HEAVEN (Tom Tykwer, 2002) R

Reviewed: December 20th, 2002

Tykwer's films traffic in fate and serendipity, two themes which heavily factor into Heaven's script (written by Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the late, great filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski) thus making the T/K match-up fitting. Unfortunately the term work-in-progress also factors heavily into Heaven's script, and the finished film feels like anything but; this is an incomplete movie with gaping second half deficiencies (an all too common cinematic problem, of late). Clocking in at a brief 97 minutes, Heaven's strong first half features a dynamo of a performance from Cate Blanchett, playing a decent teacher who -- in a passionate act of revenge -- attempts to blow up her husband's drug supplier, an endeavor which goes horribly awry. What at first I thought would be a relatively shallow terrorists-and-their-motives query promptly turned into an inscrutable and malnourished love story, a The Princess and the Warrior scenario in gender reverse (meaning instead of a woman who falls at-first-sight in love with a man, then spends the rest of the film trying to convince her object of affection they were meant to be together, we have a man -- played by Giovanni Ribisi -- who falls at-first-sight in love with a woman, then spends the rest of the film...). Tykwer's got the intangible air of destiny down past (he's one of the only directors around who can get away with having his would-be lovers just happen to have the same birthdays), but the fate justification can only carry a movie so far. The second half of Heaven follows the allegedly amorous duo into a church for a clumsily written, should-be crucial scene -- in which Blanchett talks about how she's lost faith in everything and wants to take responsibility for her actions -- that completely undermines all of what follows, since all of what follows shows her continually doing the exact opposite. This contradiction fails to cohere in an appropriately hypocritical or ironic fashion; instead it just feels like Tykwer et al. quickly forgot the crucial scene even exists. Meanwhile, Blanchett never loves Ribisi (though she lies and tries to convince herself otherwise), but the ending of the movie seems to suggest Blanchett once again ran out of Ginko and failed to remember this (if that actually sounds like a compliment, note I mean it as an "uh... what?" criticism). I've read Kieslowski intended Heaven to be the first part of a three film trilogy and it's possible all my misgivings could be quelled should this trilogy ever be completed. As is though, Heaven must be catalogued away in the already overflowing section labeled Interesting Failure.

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