Predestination
(2014)
(SPOILERS) I’m not the biggest fan of predestination paradox
time travel yarns. I’m even less a fan of time travel tales requiring their
protagonists to undertake key acts in order to fulfil the causal loop of a
bootstrap paradox. Both require some pretty hefty pre-designated rules that
don’t readily apply themselves to scrutiny or internal plausibility (breaking
down to, “Because the writer says it’s so”). Since Predestination immerses itself in both these narrative conceits
then, I really ought to have come out less than impressed. However, its eccentric
mystery mostly flies for the sheer verve with which the Spierig brothers
embrace the predestination theme of Robert A Heinlein’s 1958 short story All You Zombies; this isn’t just a case
of a Terminator-style twist to top
things off. Each event in their intricate screenplay rests against each
successive event so as to infuse a Russian doll of paradoxes. More than that, though,
Predestination pulls off a (for the
most part) touching character study taking in themes of alienation, loneliness
and determinism.
Indeed, it’s the opening 50 minutes, a sad tale told in 1970
by John (Sarah Snook) to Ethan Hawke’s time-travelling barman from 1985 that
really seals the movie, rather than the convoluted series of reveals that comprise
the last half. Hawke is employed by the Temporal Agency, on the trail of the
Fizzle Bomber. We are told that, in a more elaborate version of Minority Report, “We prevent crime before it
happens”, but so far he has been unable to stop the Bomber killing 11,000
people in New York in 1975. This is as prelude, however. It’s evident John will
be the primary suspect as Hawke wouldn’t be indulging his tale for so long as a
mere red herring. As a result, the clues leading to the actual reveals and
twists (the burnt face of Hawke’s former identity, the unseen suitor of Jane,
John’s former identity) are slightly undermined by the filmmakers’ tendency to
elaboration; by the time we are granted a montage sequence in the final minutes
“explaining” what has long been evidenced, it suggests a lack of faith in the
audience.
It’s fairly commendable to have a told tale occupy the bulk
of a movie the way this does, though. One might argue it’s all about the pay
off but, as elaborate as that is in its preposterous employment of time-travel theory,
it’s the emotional sway of Snook’s phenomenally assured performance that raises
the Spierigs’ movie another level. John is abandoned outside an orphanage as a
baby Jane in 1945. She dreams of becoming an astronaut but is rejected by the
Space Corps (the picture’s unheralded alt-history is one of its most winning
aspects) when her intersex status is discovered. After an affair with a man who
suddenly ups and leaves her, she gives birth to a child who is stolen from the
nursery. On top of that, the caesarean operation leads to the removal of Jane’s
ovaries and uterus, giving an enthusiastic doctor the chance to initiate an
unsanctioned creation of a male urinary tract; Jane had no choice but to submit
to a full gender reassignment. As John, he takes up writing true confession
articles for a glossy magazine as The Unmarried Mother.
Even (or especially, depending on how one views the second
half’s conceits) leaving out the crucial fateful interventions that dictate
Jane/John’s life, Snook makes this narrated account utterly compelling. So much
so, one is willing to forgive the slight leaps in motivation (it’s never so
much portrayed as told that she hates the mysterious lover enough to kill him).
Snook’s John has a touch of the DiCaprio in appearance, and she navigates Jane
and John with such instinctively refined modulation that Hawke is really only
required to show up and take notes.
So the second half of the picture reveals how all this falls
into place. Hawke is, of course, John after facial reconstructive surgery. He
follows a careful series of instructions to ensure his own life follows its
predestined course. It’s John who is Jane’s mysterious lover (taken to 1963 to
“murder” the lover, it is love at first sight when he meets Jane; forget about
retroactive abortions, this takes the biscuit with its proto-narcissistic
feats), it’s Hawke who snatches baby Jane from the nursery and delivers her to
1945. And it’s Hawke who pops to 1975 (“unauthorised”)
to ensure John makes it to 1985 to have the surgery on his extensive burns.
It’s also an older Hawke who turns out to be the Fizzle Bomber, his illicit
jumps fostering the onset of psychosis and dementia.
The problem with all this is that it requires a rigorous
rulebook to be even vaguely tenable. The paradox, of course, isn’t. It’s a loop
with no prescribed beginning, bootstrap style, but taken to such an absurdist
extreme that it’s nigh-on irresistible. Since such theories make no sense,
Heinlein/the Spierigs go for broke with it: “The snake that eats its own tale, forever and ever”.
More than that, while there are significant sections of the
picture where one or other of the protagonists is led in his/her course of
action (either by John/Hawke or Noah Taylor’s Temporal Agency boss Mr
Robertson), there are others that require this predestined loop to be tackled
head-on. It appears the only way the rules here work is for everything to be preordained, and so
John/Jane, and by extension the Temporal Agency have no say in what happens;
they are cogs in a machine that must play out in the same cyclic manner. No one
can actually change its course (as such, one must assume the newspaper
headlines we see attesting to its mutability are either manufactured to manipulate
or confabulations of the mind), so any fanciful notion of free will over the
events is an illusion.
If there’s a problem with this approach (assuming you’re
willing to run with it in the first place), it’s that it really needs to be
challenged at some point. Time Crimes
(curiously, both films utilised bandaged protagonists as a means of concealing
the central twist) irritates because it rather ludicrously has its protagonist
choose halfway through to undertake the acts inflicted upon him during the
first half of the picture; the very awareness of his involvement would change
the minutiae of those events, unless he became a “zombie” compelled by the
timeline to enact his experiences just so.
The Spierigs also fail to address this concern directly. They make a
fist of it with John not recognising himself as the lover who spurned Jane,
when he first sees himself in the mirror (part of him could only see the
bastard who ruined her life), but the actual relationship with her requires
more than falling head over heels to avoid questions of “Why does he go through
with hurting herself?” and “Wouldn’t he want to tell her his true identity?” It
probably wouldn’t have taken much to cover this; simply having Hawke attempt to
shoot himself in the head but failing, after killing his older self would have
addressed the point. But without it, the Spierigs must rely only on the
philosophy of predestination rather than exploring the detail of how they see
it working.
This isn’t a deal breaker, though, as underlying all this
(much more so due to Snook than Hawke’s reliable but unremarkable showing) is a
desperate, hopeless sense of the strictures of fate and yet, simultaneously,
our own responsibility for our actions (in the context of the story Jane/John,
cruelly, has “no one but her/himself to blame”). The All You Zombies title itself appears to comment on our automatic,
conditioned responses to lives we only think we have a say in.
I enjoyed the Spierig’s previous (also Hawke starring) Daybreakers, although it didn’t wow me.
That was relatively low budget, but this cost a fraction of that picture and
looks great, thanks to Ben Nott’s cinematography and Matthew Putland’s design
work. That the brothers are willing to take structural risks (the front-ended tale
told) makes the formally much more familiar second half a slight comedown, but
there’s still a satisfying exactness to following through with the premise. It
just can’t quite pay off the emotional wallop of Snook confronting herself by
having Hawke confront himself. If she isn’t on the road to the next big thing
as a result of Predestination, she deserves
to be.
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