I'm starting to think there's not much difference between what's generally thought of as highbrow art and what exists on the other end of the spectrum, art for mass consumption.
Take for example, Equilibrium, a bleak new film about a dark futuristic society that suppresses emotion for the common good of eliminating hate and war. That Equilibrium, is, by most accounts, a polished B-movie, hardly seems to make any difference to its estimable cast and even less to the entertained audience. It's a joy to watch, and a great example of a movie that at first look appears to be a genre exercise, but keeps surprising you as it unfolds, throwing nifty and thoughtful ideas at you until it all but betrays its humble popcorn origins and reluctantly begins to stand on its own legs as an unpretentious, intelligent film with solid legs, regardless of where it might have initially been positioned on the artistic scale.
Set in the "1st years of the 21st century," in a totalitarian society where war has been eradicated and "human emotion is a disease," a walled city has been erected, its inhabitants anesthetized by a government issued, mood-stabilizing narcotic named Prozium. There is no love or pain. There is no hate, anger or war. The city is presided over by the unseen messiah Father, a mysterious being of Orwellian proportions.
The notion is that since everything bad in the world comes from emotion - war, savagery, aggression - that to wipe out all emotion will solve the world's problems. Of course, the dark side is that all positive human emotions - love, passion and all by-products, which include pets, art, music and memory - are eradicated as well.
Inside and outside this fascist state there are renegades who refuse the drug and allow themselves to experience human feelings, living underground as "sense offenders," a crime whose punishment is quick justice - execution. There's a formidable resistance of sense offenders that has taken root, and it's the job of an elite, special-forces crime-fighting militia named the Grammaton Clerics, to hunt them for capture and extermination.
When we first meet Cleric John Preston, a widower with two small children and a wife recently executed for sense offenses, he lives in a world devoid of emotion or feeling. As Equilibrium opens, he not only guiltlessly destroys the Mona Lisa but also exterminates his fallen Cleric partner (Sean Bean) for committing the sense offense of reading poetry.
But plagued by rising dreams and memories of his dead wife, and affected by a skipped dose of Prozium, Preston begins to feel emotions again, falling in love with Mary O' Brian (Emily Watson), an admitted resistance fighter and sense offender captured and marked for execution. After his own human feelings of love and compassion begin to resurface, and he secretly joins the covert underground resistance and spearheads a plot to assassinate Father and re-claim the right to feel human again.
There's a radical combination of disparate elements in Equilibrium, including some that might commonly be thought of as crass or genre - including considerable doses of violent action, all written and directed by Kurt Wimmer with style, energy and gusto. But as with James Cameron's now-classic 1984 techno-thriller, The Terminator, Equilibrium is smart enough to realize that casting a net for a broader audience than teenage boys requires more that just wild action and futuristic hardware.
Equilibrium is a film that, like Andrew Niccol's superior Gattaca, isn't content to just violently inhabit the beautifully art-directed world it creates, but works very hard to come up with a few pretty good science-fiction ideas, and also to humanize its already de-humanized characters. It ultimately ends up a rather earnest message movie of sorts, side-stepping its immediate genre elements with a more ambitious philosophical agenda. And if Equilibrium doesn't quite match Cameron's manic thrills and apocalyptic heart, it does fondly recall other classics, from Bladerunner to Robocop to Mad Max.
There's much to like in Equilibrium, beginning with the absolutely superb sense of confidence and sincerity Wimmer brings to both action sequences and his human moments. I can't say enough about the beauty and attention to detail that has gone into the production design and art direction, with its dramatic futuristic architecture and compelling vision of an "outside" world blasted beyond recognition, all delivered in beautiful `scope compositions.
But all of this would only add up to routine technical competency were it not for a truly heartfelt and complex performance from the underrated Christian Bale, in his best role to date.
When we first see him, he's the human equivalent of a replicant, and in fact, he and the other Clerics behave as if they've just arrived from the set of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He's completely pumped up, a great physical presence and well worthy of any action-hero status. But as the movie progresses and he begins to deepen, to allow himself to feel, Bale has several delicate emotional shifts and subtle scenes where he is forced to make moral choices and embrace what it means to be human, to have compassion, to question the system of right and wrong, and to reconcile the outside world he serves vs. the inside world he feels.
It's fascinating to watch him come off the mood-drug, and gradually shift his personality, questioning the Cleric's credo of, "The message is not important, obedience to it is." These are the types of moments that make Equilibrium work so well, with Bale as the driving force of aggression/subtlety behind them, and one can't imagine an action poser on the order of Vin Diesel being a fraction as effective in these low-key actor's scenes.
The role is an anomaly, really, in a film like this, and one of the things Wimmer does correctly is allow Bale the room to breathe and grow with a considerable character arc. He's a fully developed character, stalking offenders at one moment, then trying vainly to suppress his emotions, then rediscovering himself all over.
He's matched by a cast that obviously saw something compelling in the material at a script level. Emily Watson lends a simple dignity in the role of the martyred fighter marked for execution. She's the rare A-list actress who knows that sometimes it's better to let vanity take a backseat just to work in a risky and against-type genre project like Equilibrium. Also along for the ride are the fine actor Taye Diggs, Angus MacFadyen, William Fichtner and Sean Bean.
What's on the screen in Equilibrium is a thoughtful piece of excitement - it's got action, but it's also got heart. It's got over-the-top violence, but it's also got passion.
I won't be waiting for Miramax's Dimension films to lobby the Oscar campaign for this one, and though no one is ever going to mistakenly call Equilibrium a brilliant movie, it works above and beyond its own meager terms, and in trying to be a competent genre exercise, inadvertently becomes more. It's a fun film with a heart and a conscience, and though some may find it corny in its earnestness and possibly a bit heavy or obvious in its message, it's directed and performed with utmost professionalism and energy.
It's nice to be surprised by a film that quietly emerges, without much fanfare, and ends up being what could qualify in spades as a sleeper hit. I don't want to overstate the significance of a competent and intelligent popcorn movie, but there's a shortage of those these days, and Equilibrium more than fits the bill.
DVD