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Wednesday, March 23, 2011
MOVIE REVIEW
Limitless
A Big Apple Hangover, With
Groundhog Drug Days
Your best friend Doug can't save you now: Bradley Cooper as Eddie in Neil
Burger's sci-fi drama "Limitless".
Rogue
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Wednesday,
March 23, 2011
"Limitless", now playing across North America, is more satire than sci-fi, the
kind of Tom Wolfe Vanities satire that lampoons self-centered,
short-attention-spanned young American males, the kind who stand around and
"look pretty" after a get-rich-quick high hits them. Neil Burger directs
Bradley Cooper in the aforementioned role, a role Mr. Cooper has played before,
well sort of -- with alcohol -- in
"The Hangover". (Note that the hotel
corridors in the photo of this review and the blue-highlighted one above look
similar.)
Based on The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, "Limitless" opens with Eddie
(Mr. Cooper), a frustrated writer under contract to complete a book.
Months pass before a single character is typed on the screen Eddie stares at.
Bedraggled, he's a mess, and a hopeless one at that. Eddie's lost the
woman of his dreams, and his ex-brother-in-law happens to have a diamond-like
pill to solve Eddie's writer's block, which propels the protagonist into an
alternate reality and identity. Suddenly Eddie's lust for life and the
women (whether antagonistic or not) who happen along the way, increases tenfold.
Money comes easily too, as does his former squeeze Lindy (Abbie Cornish).
Just like Buzz Lightyear in the overrated
"Toy Story
3", Eddie is multilingual. (Eddie's sold separately -- as in
separate mental states -- drug-induced or otherwise.)
Mr. Cooper is perfectly cast as a pretty-boy type stripped down, built up and
stripped down again, yo-yo style. The drug of choice is a conduit for the
alacrity of how a "golden boy" sails through life (ala Tom Cruise in "Vanilla
Sky" among others), without having to reckon with the consequences of
self-indulgence and egotistical vainglory until it's almost past too late.
Eddie effortlessly trades in money markets. Like some real-life Wall
Street market traders Eddie does his best work all drugged up. He tries to
"school" high-rolling investor Cal Van Loon (Robert De Niro) but Carl is only
playing along long enough to allow Eddie to see the error of his ways -- but
does he see them?
Eddie's a shark, but by the film's slimy, grimy Peckinpah nadir his
shark-toothed grin is smug and hollow. "Limitless" has its cheeky, funny
moments, giddily indulging in the folly and harsh reality of addiction, allowing
others to get in on the hallucinogen act that crazy sells. It's a
fast-food culture out there, and Eddie knows how to short-cut to that quick fix.
And he doesn't need the latest iPad or iPhone 4 to attain it. No waiting
in long lines at o'dark-hundred hours for the latest high. Eddie isn't
destitute or necessarily in dire straits early on, yet he has been cast as
the chosen one, complete with oracle-like power thanks to a drug more
heavenly to many men than Viagra. Mr. Gyllenhaal's salesman in
"Love And
Other Drugs" just couldn't compete with this. He wouldn't stand
a chance.
Eddie is an inflated superhero cut from the me-me-me 1980s. His veneer is
fleeting and his weakness is as imminent as the end of his next sexual conquest.
Especially with the drugs, Eddie is on constant auto-pilot, so much so that he
scarcely enjoys the many though ephemeral lucid moments the film provides him.
Mr. Burger's film doesn't take drug use too seriously, but there are parts of
"Limitless" that are chilling, and feel like a metaphor for the HIV/AIDS crisis
that ravaged New York City, where "Limitless" takes place.
Kiss the rich: Abbie Cornish as
Lindy and Bradley Cooper as Eddie in Neil Burger's sci-fi drama "Limitless".
Rogue
In some scenes "Limitless" has a seductive power but the effect is only as good
as the strength and credibility of the addiction -- and aloofness of those who
don't (or won't) see that Eddie can't possibly be *this* sharp. As
casually narrated by Mr. Cooper, there's a Bret Easton Ellis undertone to Eddie,
albeit without all the extreme, graphic violence and self-hatred. Where
Mr. Ellis' American Psycho book character (played in Mary Harron's
horror-comedy by Christian Bale) was a slick, self-hating savage sociopath,
misanthrope and woman-hater, Eddie probably falls more on this ignorant,
blissfully unaware side of
1980s New York City "preppie killer" Robert Chambers.
An unseen episode in "Limitless" seems to loosely reference Mr. Chambers, though
not through his deadly violence against Jennifer Levin during a sexual episode
in Central Park, but rather via Eddie in a hotel room during a sexual encounter
with a model in the story.
If there's anything else disconcerting about "Limitless", written by Leslie
Dixon, it's the idea that you are only someone of note and significance when you
make lots of money (never mind how much), and that your substance and values as
a person are irrelevant. Women will only flock to a man, "Limitless"
implies, when that man has a ton of money, regardless of anything else (see the
recent
"Take Me Home Tonight".) Never mind that the men are complete
schmucks -- which Eddie occasionally is -- if the bacon's on the table, said
woman, any woman, will be sure to fry it up in a pan and keep coming back for
more.
The cynicism underlying such folklore legitimizes a mate-selection theory out of
whack with the current economic realities for most men available to women.
It also comes with the implicit idea, and fallacy, that lazy-boned men get
instant rewards for inaction thanks to excessive drug use, while blue-collar men
may toil or be lazy and are stigmatized and ridiculed for both -- and even more
so, especially if they indulge in the same drugs (or worse.)
Mr. Cooper, a clean-cut fellow, inhabits privilege as Eddie through illicit
means, and therefore mocks it, making fun of himself in the process. Mr.
Cooper isn't as comic in "Limitless" as he is likely to be in a couple of months
when "The Hangover Part II" arrives, but here he has more freedom to make, and
learn from, his mistakes. Even so, we're not so sure that his Eddie has
learned his lesson when all is said and done.
While Mr. Burger's jarring film is watchable I don't think "Limitless" is an
easy film to embrace. Its faults (its reliance on stupefying and shallow
characters who are surely brighter than portrayed) are too distracting to be a
wholly enjoyable experience. There are many scenes of blunt, rough
violence ala
"Taken", pushing the edges of the PG-13 rating. Still, Mr.
Burger's drama gets its fair share right on a landscape where every possible
thing seems incongruous and wrong, and far too easily so.
With: Andrew Howard, Anna Friel, Johnny Whitworth, Robert John Burke, Darren
Goldstein, Ned Eisenberg, T.V. Carpio, Richard Bekins, Patricia Kalember.
"Limitless" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association Of America
for thematic material involving a drug, violence including disturbing images,
sexuality and language. The
film has brief French, Italian and Spanish language with English language subtitles.
The film's running time is one hour and 46 minutes.
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