Review of The Tourist (2010) by Shiira — 15 Dec 2010

Recuperating "The Tourist", the unfairly panned thriller made by a tourist himself(a German making his first Hollywood splash), means recuperating the performance by Johnny Depp, the risk-taking actor who's receiving the worst critical notices of his career.

The big gamble he takes here is to give an anti-performance, as if "Charade", the 1963 comedy-thriller starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, was directed by Jim Jarmusch, the director of "Dead Man", which featured Depp in the leading role.

Dead is how the many naysayers of "The Tourist" would characterize Frank Tupelo, a Wisconsin schoolteacher on holiday in Italy; opaque too, as Depp's somewhat morose line-readings will frustrate moviegoers who expect the actor to be, well, fun, through the employment of banter and sheer animal magnetism with his leading lady.

But instead, the vacationing American seems diminished by Elise(Angelina Jolie), and on the verge of disappearing altogether. Jolie, dressed from head to toe in glamorous duds, radiates sex from every bedecked pore of her personage, turning the heads of men and women alike wherever those legs take her.

It's this potential for the setting off of fireworks that many will cite as the reason why "The Tourist", and ultimately, Depp, disappoints, in which the actor, who made his name initially by playing mutes and near-mutes("What's Eating Gilbert Grape", "Benny and Joon", and "Edward Scissorhands"), seemingly picked the inopportune time to revert back to his boy-man persona, by talking in a soft and constrained voice.

To be perfectly frank, he's sort of a drag, not at all cut out for romance with a sublime beauty like Jolie. But is it a bad performance? If you said, "Yes," that means you're overlooking the third act, in which the revelation of Frank Tupelo's true identity changes the complex of Depp's subdued and fussy performance.

Suddenly, the mannerisms that Depp uses to color his cheesehead tourist with, mannerisms which, at the time, seemed nothing more than an eccentric actor's whim(remember his Pepe LePew-meets Keith Richards voice in "The Pirates of the Caribbean" movies), turned out to be an invention of Alexander Pierce's making, not Depp's.

This time, the voice isn't a novelty, but intrinsic to the character. In "The Tourist", the actor(who minced like Angela Lansbury in Tim Burton's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) is one step removed from his latest vocal styling, since it's, in essence, his character playing a character, as Alexander tries to win Elise over by being Frank, but not honest, and in the process, seems uncomfortable in his own skin.

Quite understandably, he has some mixed emotions over stealing the woman he loves from himself. And since Depp chooses to portray this conflict with utter seriousness, "The Tourist" can sometimes be too angst-ridden for its own good.

The original Alexander, the man whom Elise fell in love with, no doubt, had he graced the screen, would have made for a more entertaining movie. As Frank, the wanted man is forced to act counterintuitively all throughout his pallid seduction of Elise, and as a result, many of the scenes where fire is needed(especially the hotel sequence leading up to the moment where the couple's sleeping arrangements are finalized), Depp brings the ice, because the schoolteacher, in Elise's own words(more or less), is not a man who does exactly as he pleases.

This comment, made in reference to the fake cigarette which Frank "smokes", telegraphs the notion that we're looking at the ghost of a face, blowing ghost smoke from a ghost cancer stick. Elise senses Alexander.

"The Tourist" treats plastic surgery like a metaphor for reincarnation. The fake cylinder(and fake intrigue: the paperback spy novel he totes around) suggests Alexander's essence, inspiring Elise to criticize the name that her lover bestowed on his permanent alter-ego as being "terrible", a word that hardly describes "The Tourist", and Depp's performance as a man in transition, haunted by the phantom of his own being, and the horrible realization that his girlfriend is no longer in love with him, the old him.