Minority Report
Starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max Von Sydow
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Now Showing At Veena (Patna)
At times, as we watch Steven Spielberg’s latest spin on futuristic trauma, we wonder if we’re watching a Hindi film. A slick, supple and slender film, but nonetheless inured to Hindi film conventions.
Now take this particular sequence from Spielberg’s sleek spinball: a woman who can see into the future accompanies fugitive Tom Cruise into a shopping mall. As the cops run helterskelter searching for our hero on the run she murmurs, “Just stand here.” At that very minute a man with a bunch of balloons passes in front of Cruise, blocking him from the surveillants’ view.
Now take this sequence: Cruise is chased into a futuristic car manufacturing plant where he gets squeezed into a moulding machine. We soon see him emerge in a sleek sports car and drive away.
Futuristic formulism? Not quite. Spielberg’s film comes just a few months after Artficial Intellience, his tribute to Stanley Kubrick. In Minority Report he takes us straight into the year 2054 for a thought process and a cerebral drill that thrills, even as it kills our pre-conceived notions of formustic potions.
Slickly mounted and ultra-deftly designed to convey both the irony and immediacy of a world spinning out of control Minority Report is remarkably photographed by Janusz Kaniski to portray a universe of painlashed chicness. Thrown into this world of dizzying daredevliry is John Anderton (Cruise) heading an organization called Precrime which reads into potential crime-perpetrators’ minds and pre-arrests them.
The film opens on a shrieking note when a man is about to slam his wife shut for life for infidelity. Spielberg doesn’t flinch away from the brutality of a life lived on the edge. At the same time his vision of a counter-utopian America isn’t sordid or sleazy. His characters, like Anderton’s wife and other female characters except one, are notably under-developed, and yet able to convey a sense of wacked-out anguish.
The twist in the tale of pre-empted crime is the fact that John (played by Cruise with bridled brio) sees himself committing a crime. He has no clue who the man in the computer-generated vision of futuristic crime is, or why John is about to turn murderous.
That sense of Kafkaeque mystery compounded by an urgent flick-of-wrist action, gives Minority Report its favoured flavour. The second half of the pacy pyrotechnics is devoted almost entirely to John’s on-the-run adventures as he takes off with the woman (Samantha Morton) who can “see” and communicate future crime, to countermand his own criminal’s nemesis.
The techno-savvy mumbojumbo and the cyber-scopic gadgetry in Minority Report has compelled foreign critics to compare Spielberg to John Woo. But that, I think, is doing disservice to the master creator of films of such deepening and diverse human interest as ET and Saving Private Ryan.
Though the futuristic action sequences are staged with passion and panache they don’t take over the narrative. At heart, Minority Report is an oldfashioned whodunit . But with a difference. For here, the protagonist knows he’s gonna do it and wants to stop himself before “hedunnit”
The synthesis of crime and psycho-drama works well most of the way. The pounding motions slow down only when the narrative begins to resort to trite conventions, like picking on the unlikeliest character to come out of the closet as the villain and his exposure as the king-pin at a distinguished social do. These are sequences that would do a Vikram Bhatt proud, as they would’ve done Manmohan Desai proud in the past.
As Hollywood discovers the thrill of melodrama, it gets exported back to India in the guise of an import. It beats me why audiences should sit and watch this confluence of comicbook caper and traditional crime thriller in the Hindi language, specially since the dubbing is a wee clumsy.
Imagine, an actor with a clipped American diction like Max Von Sydow (who plays Cruise’s mentor) pronouncing the name Agatha with a stressed second “a”. Or when aforementioned Agatha, plunges into a gooey oasis of chemicals to pre-empt crime, emerges from the water at the start to exclaim, “Maar Dala!” we almost feel she’s paying a homage to the Indian hit of the season Devdas.
Unlike Cruise’s film Vanilla Sky which was essentially an excuse to demonstrate his ability to go beyond pretty-boy roles, Minority Report gives the world’s highest paid movie star a chance to immerse himself in the pain, bewilderment, anger, and tensions of his character while remaining a male sex symbol who’s sexully objectified by women of all ages on more than one occasion.
After all’s said and done Cruise plays a family man, mourning for a missing son. Even when the budget touches the sky, there’s no getting away from the pain and pleasure of family ties. Apart from Cruise the other interesting performance comes from the Irish actor Colin Farrell who plays Cruise’s chief adversary at work. Farrell is watchable mixture of Clarke Gable and Brad Pitt.
In a way he best symbolizes the spirit of Spielberg’s film. The more you escape into the future the more you look back in nostalgic pleasure.
Rating: Tom Cruise Ki Ajeeb Dastaan….
