When Angelina met Johnny in The Tourist

10 April 2012

The Tourist is only the second full-length film to have been written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. But then the first was The Lives of Others, which in 2007 won him the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

That thriller about the Stasi cost $2 million to make and took $77 million at the box office. Many reviewers thought it the film of the decade, an absolute revelation about the conditions of life behind the Iron Curtain. Others, however, argued that the way the Stasi hero, Wiesler, secretly helps the dissident artists he has been set to spy upon is implausible. Henckel von Donnersmarck replied to one such German critic by pointing out that Schindler’s List authorised such a plot. The critic, the director of a memorial institution, replied: "But that is exactly the difference. There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler."

Be that as it may, what Henckel von Donnersmarck has done next is of real interest. He’s a figure. Born in Germany, educated in St Petersburg and Oxford, he speaks five languages — and stands 6ft 8in tall. Now he lives in LA and he has chosen to follow up his first film with a mainstream Hollywood romantic thriller (albeit set in Venice) with as starry a cast as possible: Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie playing opposite each other for the first time. But, sorry to report, it’s a clunker.

It’s also a remake. Critics going to previews are handed extensive press notes — an introduction to the film based on interviews with all concerned, in Ladybird Book style, portraying the making of the movie in the sunniest possible light, as a uniquely happy coming together of rare talents.

Those for The Tourist, describing how Donnersmarck (if we may be so familiar) came up with the project, which he co-wrote with Christopher McQuarrie and Julian "Downton Abbey" Fellowes, completely fail to mention that it’s a retread of a French film from only five years ago, Anthony Zimmer, directed by Jerome Salle, in which the Angelina Jolie part was played by the estimable Sophie Marceau. Perhaps, in the heat of the moment, they forgot? True, Anthony Zimmer wasn’t set in Venice but around Nice; plotwise, it was the same, though.

A mysterious master criminal, Alexander Pearce, has stolen an immense amount of money from a brutal gangster, Reginald Shaw (glaring baldie Steven Berkoff, always value, even when saying "Where’s my money?"). Pearce is being pursued not only by the murderous Shaw and his cohorts of apelike Russian hitmen but also by the British police, notably the obsessed Inspector Acheson (Paul Bettany, cold blue eyes), who is restrained only by his boss, Chief Inspector Jones (Timothy Dalton, still Bondy).

But Pearce has spent millions on plastic surgery to change his appearance and nobody knows where he is. Then, one day, his estranged girlfriend, Elise (Angelina Jolie), living the high life in Paris, receives a note telling her to catch a particular train to Venice and on it to pick up any man who looks a bit like him, to use as a decoy to distract the gangster and the cops, before they really meet.

She chooses Frank (Johnny Depp), a humdrum American maths teacher, a tourist, on his own, trying to get over the death of his wife in a car crash. She whisks Frank off to her whopping suite in the Danieli but Pearce’s pursuers are soon on to them. Cue chases — over rooftops, through narrow alleys, by speedboat through the canals. And there’s a ball, you bet.

While all this is going on, Elise and poor, baffled Frank (who thinks they speak Spanish in Italy) are — but you guessed? — falling for each other.

The Tourist depends in the end on a plot twist so massive and so coarse that, like the Great Wall of China, it’s a work of man you could see coming from outer space. But that’s not the only problem.

I would like to mention very high up in this list the score, by James Newton Howard. It is the most badgering, pestering piece of work imaginable, always irritatingly a little bit ahead of events, whether drumming up tension before violence, or souping up the emotions before romance. It’s puritanical perhaps to maintain that the best soundtracks are the most disciplined, what is heard relating directly to what is seen. But this musical accompaniment to the narrative is so domineering, it is barely endurable.

Then there is Angelina Jolie. The poet Yeats observed of one lady he fancied that she was "a gazelle". Jolie evokes a more startling beast. Giraffe is unfair, maybe. Okapi? She certainly seems never quite human in this film, never touching or actually desirable. The lascivious film writer David Thomson once slavered about of "the carnal embouchure that is her mouth" (making one worry a little about what he hoped to post there). But, if her features have always been so emphatic as to be self-cartooning, she seems here to be made out of some advanced new polymer that takes no impression.

In every scene the director has arranged that all the men within range turn to gaze after her lustfully, while all the women do so appraisingly and jealously, a soon exhausted effect, hopefully not written into her contract. When we see her standing at the prow of her speedboat charging down a canal, it’s suddenly clear what is her true calling, not so much to act after all but to serve as a nautical figurehead, cresting the waves ahead of a pleasure boat, perhaps a paddle steamer.

She strikes up no plausible relationship with Depp. For his part, he is, in his subdued, bumbling fashion, rather likeable. But it’s hard to reconcile how he looks now, so sombre and droopy, with his teen idol past. He’s not just a bit plain these days, he is positively doggy, in the best sort of way, the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel way.

The Tourist is, of course, meant as a romp, or more specifically a vicarious mini-break. You get to go to Venice and stay in the most sumptuous suite with, for the ladies, Johnny as swain, for the gents, Angelina as shepherdess. Then, instead of traipsing around the sights, you get caught up in the most exciting and high-ticket adventures. What’s not to enjoy?

But it’s just not so enjoyable, being chivvied along by this soundtrack, in the company of these ill-assorted stars, tracking through an unbelievable story. It has to be said that Venice never disappoints and there was somebody at work in the filming of The Tourist who loves its very bricks. They were what I enjoyed most, the lovely bricks. What was Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck thinking?

The Tourist
Cert: 12A

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