Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, PierceGagnon, Jeff Daniels, Noah SeganDirector: Rian JohnsonRuntime: 118 min. Verdict: While I appreciate Mr. Johnson using concepts and conventionsmerely as a ruse to construct moral “dilemmas”, I’m not sure of the underlyingethics. Genre: Thriller, Sci-fi, Drama
The presentis 2044, Kansas. The future, only barely shown, is 2074, Shanghai. The presentis a depraved land of contradictions, a BladeRunner living right alongside Days ofHeaven. It doesn’t seem to add-up, the macro and the micro, the view fromfar and the view from within. It is all light and poverty, invisible keyboardand a good-old fashioned axe, high-rises and dilapidated structures, and whilea man simply shoots a vagrant trying to steal something of his truck, Joe (Mr.Gordon-Levitt), a hired gun, takes the pain of laying down tarpaulin to avoidthe mess before disposing the dead body into an incinerator. When the city isall filth and drug, I wonder, why take the pains to leave the farms neat anddry. Maybe it makes sense to keep the workplace clean. And there is his watch.And his worn-out book. And a blunt gun that might as well be the first gun everinvented. And his digitally operated underground cellar-cum-vault where hestores his silver bars. One might suppose Looperconsiders the total decay of western civilization as we know it, right down tothe death of its currency. As in, the rise of Zed (which obviously has Zedong’sface). Or maybe, as we come to meet more of its characters, none of whom seemto be Asian in origin save one crucial woman, I wonder if it is simply a caseof the dislocation of the “western” civilization. Recently, we had a littlevacation in Kuala Lumpur, and although my opinion here ought to be thoroughlyscrutinized, what one feels in the big urban centers of our continent is adistinct lack of personality. We’ve the same model, and Hong Kong could easilydouble up for Beijing. It is simply vertical growth and urbanization without asense of history. I watch a Johnnie To production, Motorway, and I realize yet again how adept some of those movieshave become in resembling Hollywood productions. Does Hong Kong offer anythingother than empty roads for glossy cars to chase through them? In Looper, henchmen wear black overcoatsand hats, and for some odd reason the news ticker chooses to show “TheRainmaker” in English, leaving the rest of it in Mandarin. So, is East the newWest, populated by the same people? I tend to find that a little hard to digestin a globalized world. Not a deal-breaker though. Whatbothers me here is the value of the film’s final act of sacrifice and how itfits into the overall dynamic of the film, and I suppose here is where I oughtto WARN YOU ABOUT SPOILERS. I better warn you about sophomoric jabs at Freudianmumbo-jumbo too, and here is where Abe (Mr. Daniels) and Sara (Ms. Blunt) cometo the party. There is the big city, a lawless amoral land, ruled by Abe, whois some kind of a patriarchal figure. The city has no principles, no good or nobad, just decay and drugs and sex and technology and money. And there’s thefarmland, an anachronism so complete with an axe-wielding woodcutter it almostseems willfully built like the haven in TheVillage, and it is Sara’s. The mother’s. Probably the only mother in theentire picture. A mother with a gun guarding her innocent child. Or, theinnocence of a child. Or, the innocence of childhood. I know you get thepicture. There’s Kid Blue (Mr. Segan), a crazy Gat-man (Abe’s henchmen) whoseonly desire is to find Abe’s validation, which contrasts starkly to Sara’sworld, who’s desperately trying to win back her son. Everybody in 2044 Kansasseems to be an orphan, and there seems to be desperate dearth of old people. SaveAbe. A kid is almost run over by Joe’s car and we wait for a screaming parentwho never appears. Just the abandoned kid in the middle of the road, who seemsto be something of a metaphor for the hapless unhinged state of the present. Astate, which going by the evidence here, could be explained by the absence of amaternal figure. Or the presence of a paternal figure. Vice-versa for thecontrasting farmland, I suppose. I wonder if it is safe to assume Mr. Johnsonis in favor of a land without loopers and The Rainmaker and Bruce Willis clonesand Bruce Willis shooting down the bad guys. Maybe even Batman and Alfred. Youknow, the whole orphans and father figure deal. It is a noble thought if youask me, a land of cultured and domesticated men not seeking replacement fortheir mothers, standing strongly against the folks from a lot of our moviesthese days. Renouncing macho bravado and violence, although it getscontradicted a little by the Bruce Willis style shoot-em-all coolness of thefinal shootout at Abe’s den. Let us overlook that factor though, because Looper is only halfway towards a classof movies I have now come to classify as “The Incredible Hulk” movies, wherethe darkness of the protagonist’s past kind of unfolds to display hisawesomeness, and what is at stake is his overall domestic life. The Taken movies, for example. These moviesare inherently patriarchal, seeking validity and at times authority. There’s arighteousness within them that doesn’t bond with me too well, and here in Looper, while Mr. Willis Old Joe, who isthe template (considering which actor is imitating whom), takes down scores ofGat-men all over the picture, the young Joe is considerably more uncool. As in,they do not operate as Blondie and William Munny, and Old Joe is givenpossession of that righteousness, which the film is planning to subvert allalong. As in, another paternal figure bites the dust. I have to admit, I have absolutely no idea why Mr. Johnson is sodevoutly against the very idea of patriarchy. He provides me with no evidence,no real emotions, but merely conceptual ones. Looper’s essential dynamics is constructed around archetypicalstakes with vague descriptions, otherwise known as clichés, and it is tough toimagine why a good father wouldn’t be borne out of this mess. Is Young Joe,like T-101, so inherently corrupted that there is no way out for a bettersociety than his suicide? Which is what bothers me. The film’s moral dilemma –if you knew who the man who took your wife was and it was you because of whichhe became the killer, what would you do – is so cut-and-dried it hardly meritsany discussion. Especially if the would-be-killer is a little kid. Mr.Johnson’s layout towards the end, especially without a close-up of the Gat-gununtil it appears in Old Joe’s hands, and the presence of a blunderbuss, andcornfields, and the principal characters, serves more as a rendition of theconcept than as a dramatic situation. Any logical question, like why wouldn’tSara follow her kid into the cornfields, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Which Ican live with. And by my estimate of the narrative it doesn’t matter if Cideventually becomes the Rainmaker or not, Young Joe’s actions are more out ofhope masquerading as a belief in humanity, specifically the maternal aspect ofit, than anything else. I mean, it is just about as much of a coin toss as itwas when Patrick Kenzie decides what’s good for young Amanda in Gone Baby, Gone. Young Joe’s choice,although an act of sacrifice, is in no way a guarantee of Cid’s future and ismore in line with Travis Bickle’s need to be a hero than Patrick’s courageousassumption of responsibility. I mean, does Young Joe’s suicide in anyway have abearing on the mother’s and the child’s safety? What if the next one in themiddle of the night is not a hobo? What happens to Cid’s TK abilities, which ifwe’re not mistaken, are playing into Magneto’s arguments when we automatically assumethem in a negative light? Is it a fear of both evolution and technology? YoungJoe’s action doesn’t provide an answer to any of these questions, other than totell us that it was an act of sacrifice. Which doesn’t exactly convince me. Isit helplessness masquerading as sacrifice, and I wonder what stopped Mr.Johnson from having Young Joe ram Kid Blue’s scooter into Old Joe. I mean,since it is a constructed dynamic, why not have the loop closed and let the boyhave a father. If the future could be changed and is a set of infinitepossibilities, why not take the responsibility of trying to seek the best one. Whynot make the present better? You see, Patrick Kenzie never flinched, stuck towhat he believed in, lost everything, and still had the humanity to sit besidelittle Amanda. That is humanity for me, a supreme act of courage. What YoungJoe has done simply absolve himself of any possible culpability.
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