First movie I’ve seen her in that I did not like Emily Mortimer at all.
That’s not problem with her acting in Chaos Theory. It's a problem with the script, but it's not a problem with Mortimer herself. It's a demonstration of how well she can lose herself in a part.
In Chaos Theory, Mortimer plays Susan Allen, a thirtysomething wife and mother, who for reasons that aren't explained has been having a bad time of it lately and is consequently feeling a bit hostile towards her husband and resentful of her seven year old daughter.
Since the daughter is adorable, genuinely so, not just child movie star insufferably adorable, and her husband Frank is the hero of the movie and, the script stacking the deck in his favor immediately, obviously a good guy, a devoted husband, and an adoring father, Susan starts off appearing and acting like the movie's bad guy. There's no subtext to draw our sympathies or offer any explanation for her antipathy to her own family and Mortimer doesn't write any of her own with her performance. She's too honest an actress, I guess. She plays the part exactly as written. Her Susan may or may not be a good person, but right here and now, she's not being good.
In another kind of movie, an ambiguously less than sympathetic character like Susan might be intriguing, or at least make us want to try to understand her side of things. But Chaos Theory, despite its forced independent movie quirkiness, is a conventional romantic comedy and Susan is the hero's love interest.
Fate, not Susan's anger or unspecified needs, is going to split Frank and Susan apart and we're supposed to spend the rest of the movie rooting for them to get back together.
Here the script fails Mortimer's character again. Once Fate has given her the opportunity to end the marriage, Susan takes it and runs with it. She refuses to listen to Frank's apologies or perfectly reasonable explanations. She bars him from the house and does her best to limit his contact with their daughter. Because we know that Frank innocent and doesn't deserve this from her, Susan's behavior just seems perverse and destructive, both of her own happiness and her daughter's, not to mention Frank's.
A different, less self-effacing actress, would have found a way to make Susan's anger funny or pitiable. Mortimer plays it straight and so Susan appears to be using her position as the "wronged" wife to get what she wants, which would seem to be out of the marriage.
At this point I thought Chaos Theory was going to follow a more realistic path and that Susan and Frank would both find themselves making brand new lives for themselves. After all the movie's slug line is "Life Happens," and escaping from the too exacting routines of his well-ordered life would seem to be something that Frank needs even more than Susan does.
Frank, played by Ryan Reynolds, is an efficiency expert who has turned his compulsiveness into a career. He gives lectures to office cubicle dwellers on how to be more productive. The theme of his basic lecture is that life is chaos but that chaos can be managed and even turned into order. The primary tool for ordering a chaotic life is a list. Frank is an obsessive list-maker himself. The crisis of the movie is brought about because on this one day, life happens and Frank is forced to deal with events that are not on his list of things to deal with.
This would be funny if we'd been shown what a good, if insane, job Frank had been doing making certain that he never had to deviate from his lists---something that would have helped explain Susan's hostility; a quirk that was once forgivably cute to her and even helpful, if she was someone who'd had trouble managing her own life, has become intolerable controlling---but we're only told that's been the way with him.
We don't actually see Frank rigidly obeying the dictates of his own lists until his life falls apart and he starts using the lists, not to try to re-order it, but to increase the chaos. He makes lists of nutty things to do on index cards, shuffles the index cards, and does whatever wild and crazy thing the card tells him to do.
This is the best part of the movie. Reynolds is very funny as a former straight-arrow coming apart at the seams even as he tells himself he's never been happier or more rational. But his lists now aren't props to give Reynolds a physical way to play Frank's OCD. They're just excuses for the filmmakers to have Frank start acting like he's in a Will Ferrell movie.
I would have liked it if once he came to his senses Frank found a creative way to use his lists to put his life back together again, but that would have been a violation of the movie's theme, which is that life is just one darn thing after another and the best we can do is take what comes with hope and a sense of joy etc. etc. In other words, Frank has to learn to stop making lists. Which he does, of course. And when he does he's free to start listening to his heart.
Now in reality, one of the reasons life is one damn thing after another is that people spend way too much time listening to their hearts, but more to the point here, life being one damn thing after another is not much of an insight for a movie comedy to offer since having one damn thing after another happen is how movie comedies work.
Frank's life unravels because of a string of supposedly random accidents, but the exact same sorts of accidents could and do happen in every comedy with the same meant-to-be hilarious results. And the accidents don't build on each other. Things keep getting worse for Frank, but only mildly so. They never reach the point where Frank's life really is completely out of control...or to push the metaphor of the title, there is no demonstration of chaos theory: it never happens that Frank's life is seen to be controlled and restructured by the butterfly effect. Chaos isn't Frank's problem or his opportunity. All that's the matter is that he and his wife are having a little misunderstanding.
This means that the whole mess could have been avoided if Susan had just gotten over herself and listened to Frank. Which brings me back to Mortimer's performance. Since the script doesn't give her any reason for not getting over herself and listening---because if she did the movie would end then and there---Mortimer winds up playing a person who can't get over herself and listen. The result is that once Frank starts listening himself, to his own heart, his heart doesn't tell him, You're better off without her! Run for it, Frank. Run as fast as you can and don't look back.
The most annoying thing about Chaos Theory is its unnecessary framing device. Set fifteen or twenty years in the future, on the day of his daughter’s wedding, the movie opens with him catching his prospective son in law on the verge of running out (possibly just to throw up) and bullying the poor sap into listening to the story that will be the plot of the movie but which has no relevance to the situation at hand. The frame returns to close out the film with Reynolds giving a fatuous speech about the wonderfulness of LOVE and how important it is to LOVE someone just for the wonderfulness of having been in LOVE. I think I’ve made myself clear on how I feel about that subject.
Besides adding nothing to the story, the framing device betrays the film’s main theme, that life is chaos, because it turns out that Frank and Susan have lived out a fairly conventional and predictable Hollywood happily ever after and their daughter has grown up to be as beautiful and nice and smart and sassy and good as any perfect daughter in any romantic movie is bound to. Life doesn’t happen. It’s scripted.
The only interesting thing about the framing device is that it lets Reynolds do what he does best—turn himself into a completely different person with a bare minimum of make-up and costume changes. Here he becomes 50 years old simply by, as far as I could tell, tucking his chin in and smiling more. It’s a cagey, slightly mean older man’s smile and it adds twenty years to his face more convincingly than any amount of latex and make-up artist's brush-created wrinkles could.
But if you want to see Reynolds pull off this trick, check out The Nines, three short, interlocking films---or one film in three acts with three seemingly separate casts of characters---in which he does it three times.
And if you want to see a truly funny demonstration of one damn thing after another, rent Weirdsville, in which the problems keep piling up for the stoner heroes, but not in a random way. Every problem they solve creates a new, bigger, and crazier problem. Now that's chaos theory in action.
Usual spiel: Just about every movie I write about winds up for sale on DVD through my aStore. Chaos Theory, The Nines
, and Weirdsville
are available for download.
You do this awfully well. But I would say the same about your political entries. So ignore that criticism you make of yourself below. Lots of people were confused about that vote, because the official statements were confusing.
Posted by: Victoria | Saturday, July 12, 2008 at 10:58 PM
I like Emily, too. I think it would be interesting to see her play mean...she plays mostly gentle people. But this movie sounds pretty bad so thanks for saving us the rental fee.
Posted by: Judith | Saturday, July 12, 2008 at 11:07 PM