No, I had not been wondering how long it would take for a filmmaker to apply the conceit of Groundhog Day to a terrorist threat, but now that Source Code has come out, I’m surprised that it took so long. Instead of learning how not to be a jerk, the hero simply has to identify a mad bomber on a commuter train. As he has only eight minutes to work with, it’s no surprise that at first he does not succeed, but unless we’ve crawled out from under a rock, we’ve paid precisely for the fun of watching him try, try again. 

But there’s more to it than that. The hero is actually a comatose war veteran whose head and thorax have been preserved in a pod at a remote military installation, for the purposes of a highly speculative research project. A team of scientists headed by one Dr Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) has figured out how to hook up the mind of the soldier, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), to a re-run of a dead man’s last eight minutes of life. The dead man is, or was, a passenger on the doomed commuter train, and Stevens is channeled into those final minutes in search of vital information. This is not, we are told by Dr Rutledge, time travel. It is “time re-assignment.”

Dr Rutledge wants to know who the bomber is not so that the train and its passengers can be saved — they can’t; that’s why the dead man’s mind is “available” — but in order to forestall the bomber’s next, far more devastating attack. A mumbling, authoritarian government contractor, Dr Rutledge delegates his dealings with Colter Stevens to a lieutenant, Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). Goodwin’s job is to put Stevens through his moves as efficiently as possibly, but, since he’s the hero — a bad guy would just do as he was told; in American movie language, unquestioning obedience is the badge of evil — Stevens wants to know what the moves are. He wants to know why he’s not in Afghanistan with his crew. He wants to talk to his father, unaware that his father has buried what he thought were his ashes. Eventually, of course, he’ll want to save Christina (Michelle Monoghan), the pretty girl in the seat opposite him — on those eight-minute excursions in a dead man’s body — from a fate that, Goodwin assures him, is sealed. 

Director Duncan Jones seems to know what he’s doing, although I have to lodge an impatient sigh at the bad Off-Broadway set that Stevens’s imagines he’s strapped into. I’m going to blame the set rather than Mr Gyllenhaal for the tedium of the scenes in which an angry Stevens confronts Gooowin via flat-panel display, because in his scenes on the train the actor radiates excitement. Indeed, he appears to be making things up as he goes along (which is of course what his character is doing). Mr Gyllenhaal is also convincing as a guy who knows how to do stuff, such as breaking a lock or defusing a detonator. 

Ms Monoghan suggests Sandra Bullock-type reserves that go unsounded; it’s difficult to play smart when your character hasn’t got a clue as to what’s really going on, and there are only so many ways of cocking your eyebrows at the surprising behavior of your everyday commuter friend (especially when you don’t know that he’s dead — as are you!). But the job here is to play a woman whom Colter Stevens would like to know better, and that Ms Monoghan is more than capable of doing. The dramatic weight that’s usually carried by the romantic opposite has here been placed on the shoulders of a woman who does know what is going on, and there are few actresses better endowed to bear up beautifully under such circumstances than Vera Farmiga. 

Vera Farmiga has liquid blueeyes that seem always to have just stopped weeping; they are set beneath eyebrows of Hellenistic eloquence. Her expression updates the tragic sense of life from noisy dismay to sorrowed insight. As the interface between Rutledge and Stevens, Goodwin experiences the soldier’s fear and loss first-hand, and her inclination is to take his side. But time is running out on that second blast, and she is obliged, to her obvious pain, to be impatient and bureaucratic with him. She sticks to the program until Stevens successfully retrieves the bomber’s name. Then, without Rutledge’s authorization, she lets the hero go back in one more time, to try to save Christina. This lands her in the embrace of the military police. Ms Farmiga plays this suspenseful scene not as a woman in danger of getting caught but as someone who is doing the right thing. She doesn’t care what happens to her as long as she’s able to keep her word to Stevens. (Anybody familiar with Wagner’s Die Walküre will clearly see the outlines of the Todesverkundigung scene in Act II.) While Jake Gyllenhaal flies through the story’s outward emergency, Vera Farmiga burns with its dramatic intensity.

Happily, Source Code believes in itself deeply enough to end on just the right kind of note, but we can’t say anything about tha.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.