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THE
FORGOTTEN
8/10
USA
2004 : Joseph RUBEN : 91 mins
I'm not sure
where to start - or finish - with this review of The Forgotten,
so out-on-a-limb am I compared with the vast majority of critics. In the
US the picture was greeted with almost uniformly
negative press, but this didn't stop it opening at number one at the
box-office and racking up a very tidy $60m+ in its first five weeks of
release (reported budget $42m). As with Final
Destination and Dude,
Where's My Car? I'm with the American public with this one - I
thoroughly enjoyed The Forgotten and, in the fortnight or so since
I've seen it, I've found myself bringing it up when conversations have
turned to matters cinematic. While far from flawless, the more I think
about it the more it's one of my favourite films of the year.
In a way,
this shouldn't have been a surprise, as I have for years been a solid
admirer of its star Julianne Moore. Moore finds herself in an unusual
position with The Forgotten - so often in her career her films
(and performances) attract critical praise but struggle to attract wide
audiences (as with her three Oscar-nominated pictures: Far
From Heaven, Boogie
Nights and The
End of the Affair). Now she's "opened" a bona-fide hit,
and while she herself has been applauded the general consensus is that
her performance is like those of Barbara Hershey in The Entity (1981)
and Genevieve Bujold in Coma (1977) - i.e. excellent work from
an outstanding actress, but at the service of a rather daft B-movie thriller.
But it now seems likely that Moore's face will appear in full on the poster
for her next mainstream Hollywood release, just as the promotional artwork
for films featuring Nicole Kidman (whose Virginia Woolf in The
Hours notoriously edged out Moore's Far From Heaven in
the Oscar race) now seem to consist almost entirely of a close-up of the
star - The
Stepford Wives and now Birth.
Kidman was
originally lined up for The Forgotten but turned it town in favour
of Stepford - and while Frank Oz's clumsy remake isn't by any means
the turkey of popular supposition, this must count as one of Kidman's
less inspired decisions. Indeed, she seems to be in the middle of a post-Oscar
rut to potentially rival that endured by Kevin Spacey in the aftermath
of American
Beauty. Ironically enough, there's a touch of the Stepfords
- specifically, the 1970s version with Katharine Ross - about the early
scenes of The Forgotten, as Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) finds
herself in a nightmare of paranoid confusion when she's told by her psychiatrist
(Gary Sinise) that the son she's been mourning for 14 months never actually
existed.
To say any
more wouldn't be fair - the picture works best if you don't know whether
or not Telly is as delusional as others would have her believe. But it
isn't giving too much away to say that the remainder of the Gerald Di
Pego's script beautifully combines elements from Rosemary's Baby, The
Game ("they're listening!"), Invasion of the Bodysnatchers,
certain episodes of The X-Files and The Hidden - the latter
a classic example of the sort of intelligent B-movie thriller for which
The Forgotten's director Joe Ruben was once renowned. His cult-movie
success with Dreamscape (1983) and The Stepfather (1986)
propelled him into a higher budget-league where he lost his way with the
likes of Sleeping with the Enemy (1990) and Money Train (1995).
Ruben is back
on cracking form here, and while Di Pego's screenplay is in some ways
much tamer than Donald E Westlake's bracingly topical Stepfather script,
the film's grieving-for-lost-loved-ones theme and Manhattan locations
(which are clearly the real thing and are strikingly well-used throughout)
can't help but stir thoughts of 9/11. Not that we have a great deal of
time to dwell on anything for very long, however, as Ruben keeps the pot
boiling at a quite furious clip as Telly goes on the run, trying to escape
the clutches of various authority figures - including Linus Roache as
a character amusingly billed in the credits (in one of the picture's countless
nifty little grace-notes) as 'A Friendly Man.'
The picture's
relentless pace - plus the presence of these incongruously classy thespians
(Moore, Sinise, Dominic West, Alfre Woodard) - also serves to prevent
us from picking apart the numerous screenplay holes that may become naggingly
apparent to even the dimmest viewer in retrospect. But with the possible
exception of a somewhat oversentimental coda (shades of Frequency
- of which this is in a way the distaff version) everything
this consistently enthralling movie does, it does thumpingly well. Such
as a genuinely jolting, crunchingly convincing side-swipe car-crash here
ranks alongside the ones from Adaptation
and The Bourne Supremacy
(which this picture rivals for the title of year's best Hollywood
thriller) as the most convincing ever shown on screen. There's one even
more breathtaking example of special-effects that counts as a genuine
coup de cinema but - as with so much about The Forgotten -
you'll just have to discover it for yourselves. If, that is, you manage
to avoid the unforgiveably revealing trailer...
26th October,
2004
[seen 7th October : Odeon, Nuneaton : press show - CinemaDays
event]
for John Peel,
1939-2004
by Neil
Young
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