Gil Mansergh’s “Screenings”

Deja Vu All Over Again

There are very few actors who are identified by their first name. Launching his career as an earnest young doctor from the early 80’s TV hospital drama, “St. Elsewhere,” to a double Oscar winning movie star (2001, Best Actor, “Training Day,” and 1989 Best Supporting Actor, “Glory“), Denzel deserves that name recognition. “Deja Vu” works because of Denzel Washington. He is perfectly cast, perfectly noble, and perfectly star-like.

The movie itself reminds me of Yogi Bera’s famous quote, “It’s like deja-vu all over again.” Except for the location (post-Katrina New Orleans) and the occupation of the hero (ATF Agent), there isn’t much originality in this movie (unless you include breaking the laws of physics). Even the title has been used before (in movies made in 1984, 1989 and 1997). The story plays out like one of producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s CSI-TV shows. We have a scene of normality followed by a violent crime. The amount of explosives used, property damaged and actors “dying” is only limited by the size of the budget. On TV, these tend to be small in number and decibels (except, of course, for sweeps week). On the big screen, with big stars, the crime is super-sized. It’s fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras), and a ferry leaves the New Orleans dock loaded with school children on a field trip, Navy sailors by the hundreds going on leave, newlyweds, geriatric couples, and a young girl who cries when her doll falls overboard. Then, after a suitable amount of tension building, a terrorist bomb explodes and sends the ferry and hundreds of passengers to their deaths.

Since this terrorist attack occurs post 9/11, it precipitates a previously unseen level of interdepartmental cooperation as the Coast Guard, Navy, local police and sheriffs, FEMA, NTSB, FBI and dozens of other acronym-identified agencies send personnel and materials rushing to to the scene. Suddenly, through the smoke, a lone figure emerges. It’s ATF Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington), a man who must have taken lessons from CSI’s Gil Grissom (or perhaps it was Sherlock Holmes) for having the uncanny knack of discovering evidence. It takes him about 20 minutes of beachcombing and bridge climbing to find parts of the bomb’s timing device and chemical signature. Whatever the reason, the first FBI Agent on the scene (Val Kilmer, in a thoroughly superfluous role) tracks down Carlin as he scrapes “particulate residue” from the underside of a bridge. “It’s definitely a terrorist attack,” Carlin announces with authority after tasting the goo on his fingers. And the rest of the interdisciplinary team accept this pronouncement because, as one of the other guys says when he meets Carlin, “Oklahoma City?” Carlin just answers with a nod.

The next few scenes are probably the most important in the film. Carlin picks up a time-stamped phone message from a woman asking him to call her back. Later, he learns that the same woman’s body floated to shore burned and mangled as though she died in the blast. Except for one thing, the body was discovered around the same time she made the phone call “over an hour before the explosion. How is this possible?

You will not read the answer to that conundrum here. Let’s just say that if you believed that Superman flying around the earth at high speed could reverse time to before Lois Lane’s death on the suspension bridge in “Superman,” then you will have no trouble understanding the “bending the laws of physics” explanation provided in “Deja Vu.”

So did I enjoy the movie? The answer is a qualified “You Betcha.” It is slick, and tightly directed (by Tony Scott) and very well acted by all “especially by Denzel and Paula Patton, (the dead woman who we get to know, and Carlin falls in love with, through flashbacks). But I did have trouble with several things as I was watching the film.

First off, to my untrained eyes, the emergency response and investigation seemed no different than what happened in Oklahoma City. Despite interdepartmental cooperation, there was no post 9-11 sensibility on display. For example, I saw no evidence that airports and other targets were put on red-alert. Second, with the exception of an unnecessary SWAT team storming the Katrina damaged house owned by a terrorist suspect, New Orleans looked clean and shiny and ready to party. Third, the last 15 minutes of the movie are cliché filled, unconvincing and have a tacked on feel. It’s as though the film makers were afraid of entering the realities of domestic terrorism. No conspiracies, right-wing extremists, or groups of militant zealots are investigated (or even considered). The audience is supposed to believe that hundreds died simply because one amoral nut-case (Jim Caviezal) holds a grudge. If real life was only that simple.

Comments? E-mail gilmansergh@comcast.net
Hear Gil’s radio show “Cinema Toast” 7:35 Thursday mornings on KRSH-FM 95.9