Lucy

The Great Transhuman Empire

Here’s a fact.  The name Lucy was given to the first “person” we know about: a 3.2 million year-old hominid, whose discovery proved that our taxonomic family was bipedal before our brain size increased, shedding further light on human evolution (i.e. which primates we came from).  Here’s a fact about that Lucy: she used 100% of her brain capacity, and so do I, and so do you.

Ignoring the film’s issue of presenting urban legend as science (see here), Lucy lists between human drama and sci-fi goofiness, occasionally trying to remake Akira and 2001: a Space Odyssey in its structure and imagery.  The title character, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a grad student abroad in Taipei.  Her boyfriend of one week is worried that his employer, who overpays him for simple courier services, is up to something devious, and tricks Lucy into making today’s delivery in his place.  Of course, this is the day his employer, Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik) is expecting the delivery of a volatile drug that he and his identically black-suited mooks will sell for a fortune in Europe.  Jang decides to use Lucy as a drug mule, sewing a package of the drug – a tiny blue crystal – into her stomach.

While she’s being held, Lucy is assaulted by a bored henchman, who accidentally ruptures the package inside her and releases the drug into her bloodstream.  Just like that, she knows Kung Fu, how to use a handgun, how to navigate the city on her own, and how to fearlessly use violence and intimidation to get people to do what she wants.  She escapes captivity, has the package removed from her abdomen, and finds out what it is: CPH4 (made up by Besson, at least as far as its name), a synthesized version of a substance that pregnant women produce to help a fetus grow.  Apparently, when you ingest a whole bunch of this as an adult, you gain telekinetic abilities and all sorts of insight into how the universe works, as well as gradually losing your humanity in the process.  Lucy, who somehow knows what’s happening to her, phones her mother and reveals that she now vividly remembers details of her infancy, including nursing.  She then launches a solo attack on Jang, whom she inexplicably refuses to kill after decimating his security force and reading his mind in order to glean the whereabouts of the other three drug mules (she needs more CPH4 to continue transcending her own abilities).

Meanwhile, Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) lectures a French university on what might happen if humans could harness a larger percentage of their cerebral capacity (I feel compelled to again point out that this is all nonsense; humans use one-hundred-percent of our brains at all times, and Besson should be embarrassed not only for perpetuating a dangerous myth, but for insisting that he spent years on this film’s “science” before even writing a script – Freeman delivers his lecture while his facial expressions tell us “Everything I’m saying is bullshit, and so can you!”).  With her newfound omniscience, Lucy discovers his research, reads all six-thousand pages of it in seconds, and hashes over the meaning of life with him.  Through a few conversations made up of profound tripe, they decide that the purpose of existence is to pass on knowledge, and Lucy devises a way to allow humans to finally learn to “use” their lives once she’s gone.  As she travels from country to country, memory to memory, era to era, she keeps French police captain Del Rio (Amr Waked) around as a “reminder” that she’s human (How so?  Because he’s handsome?), all the while being stalked by the Korean gangsters she left alive for plot convenience.

What works about the film is Scarlett Johansson.  The bad science and derivative story don’t get a pass, but with Johansson’s voice, what could have been a tough sit becomes pretty engaging, even in a universe where the highest of minds produce philosophical drivel that wouldn’t impress a mildly well-educated middle-schooler.  But carry the film as Johansson might, a character needs to be characterized.  She almost is, but the plot gets in the way far too early, and the effects of the drug cause Lucy’s personality to become increasingly stoic and robotic.  But we still root for her, and it’s hard not to when her opponents are essentially the Devil (I mean, come on; does anyone imagine that Mr. Jang and his seemingly regenerative mooks have actual home lives?).  The biggest difference between she and her Akira predecessor, Tetsuo, is that Tetsuo’s inferiority complex and lack of control led him to transmogrifying legions of people into puddles of gore at the wave of a hand, whereas Lucy would rather leave them in suspended humiliation as she casually leaves the room in stiletto heels, taking their prized MacGuffins with her.

As for the rest of the cast, Waked shows some real versatility as the bewildered-but-capable police captain, and Choi, prolific as he is, turns it off to play a villain who has to be menacing no matter what he’s doing.  The Professor character, maybe, should have been played by someone other than Morgan Freeman.  Nothing against him; quite the opposite – a thin character’s thinness is made even more obvious when a famous actor, known for complex and intense performances, is relegated to inhabiting it.  The result is, “Hey, there’s Morgan Freeman doing something,” not “Hey, this film needed this character.”  In fact, the whole thing would have been passable if Lucy had gained the powers from the drug the exact same way, but without including the brain-capacity angle.  Think of how much room there would have been for characterization without all the big-headed pontificating and fake jargon.

The real emotional apex occurs when Lucy, in the 2001 part of the film, briefly travels back to the time of the primordial Lucy, who is busy drinking from a river.  Present-day Lucy extends her finger, and old furry ape Lucy reciprocates, recreating Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, but with two women (not to mention at least one person who actually existed).  I love that this can happen in a film, and that this film can outsell Dwayne Johnson’s leviathan-esque biceps.

Lucy (2014); written and directed by Luc Besson; starring Scarlett Johansson, Choi Min-sik, and Morgan Freeman.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Time and tide wait for no man…or woman

Sheikh Muhammad (Amr Waked) tells us, about two-thirds of the way through Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, “I wanted them to understand that this wasn’t about fishing.”  In writing, this is what I might call a “thematic passage” – the character is speaking in context, but also telling the audience how to read the story.  Indeed, Lasse Hallström’s film, based upon a new-ish novel by Paul Torday, is anything but a movie about fishing.  It is primarily about patience, but also about love and different kinds of faith (the most interesting kinds being non-religious).

The story begins with financial adviser Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) typing an email to widely respected fisheries expert Alfred “Fred” Jones (Ewan McGregor), seeking advice for a project that will involve bringing (you guessed it) salmon fishing to the Yemen.  These scenes feature a charming technique: the typed words pop into the air alongside the face of the character typing them, allowing for intimate closeups of the character in place of a still shot of their email inbox.  Fred considers the project ridiculous and impossible (his exact words in the email are “fundamentally unfeasible”), even after being bullied and blackmailed by his boss, Bernard (Conleth Hill, whose fans are probably not used to seeing him with a full head of hair) into supporting it.  This leads to an immediate conflict between Harriet and Fred, and the wordplay between them (Fred being overly formal and unfeeling to the point that Harriet accuses him of having Asperger’s, and Harriet keeping the tone light while simultaneously housing a superior knowledge of the Yemen region that she only wields when Fred thinks he has the upper hand) is adeptly written and delightful to watch.  Meanwhile, Patricia Maxwell (Kristen Scott Thomas), the British Prime Minister’s hot-tempered and impulsive press secretary, comes upon the salmon fishing project while trying to find a puff piece that will keep Anglo-Arab relations supposedly friendly in the eye of the public, even after a recent mosque bombing in Afghanistan.  However convenient this might be to the story, it ties together in more than one way: Harriet’s new boyfriend, Robert (Tom Mison), is posted to Afghanistan on military assignment, and after the Meet Cute we recently witnessed between Harriet and Fred, we must suspect that Robert will not be coming back.  Additionally, Fred’s apparent issues with his wife, Mary (Rachael Stirling) are showcased, which also bodes well for a potential relationship between the two main parties.

The problems between the two couples, however, are handled better than they would be in a garden-variety romcom.  Take, for instance, the fact that neither Robert nor Mary fit the Spiteful Sleaze archetype.  Both are good, sympathetic people who deserve to be happy; they just can’t seem to work things out with their partners.

Fred, as he must, comes around to the potential of the project after visiting the sheikh’s estate, fishing with him, and learning that the well-water in the area is cold enough to support salmon.  The trick now is obtaining salmon that will “run” (swim upstream), but since the British media has run a smear campaign on everyone involved due to the inevitable failure of another of Bernard’s blackmail attempts, the only option is to use farm-raised salmon who have never run in their lives, and have faith in the fact that swimming upstream is their natural instinct.  Despite the sheikh’s earlier polemic concerning Fred’s lack of faith, the former is risking his reputation and life (including enduring assassination attempts) in order to see this project realized, and does not approve.

What follows is a story about trust.  The characters must trust each other to survive, to attain love (not just any love, but the kind they all feel they deserve), and to see their hard work pay off.  The audience must trust the filmmakers (and original author) to convince us of the unlikely, the impossible, and even the absurd.  McGregor and Blunt play their characters with complete commitment and seriousness, which has led to a Golden Globe nomination for each of them this year.  Thomas’s Patricia is hilarious, well-used, and has a few greatly inspired scenes featuring Instant-Message sessions with the Prime Minister, who only ever appears as a still image and delivers some delicious political humor; as well as a scene with her family, which not only fully deepens her character’s personality as an alpha female and overzealous worker, but is such a gem of comedy that a viewer like me wishes for some deleted scenes (in the scene, Patricia tells her son, who refuses to put his cool-looking hood down and act like an adult, “Don’t you suck your teeth at me, young man.  I’m not one of your bitches from the Baltimorlow Rises, you feel me?  I’m your fucking mother”).    Waked, an Egyptian actor known mostly for playing villains, creates a handsome, excitable, and absorbing shiekh, snatching a victory from what could have been a stereotype.  His inherent mysticism, which would be grating in real life (he occasionally says things like “You will know when the time comes”) is key to understanding the film’s depth: suspend your disbelief, he seems to say, and the ensuing magic will not seem so ridiculous.

The film, in the public eye, seems to follow that old Shakespearean-age rule that any story with a happy ending is considered a “comedy,” regardless of content.  Despite my protests about this film being pure comedy, I’ll concede if the Globe nominations accrue more viewers for one of 2012’s most genuinely heartfelt, and, I must say, “nice,” films.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2012); screenplay by Simon Beaufoy; based upon the novel by Paul Torday; directed by Lasse Hallström; starring Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor, Amr Waked, and Kristen Scott Thomas.