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November 26, 2005
Gary Arnold loved it: The Passenger
Washington Times' Gary Arnold is not over the moon about Sony's Classic: "If anything, The Passenger was the movie in which Mr. Antonioni, who recently turned 93, appeared to be emptying the creative well down to the last muddy drops. In his previous MGM fiasco, Zabriskie Point, the preposterously oversold and deflating hippie rhapsody of 1970, the director stranded himself in Death Valley.
"The Passenger found him lost in the desert again, this time a North African desert, with Algeria meant to simulate Chad, or anywhere uprisings were topical. [The film's] anticlimax is nestled inside a tediously affected shot sequence designed to slide the camera from an inside-looking-out position in Locke's street-level hotel room to the reverse outside-looking-in vantage point. There was a great deal of praise at the time for this flourish, more welcome as a practical matter because it cued spectators that the funeral was just about over.... To the extent that he's characterized, lackluster Locke inspires no confidence as sleuth, impostor or amorist. The film generates scant incentive to care about the gradual expiration of a character who fails to embody much life or establish urgent claims on credibility or sympathy."
Posted by pride at November 26, 2005 10:49 AM
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