The Passenger (2005)

Sick Product of a Sick System

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

When the protagonist tried to cover himself with someone else's identity, he just entered another cage. Rarely, Michelangelo Antonioni began to explain the theme in his own film, of course, the best part of the film is still his ingenious scene scheduling and lens movement. "Even if you try to escape, you can't keep going." Antonioni's desperation is probably deep in his mind. In addition, Jack Nicholson contributed a precious performance in this film beyond his comfort zone.

Nicholson fresh off Chinatown walks through this,with one confused expression on his face.The story is about a reporter WHO is having an existential crisis and decides to Exchange identities with an arms dealer he meets at a secluded desert village. The arms dealer dies of a bad heart,and the reporter takes his passport leaving his own on the dead man.From then on he decides to follow the dead mans involvement with a guerrilla Force fighting a corrupt African leader,whom he had personally interviewed.We learn that his wife had criticized him for not standing up to the dictator in the interview. After selling some arms to the guerrillas,he becomes a target of the dictators International assassins.At that point the movie becomes muddled and stupid.Instead of trying to expose the dictators International spy ring and bringing them down using the help of the Police,the reporter is more concerned about escaping his wife and the police so as to keep his fake identity,something not really admirable.In the process he meets a young girl played by Maria Schneider and they both run together as if they were a couple of delinquents. And this goes on and on,through several international European locations and the movie becomes more and more boring.

Although I had seen Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger" when it first appeared on television in the late 70's, I was disappointed that it didn't seem to measure up to "Blowup", and pretty much forgot about it.However, there have been so many references to the film over the years, especially when the conversation turns to movies with ambiguous plots and obscure endings, that I decided to give it another go.I still don't think it has the sharpness or style of "Blowup", but I now appreciate it more, and definitely love that unresolved ending. However, it has a flaw, and it weakens the film – it's a mistake that Hitchcock would never have made.Jack Nicolson plays David Locke, a reporter seeking to interview rebel leaders in North Africa. He is disillusioned with just about everything, before suddenly seeing a chance at a new life. When David Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), a man who looks uncannily like him, dies of a heart attack in the same hotel, Locke swaps identities with him.Although he gets away with it, he begins to realise that Robertson is an illegal arms dealer, and is involved with dangerous people. As he travels from Africa to London and then on to Spain, the movie becomes a waiting game to see which of Jack's pasts will catch up with him first.And what do I think is the flaw in the film? It's all in the timing. More than half way through the movie, Locke meets Maria Schneider's character, billed simply as 'Girl'. Schneider brings such an aura of sexual tension to the film that you realise just how flat the first half has been. Antonioni should have brought her in far earlier.What an amazing impact she has, whether it's memories of her character from "Last Tango in Paris" or simply her enigmatic sultriness, she gives the film a charge of energy. The best scenes in "The Passenger" come from the air of expectation built up around Jack Nicholson's double identities and the presence of Maria Schneider.The movie was made in 1975 and, as was the vogue in many European and Hollywood movies at the time, romanticises the revolutionaries and guerrillas. However, divorced from the headlines and the mood of the 70's, the back-story of "The Passenger" seems overly contrived.For anyone who has not seen the "The Passenger", but been exposed to all the tricky plots in films over the intervening years, you could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. The film generated a great deal of analysis about the idea of escaping one's identity, but surely more has been read into it than could ever have been intended.Nonetheless, "The Passenger" still has the unique pairing of Nicholson and Schneider, and that deliciously ambiguous ending.

I won't say Antonioni's masterpiece, because he made them in the plural, but this is unquestionably one of them. One of the great films of the 70s, full of mystery and mood. Nicholson is wonderful. Watching him one realizes what an amazing and underrated actor he is and has been. In the commentary he sounds a little self-important though he has a right to be proud of his work on this. Visually too this is a marvel, sort of a vicarious trip to north Africa and the south of Spain. The narrative? It's Antonioni so it's very avant-garde. One can never be sure of what's happening. Relax, that's what makes it such a trip. See this film and you'll remember it.