After another stellar outing for Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man, I found myself realizing that there were still parts of Rian Johnson’s filmography that, despite our coverage of Brick (and Poker Face), The Last Jedi, Knives Out, and Glass Onion, were still untapped. I didn’t see Looper when it first came out, but I remember its production well, as it was shot in New Orleans (one of the best places to go to capture images of dystopian poverty in the immediate and long-term aftermath of Katrina) while I was in grad school there. In fact, my roommate at the time of filming was an extra; he was the piercer at the tattoo parlor that we lived in the back rooms of, and there was a casting call for “weird looking people” for a group scene. Having now seen the film and having scoured the big party scenes that I would have assumed he would have been in, I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t find him, alas. That’s not the kind of close watching that this film necessarily relies upon, but as with all of Johnson’s films, you better be paying attention if you want to get the maximum amount of satisfaction.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a hitman living in Slumsville, USA in 2044. Addicted to an unnamed drug administered via eye dropper, Joe funds his habit as a “looper,” a specialized killer working for a crime syndicate that’s three decades in his future, where surveillance technology alerts law enforcement anytime someone dies. The mobsters of the 2070s skirt this by sending their victims into the past (the police apparently not being alerted if someone simply disappears), where Joe and the other loopers kill the doomed future victims and dispose of their bodies in exchange for silver. The loopers are themselves damned as well; all of them know that, sooner or later, they will have to “close their own loop,” meaning killing their own future selves (and getting one last big payday) and retiring, with the knowledge that they have only thirty years to live. When Joe’s buddy Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his loop and allows his older self to escape, we get to see the lengths that temporally local crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) to make sure that Seth stays just alive enough not to destabilize the loop while also ensuring maximum suffering.
When one of Joe’s victims does not appear on schedule, he’s sufficiently distracted that the man, who turns out to be his own older self (Bruce Willis) is able to escape. As it turns out, Old!Joe is on a mission to answer the age old question of “Would you be able to go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” with a resounding “Yes, and anyone else born that same day at that same hospital, just to be safe,” which turns out to be less morally straightforward than he expected. In the future, there’s an underworld figure toppling and absorbing various criminal enterprises into one evil force, the “Rainmaker,” and Old!Joe eventually fell in love with a woman who died at the hands of the Rainmaker’s goons. With Abe’s organization after both of them, Young!Joe and Old!Joe find that they can’t trust one another despite being one person. Meanwhile elsewhere, Sara (Emily Blunt) is raising her young telekinetic son on a farm; he’s not the only one, as about 10% of people have barroom card trick level telekinesis at this point, but he has potential to become much more.
The performances here are fantastic. This was probably Willis’s last great outing (and I say that as a Moonlighting fan, so you know I’m always rooting for him), and he brings a lot of gravitas to the screen. There’s a moment where Young!Joe demands to see the photo of Old!Joe’s wife, saying that he can avoid ever speaking to her and thus ensure that she’s safe from being killed by the Rainmaker’s gunmen in 2074, but Old!Joe refuses; it’s not enough that he keeps her safe, but he wants his life back, specifically, no matter what he has to do. There’s a moment where Old!Joe realizes this about himself, that his decision is much less selfless and much more self-serving than he had convinced himself, and Willis conveys every moment of it with conviction. Gordon-Levitt, despite acting through prosthetics that are intended to make him look more like a young Willis, is nuanced in his interpretation of Willis’s body language, intonations, and idiosyncrasies, without it ever feeling like he’s doing an impression. Despite his small role, Dano makes his usual meaty meal out of a cowardly sleazeball, and it’s always a delight to see. Particularly impressive is the amount of menace that playing-against-type Jeff Daniels is bringing to the table. Perhaps glaringly, the person I haven’t mentioned yet here is Blunt, which is in some part due to her relative lack of screen time, as she doesn’t really appear until the midpoint of the film. But it’s also that she’s not given as much to do, as she’s relegated to a role that’s not really all that demanding, although there’s a scene where her son starts to pull a Carrie that shows her pull out some fierce chops.
The sci-fi conceits of the plot are fun. The introduction of the idea that telekinesis has been discovered and is widespread but is limited to what amounts to little more than parlor tricks feels like a weird tangent given that it disappears from the plot for a while, but when it comes back, it’s relevant and feels like a piece falling into place. That’s always been one of Johnson’s strengths as a screenwriter, and one that feels very satisfying to me as a bit of a systems thinker myself. The film doesn’t spend any time faffing about with trying to justify its time travel conventions, as Old!Joe gestures to a bunch of drinking straws on the table between them and says that they could give themselves headaches making diagrams with them or just get on with things, and that’s what they (and the film) do. One gets the sense that Johnson was the kind of person who may have made just those kinds of diagrams in his younger days and knows exactly what complaints to expect and how to make them irrelevant.
I still have yet to see The Brothers Bloom, but I do know that it’s a bit of a departure from the serious noir-at-a-high-school vibes of Brick and the techno noir of Looper, which is a bit of a bummer. I don’t foresee myself growing tired of Benoit Blanc (or Poker Face, although its fate hangs in the balance as of this writing), but I wish there were more noir reinventions from Johnson to watch now. Since it’s been over a decade since Looper and he hasn’t gone back to that well, I don’t know if we’ll see him release another one soon, if ever. I’d like to see him try his hand at one of these again, as it’s always a pleasure to see.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 