Written by Brian Thomas
Written by Brian Thomas
TWELVE MONKEYSTerry Gilliam's - Time Bandits II?Time travel stories have always been troubling to me. Physicists tell us that time travel is a common phenomenon - but only at one speed and in one direction. For human beings to travel into the future at an accelerated pace, or into the past, is as near to a technological impossibility as you're likely to find. This would only be possible by taking the subject outside its relative timeline or dimension, and transport it to another point on that timeline, or onto a parallel timeline so close to its own as to be indistinguishable, except that the destination timeline began at a different point. So far, the only clue we have about how to do this is from Einstein's idea that objects traveling near light speed a decrease in aging relative to the universe around it. But that only works for traveling into the future. That leaves us with the hard truth that no scientist of the 19th century, or 22nd century for that matter, can build a working time machine, no matter how many flashing lights and bundles of wires are attached to it. Once you accept the fact that time machines are nothing more than tricked up fantasy elements like the computerized genie of the lamp cooked up by John Hughes in Weird Science (1985), you should have no trouble enjoying any good story containing one. Right? Unfortunately, no. Early science fiction writers were quick to create, identify, and hammer into dull cliché the classic Time Paradox story, or the familiar "I killed my infant grandfather" plotline. Today, the Time Paradox story, like the Locked Room story of the mystery genre, is looked on affectionately as a nostalgic old chestnut, rarely used by authors once they're out of their teen years. Sadly, movie and TV plots are usually years behind prose fiction - the writing staff of Star Trek uses a Time Paradox every time they get lazy. To their credit, the Back to the Future and Bill & Ted movies did a wonderful job of sending up the whole idea. But the prevalence of the whole paradox theme in modern sci-fi movies gives me a headache - I'm surprised at how many films involving time travel are favorites of mine. In Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam avoided the Time Paradox by using it as a convenient tool to get his characters from one brilliantly contrived fantasy to the next. But Twelve Monkeys ends up making the Time Paradox its platform, from which Gilliam launches dozens of finely tooled concepts, making this his most accessible feature to date. As so many science fiction movies do, Twelve Monkeys begins with some on- screen titles that explain the situation: in 1996, a mysterious plague wipes out most of the human race. The survivors scurry underground, sealing themselves off from the germ-laden surface world. Bruce Willis is James Cole, serving a prison sentence for unnamed crimes - though throughout the film he gives a clue by frequently giving vent to displays of homicidal rage. Cole is disturbed by a recurring dream, in which a woman cries out while a man is shot. During "volunteer" specimen gathering missions to the surface, he displays such skill that he's given the opportunity to volunteer on a much more dangerous mission - one that will send him back through time to 1996, to gather information on how the plague developed and spread. He's instructed to seek out a group called the Army of the 12 Monkeys, who are suspected to be the cause of the plague. But the techs haven't worked out all the bugs in their time machine, and Cole ends up in 1990 by mistake, where he is unable to communicate with his bosses. Arrested, he ends up in a Cuckoo's Nest "mental health facility", which washes out any further opportunity to complete his mission. There he's forced to wait until his superiors figure out that something went wrong and bring him "home". While in the asylum, he meets Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a psychiatrist who becomes fascinated by the depth of Cole's belief in his delusion. He also becomes the focus of attention for fellow patient Jeffrey Goines. Brad Pitt's performance as Goines steals one scene after another - he literally climbs the walls, twitching and yammering like the utter lunatic he is, in counterpoint to cartoon antics playing on TV screens. Pitt is clearly having the best time he's ever had in a movie, and why not? He gets to be Jim Carrey for a day, and then go on to whatever part he feels like taking next. Despite being restrained in solitary after a botched escape attempt, Cole succeeds in disappearing from his cell when he's yanked back to the future. Given another chance, he's sent back in time again and, after a brief side trip to the battlefields of World War I, he finally ends up in the right year. He kidnaps Railly to help him, and the relationship between the two deepens on the road. In one of the most interesting facets of the story, just as Railly slowly begins to give in to the mounting evidence that Cole is telling the truth, so Cole begins to believe her diagnosis that he's been living in an intricately detailed mental delusion. He's got added encouragement to believe it - now that he's experiencing it as a free man, he's falling in love with the 20th century. Willis' performance, quietly impressive up to now, comes into full bloom here, as he weeps with joy on hearing Blueberry Hill on the car radio, then sticks his head out the window and howls with delight in the sweet night air. The story takes too many surprising twists to give away any more here - it's so rich that it's a little disappointing when it decides to stick to its established framework. By focusing on the characters and ideas, and away from glitzy f/x - except a brief scene showing Willis enduring restraint in the time machine, all the time travel takes place off- screen - the film manages to my annoyance with the Time Paradox hijinx. Twelve Monkeys was very loosely based on the experimental short film Le Jetée, which was released on a bill in the US with the cult favorite Andersonville in the mid-1960s, but Gilliam's vision is all his own. He always fills his compositions with a unique beauty, no matter how repellent the subject may be. While I found his previous films to be occasionally marred by a smug cynicism, as if Gilliam were struggling to prove himself above his preoccupation with fantasy, there's little of that here. Indeed, even more than in his previous film The Fisher King, Gilliam seems to have grown to accept these things as a part of his own maturity, and as a comforting reminder of how life endures.
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