Film critic John Ryan Powell examines a haunting, underrated classic that forces us to come to terms with our isolation and futility.
It’s hard to believe from looking at him these days but once upon a time Jack Nicholson was one of the most interesting screen actors in the world. Starting in the sixties in films directed by iconoclastic auteur Monte Hellman (The Shooting) and extending into the iconic films for the legendary BBS (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces) and further into the classics of the seventies after his star had been confirmed (Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Nicholson had an edgy, engaging presence all his own — equal parts relatable everyman and charismatic rogue — that was perhaps less intense than the Method acting of precursor Brando and contemporaries De Niro and Hoffman but in some ways more immediate and vital; more like the type of slightly off-kilter free spirit you might run into on the street, in the military or on the job. He hadn’t yet resorted to that most regrettable and ignominious habit of the star actor: Just Playing Himself.
In 1973, fresh from his towering successes in Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail and his uncharacteristic turn in the underrated The King of Marvin Gardens, Jack hooked up with Michelangelo Antonioni, himself fresh from the debacle of 1970’s Zabriskie Point, for the final picture of the Italian maestro’s three-English-language-film deal with Carlo Ponti.
Michelangelo Antonioni and Maria Schneider.
Antonioni, perhaps more so than any other of the true giants of cinema, remains a polarizing figure among the critical intelligentsia, who are generally content to grant him just two unequivocal masterpieces: 1960’s L’avventura and 1966’s Blow-Up. His other films, from 1961’s La Notte to 1962’s L’eclisse to the aforementioned Zabriskie Point of 1970, are generally regarded as anything from “minor successes” to “ponderous failures.” That the films all share a deliberate style full of immaculately constructed, carefully framed compositions, ennui-wracked protagonists on existential quests for meaning and purpose in a world largely bereft of either, and skeletal plots that serve as mere framework on which to hang subtle symbolism and subtext, and that all are of a remarkably consistent high quality with few if any hiccups prior to the 1985 stroke that effectively ended Antonioni’s career as an expert filmmaker of the highest order, doesn’t seem to register with the majority of critics — L’avventura and Blow-Up are all they care to see of Antonioni’s singular vision of the world. And what a shame that is, because in so doing they — and as a result the myriad cineastes who put their trust in and allow their tastes to be determined by the “critical consensus” — forsake some of the absolute masterpieces of world cinema: his first color film, Red Desert, which features perhaps the most imaginative uses of color in the history of the medium; L’eclisse, the masterful study of a love affair and its haunting, supremely poetic conclusion; the existential anguish of the soul-searching Il Grido; the definitive look at the counterculture that overtook college campuses in the late sixties, Zabriskie Point. But perhaps none of Antonioni’s numerous neglected triumphs is more deserving of reconsideration and inclusion in the “canon” as The Passenger, finally released in 1975.
One of the most memorable sequences from Antonioni’s The Passenger.
Ostensibly a globe-trotting thriller, The Passenger is in reality a near-definitive study of identity and alienation. Nicholson, in one of his subtlest and least typical performances, plays David Locke, a British-born but American-raised journalist in the African nation of Chad to film a documentary about a conflict between the Chadian government and a band of rebels seeking revolution. Locke, a profoundly bored and unhappy man coasting through life with an abundance of passivity, swaps identities with a remarkably similar-looking man named Robertson who he finds dead on the bed in the hotel room next to his. From there, lacking the drive or imagination to do anything original with his new life as a completely free man, Locke allows his every move to be determined and dictated by the dead man’s rather busy appointment book.
As it happens, Robertson was a gun-runner selling weapons to the Chadian rebels about whom Locke was making his documentary. Though this scenario would provide a fine basis for a quality thriller or action film, Antonioni uses it as the basis for an examination of how easily people can fall into inescapable routines that rob life of any meaning or joy and how and why depressed people who change their surroundings so often find themselves just as unhappy in their new circumstances as they did in their old ones. As Locke himself alludes to in a brilliantly constructed flashback conversation with Robertson — the camera begins with a focus on a seated Locke at work on doctoring his and the deceased man’s passports, then pans left to the window to show Robertson and Locke floating into the frame and talking on the balcony, all in one single, fluid movement — no matter how far people run they always bring themselves with them.
Antonioni on the set of The Passenger.
In addition to being a magnificent mood piece that handles its themes with careful, refreshing subtlety, the film is beautifully acted by Nicholson and Maria Schneider (as “The Girl;” she seemed to have a thing about filmed romances with troubled strangers back in the seventies — most will remember her best as Marlon Brando’s love interest in Last Tango in Paris) and, as I mentioned briefly in describing the flashback above, gorgeously shot. Most of the film’s limited notoriety throughout the years has derived from its penultimate shot, an unbroken seven-minute take in which the camera begins in a hotel room, moves up to and then through a barred window, out into a courtyard, pivots 180 degrees and glides left to observe some characters conversing outside of and then entering the hotel lobby, sweeps to the right and then moves back through the bars and into the hotel room once again for the film’s haunting denouement. According to what I’ve read, the shot required some seven days to set up and realize. Extraordinary.
Languishing in obscure unavailability for about thirty years after its initial release, The Passenger finally received a theatrical re-release in 2005, financed by rights-holder Jack Nicholson, and was then licensed to Sony for a high-quality Region 1 DVD release in April of 2006, its first-ever home video release in North America. That DVD remains in print, readily available from vendors like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It contains two commentary tracks as supplementary features: one with Nicholson, who offers a genial take on the film and its production, and one with screenwriter Mark Peploe (joined by Aurora Irvine), who provides a more analytical track.
Images–Cineplex