to look
at, but also tends to obscure broader, currently pertinent
dimensions of oppression and exploitation -- say, of populations
and communities.
But okay, it's a Tom Cruise movie. Try to forget, for a minute,
all that machinery, and you can notice that Minority
Report astutely links such oppression and exploitation with
technologies of seeing. During his run, John decides that he
must lose those eyes in order to avoid detection by authorities,
as retinal scanners monitor activities at every street and in
every building. He visits a black market surgeon, Dr. Eddie
(Peter Stormare), who replaces his eyes with someone else's. The
grisly episode includes some memorable images: eyeballs oozing
in plastic bags; Dr. Eddie propping John's eyes open in a way
that recalls Alec's reprogramming in A Clockwork Orange;
and recovering from one of those noirish moments where some
seedy character, say, Humphrey Bogart, gets plastic surgery to
hide his identity.
This eye-swap also allows for a brief series of super-FXed
set-pieces, including the cops' "penetration" of the doctor's
apartment building with scanner-spiders, little robots that
tic-tic-tic through and read all citizens' eyes in their homes;
a bit where John has to hide in a bathtub full of ice in order
to avoid the body-heat-scanners handled by his former teammates;
and a follow-up scene, where John disguises himself with a drug
that distorts his face, painfully (baggy Tom -- it's a bit of a
jolt). The film represents these invasions of self and space in
ways that are terrifically disturbing. Though Minority
Report makes a few wrong turns (like A.I., it
overstays its welcome, with several possible endings strung
together, and closes on an improbably cheerful note), this
disturbing sequence resonates. Between seeing and being seen,
running is not an option.
— 20 June 2002
