Review: Trance (2013)

             

  Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) has a fantastic eye for editing, cinematography, and sound. Watching one of his movies is like riding a roller coaster through dazzling images and movement. So when it comes to his movies, the characters and stories often don’t matter as much as what you literally see on screen. Not to say that he doesn’t have good stories or characters (one of the best “stories” being Millions, in my opinion), but they generally take a backseat to the look of it all. In the case of Trance, Boyle’s newest film starring James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel, and Rosario Dawson, Boyle doesn’t fail to deliver some fancy shots, editing, and visuals to keep the eyes entertained. Sadly, the story is so blaringly convoluted and unnecessarily complicated that it distracts from everything else.

                The film follows an attempt by Frank (Cassel) and his henchmen to extract a memory from the mind of Simon (McAvoy) using a hypnotherapist, Elizabeth (Dawson). Simon stole a very rare and expensive painting from an art auction but was hit on the head in the process and now can’t remember where he put it. The only route left for them to uncover the location of the painting is through Elizabeth which leads to many opportunities for blending, warping, and mixing up reality from fiction in sequences which depict what Simon and others see during hypnosis. Obviously this provides Boyle a hay-day of chances for cool editing tricks and camera shots, and you get some. For the first 30 minutes or so, the story is rolling right along and everything is feeling OK and like a smarter-than-usual heist movie. But then things dive off the deep end.

Without going into details, suffice to say, Boyle should’ve stuck with his screenwriter from other successful occasions, Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Sunshine). The story begins to blunder, quickly, from one confusing plot twist to the next, and the editing goes overboard, making it nearly impossible to follow. No doubt this was intentional in seeing how it wraps itself up at the end, but this is just ridiculous. Characters’ motives aren’t clear, and neither are they as characters. Ultimately, the story winds up echoing the message of Memento and others like it: the mind can make itself forget things. Would you rather forget or remember? It is an interesting concept and films like Memento have done it incredible justice. But the overly complex story of Trance overshadows the message, style, and characters. What you’re left with is a bag full of interesting tidbits and ideas, but nothing really comes together. For Boyle, one of my favorite, modern directors, this was very disappointing.