The sixth film I have selected in my series of blogs about Best Chemistry in Cinema may come up as a surprise both because of the genre and the oddity of the relationship portrayed by the characters. It has elements that combine the romantic nature of "Terminator", the sci-fi nature of "The Fourth Kind", the obsessive nature of platonic love of "Vertigo" and the sadness of an impossible love from a movie also belongs to my list, which I will name at the end of today's blog.
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| A Masterpiece |
Like it or not, Bruce Willis delivers a stand out impressive performance. He is very convincing as the physically brute but mentally human James Cole, who starts suffering the consequences of time travelling and dealing with parallel realities. Things begin rough for him as in his first trip, he is sent back to the wrong year -1990-, instead of 1996. Right away the movie gets interesting because you feel a lot of empathy for Cole: how are you supposed to gather information for your research, if you were sent to somewhere you're not supposed to be? Moreover, what are you supposed to do now? Needless to say Cole feels confused and lost, and reacts violently trying to solve a puzzle that has no pieces.
Like I said although interesting, this act of the film tends to be overlooked as 'boring', because of Cole's character development. Here we have a tough brute guy who finds himself a stranger in a strange land, so we get to see the birth of his emotions and the appreciation he has for things that are taken for granted in the time where he is. Interned in a mental facility, he meets Dr. Kathryn Railly -played by a gorgeous Madeleine Stowe- who before anything is a scientist and a woman of theory, who doesn't "believe" in things unless it belongs to sciencific method. Kathryn immediatly begins feeling a connection with Cole... not a crush or love or anything like it, just a mere 'connection' with him, as if there is something special about him.
Here is when we have the believer vs skeptic confrontation, that is the main force that drives the movie and both characters together:
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| The believer and the skeptic |
From the beginning, Cole is a believer. He lives and believes his reality and everything that is happening to him. Kathryn is skeptic to this. She is a scientist and she is firm that time travel is impossible. However as the movie progresses, if we were to graph the strength of the believer and the skeptic we would find that the more time passes the believer stops believing in himself and his perception declines, while the skeptic starts to become a believer and her perception increases. This is what I find magical about Cole and Kathryn.
Despite their strong accentuated differences, they accept each other and deal with each other through a varierty of situations. When Cole is sent back to the right year 1996, he still respects and follows his mission, but he starts falling for his new settlement; Kathryn on the other hand, begins losing resources to prove that Cole's explanation to his presence in the world is not time travel.
As the movie progresses into the third act, the two characters begin to experience chemistry and they miss each other and start caring about each other. They find themselves trapped in a battle certain to be lost no matter what they do; a prime example of this is the recorded message left by Kathryn to the laundry business. This stage is a perfect portrayal of a love that is not meant to be, and even though the characters fight real hard to make it through and even start believing that they may make it through the adversities, we all know what the end is going to look like.
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| Cole -the believer- loses faith in his beliefs as time goes by.... Kathryn -the skeptic- believes more and more as time goes by... |
By the time we reach the final act, Karthryn is now the believer and Cole is the skeptic. Amazingly, it is this switch of perception what made the relationship grow between them, and it is why it is so depressing to see them part ways the way they do. They did everything they could that was in their hands up until the last minute and us viewers are true witnesses of it.
Twelve Monkeys is a supreme effort on how to merge different genres into one single cinematic piece, that is able to deliver a strong message in each particular message. The main plot is sci-fi -no doubt about it- but the topic of an impossible love has been treated in a very compelling way. It has a bit of resemblance with the movie that I will write about in my next entry about Chemistry in Cinema, that also deals with an impossible love: "Brief Encounter".
