Proof of Life,
Taylor Hackford's international hostage-negotiation thriller, turns
out to be a movie about David Morse's feet. Morse, playing an
engineer trying to build a dam that would benefit the people of a
South American company, is not wearing the proper foot apparel when
he is yanked from his car by gun-toting guerrillas and marched into
the underbrush. They march up rocky slopes, across snowy peaks,
through acrid mud and jungle shrubbery. At one point, the engineer
stops and pulls out a gigantic thorn that has torn its way through
one shoe and into his foot. By the time he reaches camp, his
footwear has all but disintegrated, and he has to sit in the mud and
the cold and the rain. When a Polaroid is taken to send back for
ransom demands, his swollen, misshapen, bloodied feet -- which have
been whacked a few times for good measure by his captors before the
picture is taken -- are as prominent in the photo as his haggard,
stubbly face.
Morse's portrayal of the engineer,
as a man whose sense of purpose and humanity are sorely put to the
test, is actually quite good, as is the supporting work by Pamela
Reed (excellent as the engineer's sister, whose outrage and
indignation become tempered by compassion), Gottfried John (one of
Fassbinder's regular actors, and who still has that marvelous,
hawk-like face seen in earlier films), and, in some of his scenes,
David Caruso (who doesn't so much appear in this film as seem flung
in and out of it much of the time). Otherwise, although the
filmmakers have worked, and reworked, the material so that a tense,
tight mood is sustained throughout (with Danny Elfman's music
thundering away on the soundtrack), there's really not much of
anything else going on in this picture. Russell Crowe plays a
professional negotiator who specializes in handling
kidnap-for-ransom situations for various corporations. When the
company the engineer works for declines to help get him back, the
negotiator leaves, then, out of the goodness of his heart, comes
back to help the engineer's wife (Meg Ryan) rescue her husband and
not get hoodwinked by unscrupulous people in the process.
Crowe spends a lot of time gently
leaning over a radio and softly dickering with people on the other
end of the frequency, or issuing terse instructions. Ryan bravely
fights back tears. Crowe acts strong and silent. Ryan acts noble yet
conscience-stricken (her character had a bitter argument with her
husband the night before his abduction). Although Crowe and Ryan
struggle to imbue their characters with some sort of active
cognizance, neither of them seems to have any sort of inner life.
There's no explanation as to why the negotiator seems to have all
the time in the world to hang around dawdling over this one
situation, or why the wife doesn't suddenly flip-out and become
hysterical over why things are taking so long to be resolved. The
two leads do cast long, yearning glances at each other from time to
time, but their relationship is so chaste as to seem practically
moribund. When the negotiator is accused of falling in love with the
wife of the man whose life he's trying to save -- now, that would've
been interesting! -- you figure that, from what we've seen, they
must have gotten him confused with somebody else.
Review by Gregory Avery · Nitrate Online
