DIRECTOR
Brad
Silberling
SCREENWRITER
Dana
Stevens
based
on the script Wings of Desire by
Wim
Wenders
Peter Handke
Richard Reitinger
PRODUCERS
Charles Roven
Dawn Steel
CINEMATOGRAPHER
John Seale
MUSIC
Gabriel Yared
EDITOR
Lynzee Klingman
CAST
Nicolas Cage (Seth)
Meg Ryan (Maggie)
Andre Braugher (Cassiel)
Dennis Franz (Nathaniel)
Colm Feore (Jordan)
Robin Bartlett (Anne)
Joanna Merlin (Teresa)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 114m
U.S. release: April 10, 1998
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
|
Why
do so many people seem to want so badly to believe in guardian
angels? To me, there's something vaguely creepy and stalker-ish
about the whole concept: invisible beings floating around, watching
you and maybe giving you a kindly nudge every so often. Ick.
Guardian angels sound like a plot devised by an Orwellian government
so that we'll gradually get used to, and even embrace, the idea
of being spied on. (Now that might be an interesting movie
premise. Call Oliver Stone.)
The one angel movie that gets around my defenses is, of course,
Wings of Desire -- Wim Wenders' acclaimed 1988 fantasy
in which Bruno Ganz gives up his halo, becomes human, and wins
the heart of beautiful acrobat Solveig Dommartin. A decade later,
Wenders' vision comes to us Hollywoodized -- not to mention bastardized
-- in the new remake City of Angels, in which Nicolas
Cage gives up his wings to be with surgeon Meg Ryan. The
movie could hardly be a better illustration of Hollywood's uncanny
ability to suck all the brains out of a good idea.
City of Angels begins as Wings of Desire does,
with passing glances at random citizens (in Los Angeles instead
of Berlin) whose thoughts we overhear. Wenders used the device
to make us feel like isolated angels, doomed to eavesdrop on
people but never communicate. The filmmakers here, director Brad
Silberling (Casper) and scripter Dana Stevens, don't sustain
the angel's-eye device. Whereas Wenders established black-and-white
photography as the way angels see the world, this film is in
lush color. In the remake, when an angel becomes human and marvels
at the sight of his own blood -- "Red! Red! Color!"
-- it makes no sense, since we've spent the movie seeing through
his eyes and admiring John Seale's lovely color photography.
Wenders' film was also about duality and splits of all kinds;
its forbidding Berlin Wall (still standing when the film was
shot) and characters with double lives (including Peter Falk
playing himself playing a role in a movie) gave us a brooding
sense of fractured existence. People go through life looking
for wholeness, taking their flawed, painful humanity for granted.
There's also, of course, the eternal divide between the spirit
and the flesh. City of Angels pays some feeble lip service
to this last idea. Nicolas Cage, the angel protagonist, can't
feel or taste or smell anything. He yearns to be human so he
can be with Dr. Meg, who is specifically looking for a guy who
can feel, taste, and smell things, apparently.
Somehow Meg is able to see Nicolas in her operating room, staring
at her over the soon-to-be-dead body of a guy whose heart she's
fondling (this must be what Hollywood calls a "meet cute").
Soon she's telling him how a pear tastes and he's getting advice
from a red-faced Dennis Franz as a former angel turned human.
The spiritual pieties come fast and hard, and we get a bare-assed
Dennis Franz running into the surf and a scene where Meg stabs
Nicolas with a knife to see if he bleeds. If a woman stabbed
me to see if I bleed, I'd want to be anywhere that she's
not. But no, Nic trades in his wings for his blade-happy sweetie.
As always, Nicolas Cage keeps his end of the bargain; he commits
heart-and-soul to a role no matter how stupid the movie is, and
he makes you feel the emotional highs and lows of his newly human
hero. In his early scenes, when he's following Meg everywhere,
he reminds you less of a creepy stalker than of a lost puppy
looking for a warm lap to snuggle in. But after he turns human,
City of Angels loses whatever humanity it had, regressing
into pointless tragedy and manipulative tearjerking. I mean,
even Wim Wenders didn't feel compelled to whack Solveig Dommartin
with a lumber truck, for Christ's sake. We've reached
a weird point in cinema history, where "uplifting"
Hollywood romances are more depressing than solemn German art
films. |
