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: 180 Days to go: 125
Movie #258: Sliding Doors
What if a single moment changed your entire life? It’s a question I’ve always been fascinated with, and it’s the central question of Sliding Doors, which makes it one of my all-time favorite films. The movie explores two alternate timelines in the life of our heroine, Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow): one in which she catches the train home, and one in which she does not. It’s a tiny, seemingly insignificant moment in her life, but the movie shows how that one moment cascades into many.
It’s hard to identify what draws me to the question of alternate universes, alternate timelines, and alternate lives. I think I simply am an introspective person who often reflects on how I got to where I am in life, for better or for worse. I’m also pretty attuned to the pivotal moments in my life — the instances that clearly could’ve sent me down a different path had they gone a different way. Like it’s postulated in Rabbit Hole (or in theoretical physics, whatever), each of these moments might actually split off into another reality. There might be millions of me out there, living different lives, in different cities, with different successes and failures. And so it goes with Sliding Doors.
When Helen misses the train, she goes to take a cab home instead and gets a nasty cut on her head when someone tries to mug her. After spending hours in the hospital, she comes home to her boyfriend Gerry (John Lynch), but misses catching him with his mistress Lydia (Jeanne Tripplehorn, who makes weird kiss faces). However, when she makes the train, she runs into the charming James (John Hannah) both before and after coming home early enough to catch Gerry and Lydia together. She moves in with best friend Anna (Zara Turner), gets a sassy short hair cut and color, and opens her own PR firm.
The film could easily split off into two entirely different stories, but instead it interweaves the tales while maintaining some fixed intersection points. In this way, Sliding Doors also plays with the idea of destiny and that, however and whichever timeline you find yourself on, there are certain experiences and paths you are meant to travel — paths that will find you, no matter what. So maybe in all those millions of different mes, I’d actually always wind up here, where I need to be.
It might sound obsessively neurotic, but my mind does cartwheels imagining all those different (or possibly similar) possibilities. I love it, and I love the thoughtfulness put into the film. It’s probably one of the least flashy films I count among my favorites, and yet that subtlety and nuance is what makes it stand out all the more to me. It holds such a special place in my heart, in fact, that it influenced how my husband and I named our youngest child. And now I love it even more.
Viable Option 