SPOILERS!! DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN “IDENTITY!”
The gimmick in “Identity,” the deus ex machina, is that Agatha Christie is crossed with “Mulholland Drive;” i.e., there is a real world and a phony world, and that means there are real and imagined characters. “Identity” plays fair because clues within both the real and artificial worlds point to the artifice. But if “Identity” had been more like the superior “Mulholland Drive,” then more elements of the artificial world would have connected to the real world—there would have been more clues to the outside. Artificial characters would have borne more direct connections to the mind and life of the person that had invented them. “Identity” could have been even more exciting by dropping more of these little hints and connections between the inside world and the outside world.
As the movie stands now, there are only a handful of briefly-shown newspaper clippings and snatches of dialogue early on that make these connections. We hear a voice say his mother was a “whore,” and we meet the prostitute Amanda Peet; we hear “my father left us” and discover that John C. McGinley is actually a stepfather who replaced a deadbeat dad who had temper issues; when we ultimately learn of the killer’s personality disorder, it’s not long after the sleazy manager John Hawkes reveals that when he showed up at the motel, the real manager was dead. We hear that Hawkes had just “moved in” and that “more people kept showing up and they seemed so happy.”
But what about the other artificial characters? What do they represent? We can guess at what they represent—the ex-cop is all that is good in the killer, the nuclear family is the family he wishes he had, etc.—but quickly these guesses and representations become vague and general. They become broad enough for the two worlds of the movie to neither support nor deny them. Is the actress the killer’s thoughtless ego? What about Ray Liotta? Are some of them just people the killer has met (remember the scene in “8 ½” in which Guido throws an imaginary party for all the loves and lusts of his life, and lords over them with a whip)? Certainly we all carry many different personas in our heads for every occasion, but since “Identity” is a mystery, I would have been more satisfied if I could have drawn more specific connections. Instead, the movie is little bit like “The Cell,” in which we see awesome images from the killer’s mind, but which could mean anything, and whatever meaning we attach to them is in no way supported or disputed by the movie all around the images.
Still, I’m more than a little intrigued by the idea of all the different sides of my personality getting together to have a fight. In a sense, that’s all fiction is anyway: different aspects of an author butting heads together. Certainly a movie that makes us think thoughts like this, and is scary along the way, is worth our time. In the recent string of films to explore our dream worlds and how we view other people—including “Mulholland Drive,” “Waking Life,” and Soderbergh’s “Solaris”—certainly “Identity” is a worthy, if lesser, addition.
Finished July 13, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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