Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

April 25, 2003

A plot twist is a terrible thing to waste: eclectic director James Mangold's latest, Identity, is a taut yet playful what-the-hell-was-that thriller, as if Agatha Christie put her hand to The Usual Suspects. Less fun: the miserable, cheerless Levity. Most fun: talking to the volatile, sweetly irreverent Amanda Peet about her role as someone's fantasy version of a girl gone wrong who just wants to go right.

Character roles

It's difficult to talk about Identity without giving away its breakneck game. An 88-minute examplar of the same mindfuck genre as The Usual Suspects, it's stylish, if modest fun. Night. Rain. The Nevada desert. Ten people find themselves trapped at the same motel (with ten rooms), as beautifully barren as a landscape study, in a story as untrustworthily direct as a children's book. We also know that a criminal with multiple personality disorder might, just might, be on the loose as well. Like many tersely plotted movies, Identity could be taken for a movie about filmmaking: as actors like John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Rebecca DeMornay, John C. McGinley and Jake Busey are alternately suspected of murder, the lightning pace of the twists give you just enough time to wonder if it could all be a terrible dream... in the mind of a screenwriter, or a director like Mangold.

Most actors will tell you they're not real movie buffs. They leave that to the filmmakers. Whether that's sincere or programmed by publicists, the average performer doing press doesn't talk about movie love. It's more secret than their affairs. Amanda Peet, however, is a sweet, run-at-the-mouth exception. As in other roles, like in last year's dark comedy Igby Goes Down, the 32-year-old actress manages to bring eccentric liveliness to a role as a woman trying to leave a crime or two behind, dreaming of living out her fantasy life in a Florida orange grove. Without hinting at the plot's turns, Peet has a delicate balancing act, playing a caricature, but also bringing her to life. "I think as an actor, you should never try to play a quality," she says. "I don't think about sweetness or edginess or anything like that. Sometimes it's dangerous to try to be appealing. Not dangerous, but... You know, not useful."

While certain career paths frighten Peet-"I'd rather do Identity than be the girl on Seinfeld," she says-but this script scared her. "I'm such a pansy, I was so terrified when I was reading. By page like 20, I was like, I can't do this movie. It was so scary. I don't see a lot of scary movies. I get really scared. I live alone. Not good. I saw Signs and I like lost my mind for a month. And that's just green monsters!"

After most shoots, she's at a loss. "I went right into this movie I'm doing now with Jack Nicholson so I didn't have time to be sad, but if I had just had time to myself, I would probably have been really depressed. There's also the hangover part that I have that [stars] probably don't have, where it's like, 'Omigod, it's all in the fucking can, what if I sucked? It's all done, I don't have any control of it anymore!'"

I wondered if the new movie, directed by Nancy Meyers, and starring Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Keanu Reeves and Frances McDormand was an intimidating prospect. "What are you, crazy? C'mon! I was just like, 'This is not possible.' I wanted to get it, but I didn't want to get it. I didn't want to do it, I just wanted to get it." She laughs. "I wanted it to be done. Somehow. They're all great, like really nice, like not scary intimidating weirdo people."

She sounds like a devoted movie fan. "Yeah, a little like a crazy person, yeah. Slightly deranged. Lines... I get very obsessed with moments. I'm very detailed that way. If I'm obsessed with a movie, I get it down to the tiniest... I'm a rewinder, you know what I mean? Rewind it like eight times. I just watched Racing with The Moon last night. There's this moment, Sean Penn's so young in it, it's so beautiful. He has a cigarette. He's studying planes. He's about to go to war. He brings the binoculars down and he sees the woman he loves and his cigarette drops and he just goes 'Oh Christ." I rewound that like five times. I cannot believe the way he says, "oh Christ," and the way his cigarette... it's just not really possible." She leans forward, talks faster. "And also, what was he looking at, on the day that they shot it? Did she go stand over there, how did they do that? I get obsessed! I can't help it! There's nothing more fun than rewinding. Nothing!"

Learning? She blows a raspberry. "You can't learn, that's just the thing. That's what makes something genius, it's inimitable. It's weird for me with Diane and Fran. We've done a lot of things, the three of us in a three-shot, like the Witches of Eastwick, we've joked. Really, the truth of what's going on in my head is like 'Holy fucking shit, I'm acting with Frances McDormand and Diane Keaton! It's not possible! It's just not possible. I rented Annie Hall last night, which I didn't see, because I had to watch Racing with the Moon and the 'Oh Christ' moment, but the other day I was doing a scene with Diane, and she says, "I love you," and she says, 'I love you more' and then one time we were doing it, I just said, 'I lurve you.' I was like, 'Oh my fucking god, I just quoted Annie Hall to Diane Keaton, I just quoted Annie Hall to Diane Keaton, I just quoted Annie Hall to Diane Keaton! It was the scariest moment. She looked blankly, I said, "that's from Annie Hall," and she's like, "Oh, oh, god, right, yeah, right." Another time? I said, "You do it," and she says, "No, you do it," and I say, "No, you must be Don Francesco's sister," from Love and Death, and again, she just stares at me. They don't understand what they've meant to people! She practically didn't recognize it, I go, "No, you must be Don Francesco's sister," Hello! Are you crazy?

"You can't let them know, then you'd be a little psychotic," she says, smiling. "If I really told Diane, I need to talk to you, then that she might think I'm a stalker, a deranged person. I try to just be... appropriate. It's really hard sometimes."

GRAVITY

The road to hell is paved with bad movies.

Such good intentions, and such a tidy misfire is the simplest thing to say about Ed Solomon's Levity. Billy Bob Thornton, ghastly pale and with a precious, shoulder-length gray hairpiece with a studiously spruced widow's peak, plays Manual Jordan, a man recently released from twenty-three years in prison for killing a liquor store clerk his own age. He's stared for years at a newspaper photo of his victim, and once out of jail, he returns to the streets of the nameless every-city where he committed his crime. (It's actually Montreal.) He meets other lost souls: Miles (Morgan Freeman), gargling gravel as the noble caretaker of a community center; Sofia (Kirsten Dunst, playing another of her patented, privileged dirty girls) a sleepy-eyed drink-'til-you-puke partier; and Adele (Holly Hunter), the sister of the man he killed, and whom he half-heartedly, passive-aggressively stalks until she (briefly) draws him into her affections. Adele is commendably plainspoken, demonstrating maturity earned through her pain, and Hunter's performance is strong. Among the performers, she wrings the most from Solomon's dry dialogue. "He is one pissed-off little fuck. He gets it from me, I think." Thornton's eyes light up once or twice, but Freeman turns his charisma to unforgivable scene hogging in line readings and body language. Thornton is a remarkable minimalist actor, notably in The Man Who Wasn't There and Monster's Ball, which is a far more hopeful, far more convincing portrait of communal pain than what we see here.

Solomon worked from an idea he's been nurturing for decades, since he had volunteered in college with the UCLA Prison Coalition, tutoring English in a maximum-security youth penitentiary. He met a boy who had killed someone, who was there for only a few weeks before turning 18 and being remanded to a state prison for the rest of his life. Solomon says the kid has haunted him ever since, and after a lucrative career as a comedy screenwriter-his credited scripts include co-writing Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Men in Black-he makes his directorial debut with this mirthless exercise.

The theme is redemption, and it's not light, despite the beauty of almost every frame as shot by Roger Deakins, best known for his work on movies by the Coen brothers. Solomon favors large-object-in-the-foreground framings, which force perspective through props rather than dynamic composition. It's one more constipated tic that makes this failed fable such an arduous slog to sit through.

In his director's notes, Solomon illuminates how Levity became so heavy: "I wanted to make a film about someone who, by his own hand (I chose the name Manual because of its reference to that), had forever removed himself from the flow of humanity." Redemption: jeez, is that the only theme serious movies can take on in this nation? "The reality in which the film takes place is not an objective one," Solomon writes. "Just as Manual emerges slowly into the real world, I wanted the film itself to evolve gradually from a subjective, somewhat isolated state into, finally, a more integrated one." That's not drama, that's a seminar.

You want to root for a movie that seems to be seeking the spiritual, yet this is a soul-killing movie throughout, more so for audiences than for the characters. Levity is yet another in a long line of films made by gifted comic writers who believe that their talent is less valuable than that of those who write drama. As the aliens ask Woody Allen's character in Stardust Memories, "Why don't you make funny movies anymore?" Mopey faced and stringy-haired, slouching through the snow, Manual is almost a laughable sad sack. Something seems forced, even in moments when it seems the movie might have something to say about loneliness, both self-imposed and publicly sanctioned, as well as the eddying of hurt into a community.

Solomon seems to trust himself less than he trusts the audience. "Manual's relationship to light, and lightness, and further, to laughter, is the basis of the title," Solomon writes. "It's about what's missing." There's nothing to be discovered in his story. The expected events happen. The expected speeches are spoken. The plot falls into place. Twists are twisted; the punished are punished further (victims and perpetrators alike.) The patterning of the lovely art direction and splashes of color and light remain filigree, and for all the genuine talent on display, Levity never gets under the skin, failing to rise to the level of wail, lamentation, or even significance.

Email Ray Pride