director
James Mangold
screenwriter
Michael
Cooney
producer
Cathy Konrad
cinematographer
Phedon Papamichael
music
Alan Silvestri
editor
David Brenner
cast
John Cusack (Ed)
Ray Liotta (Rhodes)
Amanda Peet (Paris)
John Hawkes (Larry)
Alfred Molina (Doctor)
Clea DuVall (Ginny)
John C. McGinley (George)
William Lee Scott (Lou)
Jake Busey (Robert Maine)
Pruitt Taylor Vince (Malcolm Rivers)
Rebecca DeMornay (Caroline)
Leila Kenzle (Alice)
Bret Loehr (Tim)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 87m
u.s.
release: 4/25/03
video
availability: VHS/DVD
official
website
other james
mangold films
reviewed on this website:
- cop
land
- girl,
interrupted
- walk
the line
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Full disclosure: I have little
patience with thrillers that play with you for its own superior
sake, leading up to a big twist ending designed to make you feel
like a sap. Unless it's done in fun (Brian De Palma's specialty)
or driving at something larger than simply the filmmakers' dominion
over a gullible audience, what's the point? You've just spent
a chunk of the day being manipulated for nothing. The rain-swept,
brooding, violent thriller Identity is one such elaborately
crafted necklace of nothing. The characters are not people; they're
not even pawns. They're just pieces of the puzzle.
Fate, or Michael Cooney's contrived
screenplay, brings together ten people -- er, pieces -- on a
dark and stormy night: limo driver Ed (John Cusack) and his movie-star
employer Caroline (Rebecca DeMornay); detective Rhodes (Ray Liotta)
and a vicious killer he's transporting (Jake Busey); an unhappily
and recently married young couple (Clea DuVall and William Lee
Scott); a star-crossed family of three (stepdad John C. McGinley,
mom Leila Kenzle, and little son Bret Loehr); and Larry (John
Hawkes), manager of the remote motel everyone converges on. The
roads are flooded, the phone lines are out, and people start
to die. Something nasty is found in a clothes dryer; one character
is permanently silenced with a baseball bat; and so on. Identity
is a guess-what's-real slasher movie with high secretive overtones.
There's more to what we're seeing than we're seeing.
The question is whether we
care about seeing the Big Truth. Every now and then, we move
away from the body count at the motel and sit in on a hearing
concerning a condemned prisoner. Is this the Busey character,
or someone else? This is a very short movie, so it's obvious
to anyone who's seen a movie before that there's something fishy
about this hearing, which appears to be taking place on the same
dark stormy night. In such thrillers, any apparently pointless
scene is really there for a reason -- maybe the Big Reason.
A good cast is enacting this
fancy rubbish; what drew them to the material besides its self-conscious
cleverness is beyond me, since they rarely get to push the tight
envelope they're stuffed into. Cusack, as always, exudes an aura
of intelligent decency, which of course sets you up to think
he might be the mysterious killer (especially after he talks
about his history of blackouts). Most of the other characters
pretty much are what they appear to be, though each has his or
her secrets and shames. Mainly, the rigid control of the screenwriter
rules the day. There was probably precious little improv on the
set, and few discussions of character depth, since everyone is
no more or less than what the script requires.
Perhaps the biggest mystery
of Identity is its director. James Mangold has done a
dour indie drama (Heavy), a convoluted cop drama (Cop Land),
a sensitive female ensemble piece (Girl,
Interrupted), and a cross-century romance (Kate &
Leopold). Now this. If we try hard enough to find a thematic
link in Mangold's work, it would appear to be the onion-like
layers of delusion and deception hiding our true selves from
other people and from ourselves. Identity, I guess, fits
into that, but it's a pretty crude and obvious reiteration of
his theme. If you want to get to the bottom of your characters'
identities, it helps if they have identities first.
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