Venerable publications rarely review multiple movies in one article, and when they do, it’s because those movies are somehow linked. Perhaps they appeal to the same niche audience, or they are showing at the same film festival, or their strengths and weaknesses can be juxtaposed in a clever way. So I feel sort of lame saying that the only commonality between Boarding Gate and Atonement is that I saw them both this past weekend.
Since Boarding Gate bombed at the Cannes Film Festival, it is resigned to showing at small art house cinemas who eschew any movie with the potential for mild commercial success. Oliver Assayas wrote and directed this pseudo-thriller about a sexy Italian semi-hooker (played by Asia Argento, a sort of an Isabella Rossellini for the Maxim generation) who lives a kinky, crime-filled existence, then is involved in a murder and must make a tension-filled getaway to Beijing. It sounds really exciting, but the real killers were the superfluous dialogue and the wooden acting. And woah, what is Kim Gordon, bassist for Sonic Youth and Iggy Pop lookalike, doing in this film? No really, what was she doing? I couldn’t tell if I was meant to understand the plot or if my mind just refused to properly digest all of the bloated lumps of conversation that dragged this film into the dirt.
It feels rude to dump on a movie when I was already convinced of its suckiness when I saw previews. I had no intention of ever seeing Atonement, but the second-run movie theatre near my house has been obstinately screening it since its Oscar nomination and I finally gave in. I knew its polished cinematic loveliness would give it no reason to be little more than an emotionally hollow historical romance, but in all fairness, I feel that my low expectations stocked the inward groans and sighs that mounted as the predictable plot unfolded. Normally I dig movies set on sprawling British estates about clueless, idle aristocrats and their nuanced relationships with the servants, but this one strayed too far into The English Patient territory. And upon the ludicrous and patronizing ending, it suddenly turned into Titanic. Jesus Christ.
I guess Boarding Gate and Atonement have a few more things in common: Both were underwhelming, both are more satisfying to trash rather than watch, and both would have benefitted from a Philip Seymour Hoffman cameo in which he plays a droll policeman who frequently hand-cuffs the other actors, slaps duct tape over the mouths, and rants to them about their character flaws.
