Viking Night: 12 Monkeys
By Bruce Hall
February 16, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Show me a time travel movie and most of the time, I’ll show you a piece of lazy storytelling filled with boring characters and dull clichés. Time travel has always been a staple of both good and bad science fiction, and for good reason. In the right hands, it can be the ultimate storytelling device, opening doors to things that couldn’t be done otherwise. And of course in the wrong hands it’s just a bad writer’s gimmick used to compensate for lack of skill - or even worse, to create the worst type of story there is, drama without consequences. Twelve Monkeys doesn’t entirely steer clear of every genre pitfall, but what it does manage to do is tell a time travel story in a manner that makes the time traveling seem beside the point. And to me, that’s the best kind of time travel story there is.
It turns out that 1996 was a far more momentous year than I remember. In America, a major snowstorm crippled the Midwest (sounds familiar). Charles and Diana were divorced. Brett Favre was the NFL’s Most Valuable Player. And then there was the virus outbreak that killed five billion people, forcing the entire human race underground - my, how time flies. Eventually scientists developed a way to send individuals back in time, trying to find the source of the contagion so they could either prevent the disaster, or return with a pure sample and cook up a cure. Because civilization collapsed so quickly, the only information on the virus’ origin had to do with a suspected terrorist group called The Army of the Twelve Moneys. Because of the dangerous nature of time travel, convicts are used for the missions and they are called "volunteers," despite the fact there’s nothing "optional" about it. James Cole (Bruce Willis) is one of these "volunteers," a soft spoken sad sack who seems less like a criminal and more like Forrest Gump’s cynical cousin. The film never specifies what he did to earn his prison time but when we meet him he seems more like a submissive dope than a violent offender. It won’t take long for this to change.
The intention was to send Cole back to the year the plague occurred, but he accidentally lands a few years earlier instead. This turns out to be critical, but still isn’t as big a deal as the fact that James has no idea how to fit into the 1990s, and it has nothing to do with the fact that he can’t grow a mullet. You might think it would be fun to go back in time and chuckle at how primitive things were, and how simple the people seemed. But it’s more likely you’d be overwhelmed by a sense of frightening unfamiliarity. Without being accustomed to the cultural nuances of the time, you might make an alien of yourself even in your own hometown. The advantage of being from the future might quickly become a liability and the locals might well mistake you for a lunatic.
Imagine a person of modest intelligence sent back to 1965 to warn the government about a future international terrorist network. They’d be led by a shadowy figure that lives in a cave and commands his minions to fly airplanes into buildings and strap bombs to each other. They’d lock you up faster than you could say "Osama Bin Laden," and then MGM would make your story into a Bond movie. It definitely makes the idea of using uneducated convicts for such an important mission look pretty stupid, as Cole’s ranting about viruses and Monkey Armies leads to him being arrested.
He’s placed under the care of a kindly doctor named Reilly (Madeline Stowe), a talented psychiatrist nonetheless plagued with the same sentimental social myopia that plagues all movie scientists. She reluctantly has Cole institutionalized, but takes an interest in him and his story. Inside the asylum, Cole bonds with a fellow patient named Goines (Brad Pitt, channeling Crispin Glover through Tyler Durden). The kid is a manic depressive bowl of wing nuts whose mind is sopping over with apocalyptic conspiracy theories, making him a natural audience for Cole’s doomsday drama. But Goines also seems obsessed with the way a supposedly sane person could be mistaken for disturbed when he’s taken out of context. Not only is this food for thought, but it’s an idea central to the story. Twelve Monkeys encourages the audience to consider the potential lack of difference between someone who’s insane and someone who’s merely eccentric. Cole really might be a time traveling savior or maybe he really is a kook, and his whole “shattered future” sob story is nothing more than a delusion. There’s even the possibility that Goines is less nuts and more a new wave Andy Kaufman whose agenda is simply to make people wonder where the line is between brilliant comedy and utter madness.
The film’s second act wastes no time in pressing the idea as Cole escapes the hospital and makes contact with Railly. Lucky for him, she’s a psychiatrist who knows her way around a field dressing and also happens to have a fondness for apocalypse nuts. Lucky for her, he’s an apocalypse nut who swears he isn’t really nuts. Lucky for them both, she’s written books on the subject and has made this her dominant area of study. Because of this she feels a kinship with Cole, to the point where you have to wonder - does she sense that he’s telling the truth, or is she just a hopeless romantic whose self indulgent flights of fancy happen lend themselves well to her patients’ madness?
Educated people are often seduced by their own intelligence into believing things that aren’t necessarily true; simply because they can’t imagine being wrong. If you’ve ever met someone like this you know what I mean, and you might even call that an entirely different kind of madness. Any way you want to look at it, the two spend about half the movie together and the question of who is nuts and who’s being led around by assumption gets murkier by the second. Eventually they set out to find Goines when they discover that not only was he hiding a dirty little secret, but also might be smarter than the average bear after all.
For a Terry Gilliam film, Twelve Monkeys is relatively grounded and sedate. Exploring perception, madness and dual mental states is nothing new for the former Python, but directing someone else’s script keeps him more focused than usual. This works in the film’s favor because given the story’s already ambitious subject matter, Gilliam’s tendency toward visual and intellectual overkill was not required. What the story needed was sympathy, and it is in part Gilliam’s affinity for this kind of material that makes it work.
The entire question of who’s crazy and who’s not ends up being beside the point because the weird convict and his eminent shrink both eventually come to believe in the same thing, just for different reasons. Some people let reality shape their opinions, while others let their opinions shape reality. Some people assign significance to events based on a pre-existing ideology or methodology, applying the same solutions to every problem. Others simply allow the context of an event to guide their reaction to it. At different times in the story Cole struggles with one while Railly struggles with the other, and the suggestion seems obvious, at least to me: Neither way of thinking is universally flawless. They’re both necessary and the trick is to know when one is needed over the other.
I have a friend whose favorite tension breaking catch phrase is “Where’s Bruce Willis when you need him?” I always assumed he was referring to John McClane, but maybe he’s talking about James Cole. In this increasingly Red State, Blue State society of ours, a message of intellectual flexibility delivered by a hard luck regular Joe might be just what the doctor ordered. Maybe that really is the best kind of time travel story there is.