Is Angelina Jolie the closest thing we have to Audrey Hepburn? Not exactly, and Johnny Depp is not quite Cary Grant, but they have a strangely watchable non-chemistry in The Tourist, the latest romantic-comedy-action movie to borrow the formula of the great Charade. Top-notch production values, beautifully costumed Hollywood movie stars, a plot promising mischief, seduction and romance. So why did this movie trip on itself and fall flat on its face?
While at best uneven in tone and quality, The Tourist offers Depp as something other than a Disney pirate or cartoon character, and while Jolie doesn’t physically kick any ass, you still believe she could if she wanted. Still, this is the kind of movie Hollywood used to knock out of the park – star wattage, romantic European scenery, deadly intrigue. The Tourist plays it all way too safe, and the audience is left wondering what the hell happened.
The Tourist is the Hollywood debut of director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, whose genuinely great The Lives of Others won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2007. He seems uncomfortable in this genre, trotting out a host of clichés beyond the mistaken identity premise. There’s the aforementioned Mysterious Woman – frequently decked out in the most stunning designer gowns available to women on the run; there’s Paul Bettany, underused as the Scotland Yard cop on Elise’s tail and Timothy Dalton, completely unused as Bettany’s boss. No one seems sure what they’re doing, or why, which could have been part of the charm – instead, it underlines the film’s total lack of a backbone. And at one point, someone really does leap off a balcony and onto a fruit stand. (Why a fruit stand? Why not a falafel cart?)
Jolie is Elise Ward, an archetypal Mysterious Woman who meets Johnny Depp’s Frank Tupelo, an Everyman math teacher from Wisconsin, on a train to Venice, Italy. Elise is every inch the smoldering seductress, which Jolie knows how to play to the hilt. Depp plays Frank like a guy who just woke up from a really weird dream – he’s being played for a patsy by this femme fatale, and like just any guy thrown into a bizarre situation with a woman looking like Angelina Jolie, he doesn’t seem to mind.
See, Elise is in love with Alexander Pierce, who from all reports is a rather brilliant fugitive con man, having stolen over $744 million from a brutal English gangster. And Frank’s the hapless, apparently harmless SOB suddenly caught up in Elise’s plot to reunite with her criminal love. Every echo of the movie longs to ricochet through Hitchcock at his best – think The Man Who Knew Too Much or North by Northwest. It’s not that good. As shot by cinematographer John Seale, these great European locales are warm yet rife with danger. As written by Oscar winners Julian Fellowes and Christopher McQuarrie, the inert dialogue and recycled storyline needs star power to stay upright. James Newton Howard‘s painfully melodramatic score shoves the Hollywood dross right in your face, further evidence that von Donnersmarck, so good with the East German paranoia in The Lives of Others, is at a loss with Hollywood melodrama.
Still, Depp and Jolie do their job. I smiled as I watched their cat-and-mouse games, and though the final denouement is obvious to anyone paying attention, if you’re a fan of the stars, you probably won’t mind. No one involved with this overripe piece of flotsam performed their best, but they seemed to be having fun. Sorta. Sometimes mere mortals have to be content with that.
