Peter Mountain / United Artists
Tim Robbins gets inside Samantha Morton's head in Code 46.
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Code 46
Opens Fri., Aug. 13, at Harvard Exit and others
Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind is no longer the only dystopian weirdo sci-fi fantasy set in Seattle. Now we have Michael Winterbottom's drama about a Seattle Pinkerton detective (Tim Robbins) investigating the theft of "papelles"— temporary visas in electronic form— in Shanghai. In this future, the world is divided into high-rise cities and blighted deserts full of homeless refugees who don't have papelles and can't travel. The Ashcroftian fascist world state is determined to keep refugees out of the cities.
The state's other big obsession is preventing people from copulating with near relatives, a violation of Code 46 of criminal law. Incest is a common problem because cloning is so rampant that the fair maid winking at you from the bar has a fair statistical chance of being genetically identical to your mother. The fact that she would then look just like your mother, giving you a clue, does not occur to the filmmakers, whose sci-fi ideas are all half-baked from less-than-fresh ingredients filched from previous SF stories.
Robbins is assigned to bust a worker at the papelle factory for smuggling one of the visas out, giving it to an amateur naturalist who yearned to study bats in a cave in Delhi. Somehow traveling with a fake papelle got the guy killed. (The plot exposition is clumsy and murky.) Robbins, equipped with an "empathy virus" that enables him to read people's minds, effortlessly identifies Samantha Morton as the guilty factory worker. But he falls in love with her at first sight—unaware of her striking resemblance to his mother—so he fingers somebody else for the crime, then promptly gets her pregnant. The Code 46 cops get on their case, triggering the world's slowest global chase scene.
Sci-fi films derived from film noir bring a distinctive coolness to the genre. A triple feature of Blade Runner, THX 1138, and 1984 could lower your body temperature by 10 degrees. Director Winterbottom's cold-ass sensibility turns the thermostat down still further—his is not a mind of winter but of Ice Nine, a freezing substance that makes the Earth inert. His characters attain a near-comatose frigidity comparable to that of David Cronenberg's Crash.
Winterbottom achieves what he's after: an internally consistent parallel universe. The acting styles are impressively frozen, and his location shooting in Shanghai, Dubai, and Jaipur yields a marvelously otherworldly sense of place, or rather spacey placelessness. But there's more to movies than place. He brings out the worst in Robbins, a parched and parsimonious pretentiousness, and squanders Morton's considerable gifts. Their romance is as dead as an art-porn flick—though one scene, in which her body frigidly tries to reject him, so he has to tie her down and satisfy her lustful mind, does briefly flicker with creepy S&M zest. The detective-story chase is utterly unthrilling. The SF critique of authoritarianism, genetic engineering, border paranoia, and high-tech mind control is as stale as salt-free Triscuits discovered in a bomb shelter countless tedious centuries after the last blast. Code 46 brings us the end of the world as we know it all too well. (R) TIM APPELO
Garden State
Opens Fri., Aug. 13, at Guild 45 and others
Since I loathe Scrubs and Zach Braff's pop-eyed TV acting, I had low hopes for his movie debut as a writer-director-star, shot in New Jersey during his brief series hiatus. Surprise! It's the antidote to the TV show's noisy shtick, an understated homage to The Graduate and Harold and Maude that floats on a Hal Ashby contact high.
Braff plays Andrew Largeman, back in his Garden State hometown nine years after making it as a very small Hollywood star. Everyone's on drugs in the old 'burb. His shrink dad (Ian Holm) has had Andrew on tranks since childhood, thanks to the trauma of his mom's paralysis in an accident the dad blames on Andrew. He's back home for her funeral—she drowned in the tub—so he's narcotized by grief and shock at re-entering his high-school world. Braff wanders through the movie with a dazed expression copped from Dustin Hoffman's Ben Braddock and Bud Cort's Harold.
He hangs with his THC-saturated schoolmate Mark (Peter Sarsgaard, in the film's one great performance), a grave digger who moonlights as a grave robber, and Mark's still stonier mom (talented Seattle escapee Jean Smart). Party headquarters is the mansion owned by a nerd classmate (Denis O'Hare), who bought it with the zillions he made inventing "noiseless Velcro." There's no furniture—the place is like Kurt and Courtney's playhouse, only with nicer drugs. Instead of OD'ing, Andrew wakes up with funny words scrawled on his forehead by puckish pals. There's no real satiric point to Braff's send-up of aging student stoner culture, just a gentle ribbing sensation with a hint of sorrow.
Nor is there any direction in the drift of Andrew's tiny adventures from graveyard to party to abandoned quarry. But then he meets Sam (Natalie Portman), a willful will o' the wisp obviously meant to be a 60-years-younger version of Ruth Gordon's Maude. She's an epileptic, which gives her a chance to meet (cutely) with Andrew at the doc's office. Soon they're bonding over her own private pet graveyard and her loopy lust for life, and Andrew's revising his halfhearted nihilism.
