A Life Less Ordinary (1997)
Director: Danny Boyle

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JUMP DOWN:        Right Amount of Edge        Ewan McGregor
Cameron Diaz        The Dark Side of Venus        Support
Holly Hunter        Dream Pop        Channels of Style for Stored Rage       

This fast-paced romantic comedy begins in a teeming police precinct as we know them from "realistic" TV shows, except that all the decor and costumes are bathroom-porcelain white. 1   We are, it turns out, in heaven, where Gabriel (Dan Hedaya), a decidedly down-market vision of the archangel, is chewing out Jackson (Delroy Lindo) and O’Reilly (Holly Hunter), two operatives in charge of making earthlings fall in love. He throws case folders at them as he hollers how match after match has broken up. The two angels are facing a problem we all recognize. As O’Reilly tries to explain, "Things have changed down there. Men and women, they’re not like they used to be"; later Jackson reminisces, "I remember the good old days. All you had to do was introduce a man and woman--nature did the rest." The movie picks up on our sense of belatedness, of living in a world complicated far beyond the capacity of our emotions to adapt. We hustle more, in pursuit of commodities and experiences that have shifted from the category of "luxury" to "staple," while feeling that we experience less simple pleasure than our parents and grandparents did, both in their lives and at the movies that supposedly reflected them. Inflexible, Gabriel tells Jackson and O’Reilly that they have to make a success of their next case or face what appears to be the most unpleasant consequences imaginable: returning to earth as humans.

The team who made A Life Less Ordinary--director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge, cinematographer Brian Tufano, editor Masahiro Hirakubo, producer Andrew Macdonald, and star Ewan McGregor--gave us the gratingly cynical Scottish film noir Shallow Grave in 1995 and the repellently manic-anomic Trainspotting in 1996. These first two flashy movies show a jejune desire to shock and dismay, no matter what overall impression, or incoherent lack of one, a disturbing scene might contribute to. They’re all edge, which has the same effect as it would in a jigsaw puzzle, making it easy rather than rewarding to put together. Despite the movie’s literary pedigree, the way arty kids talked about Trainspotting, in particular, resembles the way mass audience teens talk about slasher movies, as a challenge to their visceral endurance. The fact that with Trainspotting there was an additional, higher bar to inclusion in the in-group doesn’t change this. With Scream the second bar was getting the self-referentiality of the rules; with Trainspotting it was getting that enjoyment of the flashy style didn’t require any moral distance from the irredeemable characters.

So you may go into A Life Less Ordinary expecting that nihilism and kinky thrills will sour everything, but the opening in heaven allays those rational fears. There’s a sweet-pickle zing that tells you from the outset the romantic comedy will carry you through the black-comic mayhem. You know that the violence is just part of what the angels have to do in the modern world to get a poor boy and a rich girl to fall for each other, and so you’re free to laugh because what you’re seeing is justified by the concept.

Which is to say that A Life Less Ordinary has just the right amount of edge for Boyle and his collaborators. And it works even though the group changed their tone specifically (though in vain) to have a breakout hit in the States. As Macdonald put it: "It is like a game, really. . . . Trying to make something slightly more sugary for America, but something that’s not really a mainstream movie. Using the power of Hollywood to make a non-Hollywood movie." 2   In the event, they did it by connecting to the romantic comedy tradition, which caught the movie out, both despite and because of a long, hard sell in all major media. (It did get some good reviews, particularly Stephanie Zacharek’s on-line at Salon, but the team’s art-film audience was apparently put off by the movie’s sweetness, while the mass audience was put off by the whiff of nightshade in the spray cologne.) Still, to my mind, A Life Less Ordinary, made for 20th Century-Fox, marks one of the few occasions when Hollywood’s impulse to lighten everything was just what the artists needed.

It also surprises me that I like a Hollywood movie featuring heavenly intervention in messy human affairs so much. There was a rash of them in the ’40s, which makes sense for a time of worldwide conflict when even civilian casualties were counted in the millions. The intermixing of the afterlife with life on earth was an understandable comfort for people who might not see lovers, friends, or relatives again. But even acknowledging that the impulse is sincere, I find it hard to take, just as today’s angel craze and new age spirituality are, because the intentions imputed to the Creator are so blandly beneficent (in such a patently self-justifying way) that it’s unimaginable how or why He made this screwed-up world in the first place. That’s the beauty of making heaven into a busy precinct station with gruff cops and flirty hookers. Wouldn’t it have to be some such seedy command post to track our affairs?

It makes even better sense when we see how Jackson and O’Reilly bring their assigned couple together: Robert (Ewan McGregor), a janitor, and Celine (Cameron Diaz), the poor little rich girl whose father, Naville (Ian Holm), owns the company Robert works for, until he’s replaced with a robot. By pushing Robert’s life even farther downhill from mere unemployment, the angels provoke him to burst into Naville’s office with a gun and idiotically demand his job back. Robert salvages the situation only by kidnaping Celine, who, having just been informed by Daddy that if she won’t marry for money she’ll have to enter the business, is capriciously and ambiguously complicitous in her own abduction.

Ewan McGregor is an oddly protean young star: I never recognize him at first in trailers. But that formlessness is just what makes Robert’s character hold together. Robert is a baby-faced bottom-scraper who repeatedly bores his fellow janitors with the plot of the trash novel he plans to write and that he imagines will take him out of all this. His supervisor refers to the unwritten novel when she gloatingly tells him he’s been replaced by the automaton, and Celine is later able to guess the entire plot after he’s told her half a sentence of the premise. Robert, groomed like a David Cassidy look-alike, has the body and soul of a kid who thinks he deserves better but has no clue how to get it, and he’s incapable of pulling off big scenes. When he first charges into Naville’s throne room, he grabs one of the cleaning robots and throws it at the high rise window. You know the shot that Robert has in his head--in slow motion we’d see the robot and window glass burst outward and rain down on the plaza below. But the window is unbreakable and the robot bounces off, rights itself, and continues its duties without losing a beat. (It’s pretty plain that replacing Robert with a robot is not an inefficient move on the company’s part.)

McGregor pulls off something semi-miraculous for a comedy in which the romance predominates over the slapstick: he’s always more of a loser than you expect and yet he carries the picture, the slapstick and romance alike. In interviews McGregor has come across as something of a yob, dissipated in his behavior, cynical in his attitude. Robert, by contrast, will never form a crust, and maybe McGregor can do it so well because he has to play it. He certainly sees the joke of Robert’s being such a soft-boiled criminal. Lacking the criminal cunning or even the faintest aura of menace for the kidnaping he only bumbles into, Robert is unmistakably a nice boy. He listens to what people are saying to him and tries to answer honestly. Even when he’s made his ransom demand to a wrong number he doesn’t just hang up but starts chatting with the woman about her daughter. More centrally, when Celine early on mentions to him that she knows how kidnapings work because she was grabbed when she was twelve, his first impulse is to empathize--"God, that’s terrible!"--and his second is to ask how he’s doing compared to the others. Robert’s helpless sincerity gives McGregor opportunities for line-readings that are always inspired, even when delivered in a high whine. His every gape-mouthed response to a set-back is funny, and he’s especially good at No--well … -- No! answers to straight questions. He’s the fulcrum of the movie’s stylistic balance of dark and light. Even when forced to dig his own grave his weeping is as funny as Bert Lahr’s in The Wizard of Oz.

The movie gets its tension from Cameron Diaz’s princess. Some of the early imagery suggests that Celine has been conceived as an Eve figure, still causing mayhem in the fallen world. (She accidentally shoots her wealthy suitor when he flinches under the apple she’s made him put on his head for target practice.) And there is a sense in which Celine is a tough dame out of a film noir, capable of turning her own kidnaping to her financial and sexual advantage, as much as she is an heiress out of a screwball comedy. But the Eve imagery falls off and we begin to see her in contrast to Robert.

She is, of course, a spoiled girl who wants above all to be indulged. When she and Robert are on the lam and discover that her father has canceled her credit card she says she’s never been so humiliated. Robert tries to sympathize but she cuts him off, "You don’t begin to know how I feel! Only the exceptionally rich could know how I feel at a time like this!" (Both complaint and command seem natural to her surprisingly tough voice.) She’s also outraged that Robert is thinking of asking her father for $500,000 in ransom, saying that if she were ransomed for so little money she could never hold her head up in her circle. She’s the kind of rich bitch whom Robert under ordinary circumstances could never touch. And when she’s reading a trash romance she found in the deserted house Robert has taken her to, she sneers at the plot: "This girl meets this guy, they fall in love, it’s bullshit." (In this respect she’s a worthy descendant of Donizetti’s Adina, the independent, landowning heroine of L’Elisir d’amore, who laughs derisively while reading about Tristan and Isolde, and who herself descends from a level-headed Shakespearean heroine such as Rosalind in As You Like It.)

But Celine quickly sees that the kidnaping could be a way of achieving independence from her father without marrying the rich suitors he considers eligible, and so she begins to identify with Robert as she trains him to be a kidnaper worthy of her. She can coach Robert on how to make the ransom call--"Go to your dark side"--because she’s grown up around business negotiations. Her father’s daughter, she finally makes the call herself, and Diaz has a wonderful moment of self-consciousness when Celine recomposes herself afterwards. (Unlike her father she doesn’t want to live on the dark side of her planet.) Robert needs to be toughened, and Celine needs to be softened, as if love were a basic math problem in averaging. And we see it happen as she encourages him to persist in the kidnaping.

As the clear-sighted gal taking advantage of an unexpected opportunity, Diaz has the right kind of glisten in her coolly appraising eyes, which are hard enough to etch glass but faintly starry. In this way Celine’s character reflects one of the things that scares men about women: he’s the romantic one while she’s the practical one, which is the source of the classic film noir suspicion that the woman cannot be relied on because she’s using sex as bait while really holding out for the best chance. You may simply be a means to an end you can’t even guess, fella. But the movie accepts that boys may need a mother’s strength in their women. It leans on it, and increasingly glamorizes the couple as they form a symbiotic bond out of Celine’s effectiveness and Robert’s dreaminess. (Within pop conventions it’s a much more interesting reflection of contemporary discussions of male and female types than you get in Disney’s updated heroines, with their patronizingly trivial glasses and books.)

A Life Less Ordinary clips along like a film noir but also bustles like the classic Hollywood comedies, which are full of reliable supporting performers in specialty numbers. Maury Chaykin as an innocently moronic far-right hunter and Tony Shalhoub as the utterly unsentimental owner of a diner both get terrific little scenes. Shalhoub’s reply to Robert’s claim that Celine is not his type is particularly good: "The issue of whether or not she’s your type--not one that you are likely to have to resolve in this world, or indeed the next since she will be going to some heaven for glamorous pussy and you will be cleaning the floor of a diner in hell."

But I can’t think of any screwball comedy with a supporting female performance as eccentric as Holly Hunter’s here. The joke of these operatives is that they’re licensed to use hitman tactics to make people fall in love. It’s a vulcanized little conceit, and Hunter sees what this hard-rubberiness offers a comedienne. Since the angels have to con the humans they interact with, Hunter plays O’Reilly as unusually forward. Using a different accent in nearly every scene, sometimes she’s spitting tough, like an overheated pop bottle about to blow its cap, and sometimes kittenish, especially funny when by lying across a mountain road she stops Robert’s getaway truck, stretches as if after a nap, and all but purrs as she takes his gun away.

O’Reilly’s perversity isn’t misanthropic because she doesn’t enjoy upsetting people, she simply does whatever it takes to get them to fall in love. She seems to be destroying their lives but she’s doing it for their own good. (This happens--I know.) It requires throwing them off balance violently, but most romantic comedies do that. O’Reilly and Jackson personify the kind of shake-up we know romantic heroes and heroines need before they can wake up to each other, updated for a jaded age. (And Hunter, a veteran of Raising Arizona, gets wild with expertly controlled gusto.) The most skillful sequence has the same tone-switching playfulness as Hunter has here, intercutting between Celine chopping wood while Robert enjoys the trash novel she had sneered at, O’Reilly in bed reading the same book, Jackson reminiscing about how uncomplicated love used to be, and Robert then cooking for himself and Cameron (while the Shirelles sing "Will You Love Me Tomorrow").

The other stand-out sequence is the one in which Robert has to pretend to be a pop star at a karaoke bar and performs to Bobby Darin’s "Beyond the Sea." Celine joins him and the moment blurs into a full-on dance routine with the two of them slicked up like a Vegas version of old Hollywood. In this dream-dance sequence, Celine’s pincurled hair and baby doll dress make her look like an elegantly decadent squeeze toy, a Bertolucci kewpie. The movie is very well shot, with an emphasis on strong horizontal lines so that whether we’re looking at architecture or the open road the world seems framed as wall-filling modern art. But this karaoke sequence is still something special and includes what I can only imagine will be the best shot ever of McGregor. With the camera pointed at him from floor level, Robert glides on his knees across the floor to Celine, so that we’re looking up at him as he looks up at her standing over him. It’s a rare actor who can glamorize his beloved while looking up at her, and still come across as a star. (McGregor’s skill in this department is kin to Nicolas Cage’s in Moonstruck.) Here, and in Little Voice, McGregor has become the most goofy-winning romantic lead in movies. Here especially he’s an Orlando who becomes worthy of his Rosalind before our eyes.

The musical fantasy sequence hollers Dennis Potter, though it’s more purely pop. Potter introduced musical numbers at moments of stress to show how much people need popular music. A Life Less Ordinary shows how living up to the demands of out-of-control situations together can romanticize a relationship. (That’s why the angels treat them so rough.) But you don’t have to wake up from the romance, as you do in Potter. The violence (three people shot in the head, two people shot in the leg) is not meant to register seriously, and yet the picture is far from nihilistic. In fact, you could say that a slight complacency is one of its virtues. It’s a romantic comedy full of stylistic irony and absurdity that really sustains a belief in romantic love. It’s because of the irony and absurdity in fact that we can trust its belief in love, which we certainly couldn’t if it didn’t take into account the unpleasantness of modern life. (That is, if it were a dishonest whitewash, like Sleepless in Seattle, for instance, which tries to jolly us out of grief and depression and loneliness by warming up savorless Hollywood leftovers.)

A Life Less Ordinary’s good will is unfailing. Near the end Jackson is playing blackjack opposite a character who’s been tied to a chair and whose mouth is taped shut. Jackson is dealing, of course, and pretending not to be able to hear his opponent saying no more cards. He deals a fifth card and the total is under twenty-one; he deals a sixth and it’s still under twenty-one, at which the hostage crows in victory behind the electrical tape. In a Tarantino movie, the victim would lose (compare it to the card game in his episode in Four Rooms); Tarantino’s jokes tend to run off sadism, which gives them an enormous charge but also limits them to the shock of enjoying the violation of honor. A Life Less Ordinary is still black comedy, but it shines with a black sun.

The game of twenty-one is an emblem of the way the movie sees love as a bolt of luck from the blue. No one deserves it, strictly speaking, but many of us find it anyway. If you wanted to be really moralistic about it, you’d have to say that Celine doesn’t deserve her father’s money, and that what would be best for both of them would be to go to school or get real jobs. But moral loopholes are central to movie fantasy. It’s not a crime if we enjoy a little larceny or lust or violence, or if actions don’t have real-world consequences. James Toback has called both American sports and entertainment "channels of style for stored rage." 3   He was speaking of them as "endeavors" for athletes and entertainers, but I think it also applies to the projection on the part of spectators and audiences. I don’t know of another movie that gets this element across so penetratingly while preserving the feeling of lightweight comedy. Boyle and company are behaving here, but we feel the force of the bloody logical conclusion to the stand-off between father and daughter though they avert it by means of movie fantasy.

At the end of the movie, Robert spins a knife on a bar top which has carved into it a bisected circle with The End written in one half and The Beginning in the other. Romantic comedies always imply that the future will be free of the complications of the comedy itself, suppressing the awareness we have in life that a couple’s coming together can be so traumatic as to taint and even doom the relationship. So for some people the last drop of A Life Less Ordinary may be too cloying. They may not like the supernatural ending and might even carp about the unexplained limitations of the angels’ powers and omniscience. (Why can they be wounded but not killed, for instance?) Though if you’re going to resist in this way, most movie clouds would disperse. A larger group is bound to find it too violent from the outset, nasty even, especially Celine with her deadly aim. To me A Life Less Ordinary feels like it’s made of an intriguingly unique substance. Calculated in part as a commercial variant on the moviemaking team’s signature black comic style, the movie may be only paste amber, but it has a real bug trapped inside, and it glows.

1. white: In the December 1997 issue of the on-line magazine American Cinematographer Brian Tufano provides interesting technical details about shooting this sequence (Tufano). (return to text)
2. It is like a game: Svetkey 27. (return to text)
3. channels of style: Toback 7. (return to text)