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A Communal Life in Film, Examined
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, a well-regarded Western war<br />
correspondent blindly chasing a story in Africa that he can’t seem to<br />
find. When a fellow traveler passes away, Locke assumes the stranger’s<br />
identity, David Robertson, and his datebook too, using the latter as a<br />
guide through a thickening bramble of gunrunners and independent<br />
warmongers. <b>Jumping spryly back and forth in time, and hopscotching<br />
through Europe</b>, Locke randomly crosses paths with an unnamed girl (<i>Last Tango in Paris</i>’<br />
Maria Schneider) and with her tries to piece together clues to <b>a story<br />
that tangentially highlights Anglo complicity in sustained African<br />
violence</b>. In doing so he works to avoid some unsavory strangers trying<br />
to track down Robertson, while also perpetuating the hoax of his death,<br />
even as his wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre) attempts to look for his body. </p>
<p><b>Shot in five countries, the film is a lesson in delayed gratification and downhill momentum. </b>Antonioni (<i>L’Avventura</i>, <i>Blow-Up</i>, <i>L’Eclisse</i>)<br />
starts things off slowly, almost teasingly, and <b>the plot itself of the<br />
movie is in many ways incidental, or at least ornamental to the sapped<br />
will of our emotionally battered protagonist</b>. While this makes certain<br />
passages of <i>The Passenger</i> inherently less interesting,<br />
Nicholson is as compelling a guide as one could ask for through this<br />
artfully muddied maze, and the film builds to an undeniably mesmeric<br />
single-shot finale, a noted later influence on Martin Scorsese, Paul<br />
Thomas Anderson and other filmmakers. </p>
<p>The new DVD release of <i>The Passenger</i> is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen,<br />
with optional yellow subtitles in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese,<br />
Thai and Chinese. Its extras are a case of <b>qualitative distinctiveness<br />
trumping quantitative excellence</b>, as there are only two here — a pair<br />
of audio commentaries. The first features journalist Aurora Irvine and<br />
co-screenwriter Mark Peploe, and gives a nice overview of some of the<br />
research that went into the story of geopolitical intrigue. It’s the<br />
second track, however, that’s destined to get more spins, and<br />
deservedly so: <b>Nicholson sits solo for a warm and wide-ranging,<br />
feature-length chat</b>. </p>
<p>It opens, amusingly but non-patronizingly, with Nicholson <b>holding<br />
forth as a sort of aged hippie college film professor</b>: “In this period,<br />
they had what was called the art film … ” While he occasionally<br />
flirts with somnambulistic silences early on, Nicholson eventually<br />
settles into a nice groove. He offers up <b>insights both specific and<br />
esoteric</b>, and is equally at home discussing the dispassionate distance<br />
of Antonioni’s photography or the filmmaker’s general aversion to<br />
melodrama. Calling <i>The Passenger</i> “probably the biggest<br />
adventure” of his career, Nicholson also dishes some behind-the-scenes<br />
dirt both salacious (Schneider was so hopped up painkillers in one<br />
scene that he had to offset her woozy balance by physically propping<br />
her up) and amusing (after transportation accidentally left Antonioni<br />
at a restaurant after lunch one day during shooting, the director<br />
feigned anger and let his star direct one scene). He recalls, too, in<br />
tickled fashion, <b>years of running into bit players and extras in<br />
far-flung locales and having them remind him that they were “in a movie<br />
together.”</b> Courtesy of Nicholson’s wonderfully affectionate,<br />
transporting commentary, viewers too can now share in that sentiment. <b>B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)</b></p>
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