Illustration from Eugene Morel's Tientes du Nord, 1903
I haven't done a single "I Saw a Movie" entry since the Sundance Film Festival - why? I haven't set foot in a movie theater since then because of a little bundle of "joy" that showed up at our house recently. Circumstances gave me the opportunity to sneak in a matinee this week, but I found that there aren't many interesting movies in theaters right now. I liked the idea of Source Code, but I wasn't sure I wanted to end my movie-going drought with a "small" movie. I'm glad I did, though, because Source Code is a small movie in all the best ways - tidy and self-contained in a fashion that emphasizes its strengths.
Not that Source Code is flawless - it's a movie with a central conceit that was vague to the point of straining my suspension of disbelief. Jake Gyllenhaal plays an Army officer who is repeatedly inserted into the scene of a recent terrorist bombing to decipher what exactly happened. The technology for doing this is necessarily discussed only in fuzzy terms, but the movie handles the exposition clumsily enough that I kept trying to fill in the blanks myself with hypothetical solutions. It was distracting, as was the fact that the script calls this technology "source code" for some reason, baffling to anyone who knows anything about technology. Also, the terrorist Gyllenhaal is trying to find is a contrived and ill-defined figure that you never really get a chance to sink your teeth into.
These weaknesses are flaws inherent in the little narrative machine that writer Ben Ripley and director Duncan Jones have created, though. Like Inception in miniature, Source Code is a tight story built around an engaging set of plot devices and a few key elements. There are a handful characters, a couple key settings, and a very succinct time period involved. And, apart from the two gaps I mentioned, the story unfolds in a very satisfying way, anchored by competent (if not challenging) performances by two very attractive leads, Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan. After a few months of not seeing any new movie releases, I'm glad that I saw Source Code instead of an ambitious, messy epic of some kind - it didn't blow my socks off, but it reminded me how a little, well-executed piece of film-craft can be very entertaining.
"Train Round the Bend" by the Velvet Underground
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