Anne Hathaway's forgotten 2008 film - 'Passengers' Review...

Posted on October 24, 2008 - 10:38pm by michael I have heard that Passengers received little marketing effort because the studio didn’t want it to overshadow Anne Hathaway’s other 2008 film, the relentlessly depressing Rachel Getting Married. I can only imagine that they would do this because they didn’t want her outstanding performance in that film to be juxtaposed with her performance in this one, where she is wildly, horrifically miscast. She is definitely a talented actress, but like it or not, she is just not an adult actress yet, and to cast her in a role as a grief counselor with, ladies and gentlemen, nothing less than two Master’s degrees and a freaking Ph.D is an action of such vacuous logic that I can only imagine it was a blind stab at catapulting her into a mature role that she simply isn’t ready for yet.

And it doesn’t help matters that the first half of the movie is an emotional drama laden with every post-traumatic movie cliché imaginable, and the second half is almost entirely incomprehensible. It’s one of those things where after the movie ends you can tell what they were trying to do with the story, but you find yourself trying to figure out how they went so wrong rather than trying to piece together a complex storyline.

Anne Hathaway plays Claire Summers, a grief counselor assigned to the task of single-handedly providing group therapy to an entire plane full of crash survivors. I’m immediately lost as soon as the therapy sessions begin, because Claire begins right off the bat by interrogating the survivors about the crash as though they are suspects in a crime. Do grief counselors really force trauma victims to relive their traumatic events in such detail? Even when they so clearly don’t want to? Seems a little counter-productive to me.

At any rate, she soon meets Eric (Patrick Wilson, who you may remember from the disappointing Lakeview Terrace and the spectacularly stupid Hard Candy, one of the most offensively idiotic films I’ve seen in recent years). Eric is one of the crash survivors who is “feeling a little too good.” When Claire meets him, she walks into his hospital room where she finds him naked as the day he was born with an ear to ear grin, and he continues this behavior for much of the rest of the movie, charming his way into Claire’s personal life through his clear and deep love of life that's a little creepy but seems to be unique to people who have recently been reminded how fragile it all is.

The movie begins with a subplot that suggests that the airline is trying to cover up the accident, which Claire begins to believe was the result of shoddy maintenance (which, if revealed to the public, could easily put the airline out of business), by blaming it on the pilot. Shady characters show up in the bushes watching Claire’s therapy sessions, and she is confronted by ominous businessmen who warn her not to get too involved with the stories she’s hearing from her patients, who seem to remember a mid-flight explosion, which doesn’t really go along with the sleepy-pilot story that the airline was pushing.

The relationship between Claire and Eric is the most important thing in the movie. It evolves from a therapist/patient relationship (although Eric continuously insists that he’s not a patient) to a romantic one until the third act of the film, which is a bizarre attempt at a Sixth Sense-style twist that totally cancels out everything that we have seen so far. Don’t be surprised if you spend most of the last 30 minutes of the movie trying to figure out what you saw in the first hour that you can actually believe. It’s a noble effort to throw a little mystery into the mix, but the new direction that the story takes at the end doesn’t really fit too well with what we’ve seen so far. The movie simply jolts us out of the story and asks us to go along with it.

Unfortunately, despite some good performances, Claire and Eric have absolutely no chemistry. He seems like a guy in his mid-thirties hooking up with a high school girl, and their love scene might be the most thoroughly stale and generic one that I’ve seen in a movie in years. He moves in for a kiss, she relents, and then we cut to a close-up of her pillow as her head moves on screen, slowly laying down and looking into Eric’s loving eyes. YAWN.

There is also the matter of Eric’s painting. He has always wanted to paint but has always been afraid to (??), but thankfully the crash has made him brave enough to pick up a brush. I’m all for adding a little dimension to characters, but I just can’t get behind scenes like the one where he is showing Claire his newfound love of painting, and then experiences a flood of emotion which he deals with by frantically flinging that brush across the canvas with all his might until he finally dissolves into a tearful breakdown. I’m going to go ahead and suggest that no one in film history has ever made a scene like this work. If you’ve seen one, please let me know, I would love to see a reason why people keep filming them.

Fans of the film will have a blast trying to reconstruct the events of the ending, but personally I just never was able to generate enough interest in the movie to invest the effort into deciphering the twists and turns, who’s alive, who’s dead, and why people know what they know and who they know at different times throughout the movie. It does have a lot to say about death, but unfortunately it doesn’t say anything new or interesting and it proves to be a huge amount of work to discover the tired message. If the movie is going to be so disappointing, they could at least have made it mildly exciting, like Turbulence…

[caption id="attachment_25896" align="aligncenter" width="184" caption="2.5 Beans out of 5."][/caption]