The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 36 Days to go: 26
Movie #404: Looper
It’s back-to-back Emily Blunt pictures! And it’s another example, incidentally, of the complex and fascinating characters Emily Blunt plays on the regular. In Looper, Blunt plays Sara, a tough and enigmatic woman who lives alone on a farm with her son Sid (Pierce Gagnon). It’s a small yet pivotal role, and Blunt gives her shading and depth that would be completely lost and overlooked in a lesser actor. Sara is a woman who feels she’s made mistakes in her past and she’s trying to make up for them. She’s no-nonsense and formidable, but she has a softer side and a sexier side as well. She’s also trying to protect her son and protect herself from potential futures she’s better not even contemplating. But in Looper, the future is everything.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, living in the not-too-distant future. He’s a junkie and a killer — known as a looper — working for local boss Abe (Jeff Daniels). Abe is from the future (a future where time travel has been invented but is highly illegal) and he’s here to recruit young vagrant boys to the business. What a looper does is simple — basically, he’s just a hitman, only he’s one that doesn’t have to do any kind of legwork. He shows up at the appointed place and time and kills whoever the crime lords send back to Joe from the future. It’s easy enough work, and Joe gets paid handsomely for it. Not only that, but at the end of his contract he gets a big payday and is released from duty for 30 years, when he’ll be sent back in time to be killed by his younger self. It’s called closing the loop.
Looper is one of the tightest and most original concepts to come along in a while. Everyone quoted that “Time is a flat circle” line from True Detective, but that was a lot of malarkey in a lot of places. Here, time really is a circle, and it just keeps going around and around. When Old Joe (Bruce Willis) comes back, instead of Young Joe killing him (as he did when Old Joe was Young Joe), Old Joe evades the shot and knocks Young Joe out. Suddenly, Old Joe has a mission. There’s a new crime lord in the future — an unseen menace called The Rainmaker — who’s closing all the loops, and his rush to send back Old Joe resulted in Old Joe’s wife (Qing Xu) being killed. So Old Joe isn’t going to die quietly. He’s going to go back and find The Rainmaker and kill him, so his wife never has to die and he won’t be sent back. It’s a twisted, intricate puzzle of the film, but everything is explained clearly and succinctly handled to avoid confusion. Even when Young Joe tries to open the Pandora’s box of questions time-displacement naturally brings forward, Old Joe shuts him down. “It doesn’t matter,” he shouts, and goes on to make a very meta statement about how if he starts asking questions they’ll never get anywhere. They’ll just sit there forever making diagrams with straws trying to figure the whole thing out, and he has a point. One of the keystones of time travel stories is to keep confidently moving through the plot; never ask too many questions.
Not that the mythology of Looper doesn’t hold it to scrutiny, because it absolutely does. Events that occur earlier in the film feed into what will come up later, such as a fantastic sequence when Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) — who sets the stage for Joe’s own troubles — fails to close his loop and his older self (Frank Brennan), while on the loose, starts losing body parts to history. It’s fantastic, and Joe uses it later when he needs to get a message to Old Joe. He simply carves the message into his arm.
I’m not going to lie, the make-up used on Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make his facial features more like Bruce Willis is somewhat disconcerting. It doesn’t really look like anyone to me, though I can kind of see where they were going with it. However, Gordon-Levitt completely integrates Bruce’s tone and manner of speech — his cadence, his style, even his squinty-eyed delivery — in a way that is lies somewhere between eerie and impressive and definitely helps drive home the fact that these two men are tied together by fate and time, that their lives are one.
And in the end, it turns out there’s more than one way to close a loop.
Viable Option 