Self/less
Stars Ryan Reynolds.
Directed by Tarsem Singh.
Now playing at local theaters.
Self/less is a utilitarian thriller that seems determined to skirt every single one of the questions it raises. Directed by Tarsem Singh, known for his meticulous art direction in The Cell and The Fall among others, the film initially has a spark of promise. Ben Kingsley makes an extended cameo as Damian, a generic one-percenter dying of cancer who skipped his daughter’s childhood to get rich. We’re introduced to him via his reflection, suspended like a ghost as he stares out over Central Park. Singh adds grace notes here, whether it’s Damian’s obscenely gilded Kanye video of an apartment or a match cut on Kingsley’s eyes as we jump forward in time, and Kingsley gives his stock role some life. But when Damian decides to go through with a process called “shedding” — transferring his consciousness to another body — Kingsley is traded for Ryan Reynolds (shades of a certain Rock Hudson classic).
The many, many implications of a sexagenarian’s mind in a thirty-something’s body are studiously ignored, even by Reynolds, who makes absolutely zero effort to mimic Kingsley. And for a while, that’s fine, if incongruous. Singh’s aesthetic is dialed way back, but he still moves through the early scenes of Damian acclimating to his younger body with sturdy technique, all neatly composed wide shots and an interesting habit of cutting into the next scene before the current one’s over. It’s all workmanlike, dry stuff, with little in the way of evocative imagery, but it’s fun enough to watch.
Unfortunately, once Damian realizes that maybe the body he’s inhabiting wasn’t grown in a lab after all, things become thematically dicey. He goes to St. Louis, guided by hallucinations, and finds the remnants of his host, Jack’s, old life.
Here Singh throws in a quick fistfight that makes brutal punctuation out of a toilet bowl before seemingly falling asleep through the film’s back half. Things quickly go south. Damian drags Jack’s wife Madeline and her daughter around so he can find more pills that will subdue and, eventually, eradicate all traces of Jack’s consciousness. Scenes between Damian and Madeline are stuffed with disturbing implications, especially before he’s told her the truth, but Madeline’s need for answers is subjugated to the Men’s Drama.
Yes, despite the emotional trauma inflicted on Madeline by her dead husband’s return as not-quite-her dead husband, the real story here is Damian making good on his failures as a father by teaching Madeline and Jack’s daughter to swim. The dilemma posed by Damian’s pills — will he stop taking them and allow Jack to essentially come back to life, or will he stamp Jack’s consciousness out of existence? — is glossed over, given the same surface treatment as the rest of the film’s stickier material.
Compared to, say, Jonathan Glazer’s ink-dark body dysmorphia parable Under the Skin, Self/less doesn’t have the chops to fully interrogate its rich subtext on any level. Its bursts of technical flash dwindle as it drags through its two-hour runtime (snapping to life only for a brief climactic shootout framed at oblique angles), and it’s never able to reconcile the fundamental perversity of its premise.
Given the comparative liveliness of its early, Kingsley-led material, it’s like Singh wanted to make a character study of a dying aristocrat and got railroaded into a bland sf time-waster.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2015.