Deja Vu

Posted by Matthew Alexander (matthew@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 7, 2006

What Tony Scott did with D©j  Vu, his shot at a rebound from the critically savaged Domino, was like a high school student ripping out an entire section of his math exam and thus giving himself no shot at an extremely high mark. With a zero on an entire section of filmmaking, Tony Scott has little margin for error with his latest endeavor. Will he come through and at least make a decent film anyway?

D©j  Vu begins with a bang. Down in New Orleans, a ferry filled with servicemen and their family explodes, killing upwards of 500 people. An investigator of the ATF, Doug Carlin, played by the eminent Denzel Washington, is one of the first on the scene. He quickly determines that a bomb was set off to cause the tragedy and prepares for an intense investigation.

Impressed with Carlin’s investigative knack, Agent Andrew Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) asks him to assist on a special task force. They need a man who can quickly scan a scene and turn up clues. Intrigued, Carlin agrees to help out.

Meanwhile, little clues in the plot are being planted. Carlin returns a call and leaves a voice message for someone who had called in asking for his description. The body of a young woman turns up near the ferry disaster, burned like the others but determined to have been planted in the river a couple hours before the blast went off. Carlin’s partner is off on vacation and not answering his cell phone. All these things will have an impact later on.

In the meantime, Carlin arrives at his new assignment to discover a command center full of computer equipment with a large view screen dominating the display. On the view screen are images from precisely four days and six hours in the past. He is told that it is a data stream from orbiting satellites which can be manipulated to give views from any angle. But the amount of data is too overwhelming to play back. They can record the image on screen, but if they don’t get the angle they want the first time, they cannot play it back and manipulate the image again. They must study it and get what they are looking for the first time with no possible second shot.

But Carlin begins to suspect that something is not quite right. Though he accepts their story at first, it becomes plain to him that there is more to this data stream than he has been told. Finally, he forces a confrontation on the matter and is told that it is not a data stream from satellites but that they are actually looking four days and six hours into the past. And no once can tell him if or to what extent they are altering the past as they look into it.

Like all stories I have ever read that deal with time travel, there are logical inconsistencies. The kinds of paradoxes and insurmountable logical problems associated with time travel probably mean that it could never be possible, and it also means that it is difficult, if not impossible, to construct a story that is logically coherent using time travel as your conceit, at least not if human beings are granted free will. But these are forgivable sins. D©j  Vu doesn’t commit too many errors in this respect, and I am willing to suspend my disbelief when necessary.

My willingness to suspend disbelief grows in direct proportion to the skill with which the film is crafted. With D©j  Vu I am quite willing because Tony Scott has done his usual high quality work. Though I am not a big fan of his chosen visual style, he still manages to draw me into the story.

And the story is a good one. A mystery with some science fiction thrown in, it teases us along with its nicely spaced revelations. Each clue solved gives us a new and tantalizing mystery to explore as well as a gaggle of goose bumps on your arms. A filmmaker must always be careful not to reveal too much too soon, and Scott judiciously doles out his secrets at just the right pace. He takes a very good story and gets the most out of it.

The movie also boasts a unique perspective on an old stand by: the car chase. In trying to follow a suspect from 102 hours in the past, Denzel must carry a piece of equipment which can extend the perimeter of vision for the time device. As he weaves in and out of current traffic, he struggles to keep up with a vehicle which he sees in his viewfinder but which made the trek four days and six hours previous. It’s solid gold.

There are some flaws along the way, however. For instance when the scientists explain the device to Carlin they don’t convince me that they are scientists trying to explain complicated ideas to a lay person. They come off as lay people trying to sound like scientists but the subject matter is besting them. It’s not just the actors fault: the script treats the situation in a very cursory manner, as if the screenwriter was not very interested in the moment and just wanted to move past it for the sake of the story. There is no real effort to make the scene special or to stand out. I think a brief consultation with Ray Bradbury or someone of his stature would have helped immensely.

Also, the ease with which Carlin becomes suspicious of the story he was initially given is a bit suspect. He puts the clues together just a tad too easily. After all, a man can stare an answer right in the face for a long time, but if that answer is far outside his area of experience he simply won’t consider it. That Carlin’s keen eye would detect defects in the tale told to explain the device is not strange, but that he so easily suspects something so far fetched without going through more mundane explanations first is very odd indeed.

But the above problems certainly do not derail the film. They are minor annoyances in a very interesting and well told story. The real problem, the problem that eliminates any chance of an A grade, is the almost complete lack of characterization and character development in the film. The screenwriter, and ultimately Tony Scott himself, have torn out that particular section and concentrated on story and filming. But without interesting and well developed characters the movie will never be a great one.

Carlin has one scene with Agent Andrew Pryzwarra where he complains that we lose everything we want in life no matter what we do. It is the only hint of real character development in the movie, and it almost seems like an afterthought, something that was added after the script had already been finished in order to give some support to Carlin’s actions later in the film. But at no time do we get the type of delving into character that occurred in Tony Scott’s far superior Man on Fire, Spy Game and Crimson Tide.

With D©j  Vu, Tony Scott gives us reason to believe that Domino was an aberration. But at the same time he might be signaling that his golden age has ended. With one small hiccup along the way, from 1995 to 2004 Mr. Scott gave us Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, Spy Game and Man on Fire. By all accounts, Domino has no right to dwell amongst these fine movies, and D©j  Vu falls short as well. Tony Scott can still handle a camera and still does well with actors, but without developing the roles as real people he gave himself a large handicap that was difficult to overcome. It is unfortunate that the only characterization we feel in the film is the on screen presence that the actors bring to their roles (which, with Denzel Washington, is always going to be good).

When Doug Carlin goes to interview the father of the woman whom Carlin determined had been planted before the explosion, the father gives him a bunch of her photos. Carlin protests that he really doesn’t need them, but the father insists that he take them and look them over sometime. Claiming that he knows how these things work, he wants his daughter to matter to Carlin when he does his investigation.

Exactly.

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