Moviegoing:
Limitless
It’s hard to imagine what Limitless would be like without its star, Bradley Cooper. I know nothing about the actor himself, but in all of the films that I’ve seen him in he projects an inborn air of the smart guy who never met a corner he wouldn’t try to cut. At the start of Limitless, Eddie Morra has pretty much run out of corners. He can’t get started on the sci-fi novel for which has received a modest advance, and he can’t seem to do anything else, either, except sponge off his lovely girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish) and sip whiskeys through the afternoons. He and his Lower East Side apartment vie for unkemptness.Â
No sooner has Abbie pulled the plug on her support for Eddie than he runs into his former brother-in-law (long story), who used to be a drug dealer. Vernon (Johnny Whitworth) has left the old hard drugs behind, and is now peddling something that is not only just as addictive but farm more likely to render its user a prosperous member of society. Trading on the old eyewash about how we use only twenty percent of our brainpower, Limitless invites you to imagine what it would be like to remember everything that your senses have ever scanned (forget study!), not only effortlessly but correctly. It unfurls a vast turkey carpet crowded with the good things that such powers might effortlessly attain: primarily — and in this I find the screenwriting acute — the interest and attention of other smart people. It also reminds us of what life is like when such powers drain away, as they do every day if you don’t take your nifty little pill. It’s hard to say which vision Mr Cooper plays better. His smiling Eddie is unabashed by wealth; he behaves as if to the manner born. His deperate Eddie, craving the transparent tablets without which he is less endowed than Cinderella in her ash-heap, will do anything for the drug, right up and including the drinking of another man’s blood — a scene that, for all its grisly horror, Mr Cooper infuses with a faint virtual smirk.Â
Eddie has two opposite numbers in these proceedings. The first is a tycoon, Carl van Loon, played by Robert de Niro with suave earthiness. Carl never misses the chance to remind Eddie that he has not worked his way up the ladder of success, but flown to the top on the wings of miraculous gifts. There is another, darker movie implicit in this performance: although purportedly unflappable — tycoons don’t do flap, after all — Carl smolders with resentment even as he picks Eddie’s brain. In the end, when he thinks he has Eddie in his pocket, it’s very agreeable to find out that he’s wrong. More overtly antagonistic is Gennady (Andrew Howard), a Russian thug whose penalties for non-repayment of loans are predictably barbaric. Once he gets hold of the wonder drug, Eddie is in a lot of trouble.Â
The best thing about Limitless is that it ends on a note of redemption; we are spared the Hollywood ending. Eddie Morra is clean but still smart, and very successful, too — the sky’s the limit on his career. But this fabulous resolution is over before it begins. We don’t have time to decide that the now virtuous hero, having become a straight-arrow, honest worker, can really be Bradley Cooper. The film ends with a wink that acknowledges the problem — and then the screen goes black, and “it’s only a movie.”