Now that he’s retired from acting and retreated from the public following a diagnosis of aphasia and reports from his family and friends that he can’t speak and has memory loss, at one time, Bruce Willis was one of the biggest stars in the world. Even though he didn’t make good movies most of his career, a lot of them turned a huge profit and got butts in movie theater seats. Even a contractual obligation to Disney to make three movies in the late 1990s produced Armageddon, the sleeper hit The Sixth Sense, and The Kid, which got mixed reviews but made some money.
Willis began the 1990s with some big-budget disasters like The Bonfire of the Vanities and Hudson Hawk. Other movies like Mortal Thoughts and Billy Bathgate, where he had supporting roles, got mediocre reviews and didn’t perform well at the theaters as well. It seemed his only good role was as himself playing a fictional character in the movie within a movie in The Player. It was a genius move by Robert Altman and a little bit of self-parody on Willis part to play the types of roles he was accepting in run-of-the-mill thrillers with a deus ex machina ending.
But his career seemed to be in trouble. No one went to Death Becomes Her to see Willis as the straight man. They wanted to see Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep do a dark comedy version of body horror. And his lead role in thrillers like Striking Distance and Color of Night got bad reviews. Then, there was North, named by many as the worst movie of 1994 and one of worst movie of the 1990s.
By the end of the summer 1994 season, Willis seemed to be down and out. But he had silver lining waiting to shine in Pulp Fiction. The second movie by Quentin Tarantino had won big at Cannes and people were anticipating it. The movie opened in October of that year with rave reviews and was a box-office success with Willis getting good reviews as Butch Coolidge. Then, there was his supporting role in the critically acclaimed Nobody’s Fool with Paul Newman, Jessica Tandy, Dylan Walsh and an early role by Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
And in Hollywood, you’re only as hot as your last movie. Willis had been in two of the best reviewed movies of 1994. But still, it was a surprise when auteur filmmaker Terry Gilliam cast him in 12 Monkeys alongside Brad Pitt. What was Gilliam thinking? Two of the biggest actors of the time are appearing in his movie inspired by a French short movie, La Jetee. Something was brewing.
While most people may have known Gilliam as the American Monty Python who did more animation and less talking in the roles, he had rose in prominence in the 1980s as a respected filmmaker with movies like Time Bandits and Brazil getting Sean Connery and Robert DeNiro to appear in minor roles. And The Fisher King in 1991 was a modest success and an Oscar winner.
12 Monkeys begins sometimes in 2035 decades after a virus has wiped out a huge majority of the human popularity. The survivors live in underground compounds that look have a futuristic steampunk dystopia feel. James Cole (Willis) is one of the prisoners in the jail underneath Philadelphia. He is chosen by the powers that be to go to the surface in a makeshift hazmat suit to collect samples of insects and small animals for the scientists to study.
James observes that wildlife animals like bears and lions roam the vacant streets and derelict buildings during winter. In the search, James comes across a poster sign of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys with the phrase “We did it!” spray painted on it. (Now, here’s where the movie has a few issues. A bear would be in hibernation at this time, unless it’s an early snowfall. It’s possible, lack of humans has affected the climate over 30 years. But paint on a sign wouldn’t still be as fresh after 30-40 years. It’s possible it could’ve been in a building and some wild animal or unseen looters drug it out.)
But it’s possible James may be mentally delusional. In 1996, the virus began to spread across the globe during the Christmas holiday season. Cleared from quarantine, James is selected by a group of scientist to travel back in time to collect samples. He’s intended to be sent back to 1996 but instead is sent back to April 1990 in Baltimore where he finds himself in a mental hospital after being arrested for assault.
He’s assigned as a patient to Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeline Stowe), a local psychiatrist, who initially thinks she’s met James before but can’t place him. Because he was found nude, belligerent and assaulted police officers, he is given sedatives and sent to the mental illness ward where he meets a local patient, Jeffrey Goines (Pitt), who’s very manic and constantly rambles on. Jeffrey is the son of a millionaire and controversial virologist, Dr. Leland Goines (Christopher Plummer).
James tries to convince the medical doctors he’s not crazy and Kathryn shows him some sympathy. But it gets harder for James to convince the physicians he’s from the future as the number he was supposed to call doesn’t yield the results he wanted. Jeffrey helps James get out of the mental ward but he is soon put back in a room strapped to the bed. But his body disappears leaving the medical staff, including a supervisor Dr. Fletcher (Frank Gorshin) stunned.
Back in 2035, James is again questioned by the scientist who criticize him for being in the mental hospital, thinking he got drunk and in a fight. But when he says he identified Jeffrey from a group of photos of protestors, they send him back. But he arrives in France during World War I and sees his friend, Jose (Jon Seda), briefly who’s been injured. James is shot in the leg and makes it to Baltimore during the late Fall of 1996 where he’s able to track down Kathryn who was speaking at an event where she was promoting her new book mentioning the Cassandra theory which mirrors James’ situation. He forces her into her vehicle so they can drive to Philadelphia.
But she discover some things. James keeps getting upset when he hears about a young boy who is believed to be trapped in a well on the radio and TV. But James says the kid is actually hiding in a barn as it’s a prank, something that later is announced to be true. He likes to hear music like “What a Wonderful World” and “Blueberry Hill” on the radio, yet Kathryn is surprised he doesn’t understand the concept of an advertisement. He also never learned to drive a car. In many ways, there’s almost something childish and innocent about James. Willis spends most of the movie with a bald head and he’s like an overgrown child. James says he was only a child when the virus started and it killed about four billions people around the world.
This explains a lot of James’ behavior. Having to witness his parents and other family members and friends die, he found himself an orphan. With all the effects of surviving a worldwide pandemic and forced to live underneath the ground with strangers, he was never able to have a normal childhood during his formative years. It’s like he never got out of the moment in adolescence when people go through emotional times as their hormones change. With no one to turn to for support and an authoritative system sprung up, it’s no wonder he turned out the way he did.
Despite an opportunity to get away from James, Kathryn still wants to listen to his claims of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys even when she doesn’t believe him. Being that she’s a medical doctor, she wants to help him. And in an odd way, James finds the motherly support and that’s been missing most of his life. However, this is a still a Gilliam movie so you know things aren’t going to happen the way you suspect or the way some other director would be forced to steer the movie to a satisfactory conclusion.
James keeps having nightmares of a traumatic event when he was a child where he witnessed a long-haired man in a tropical shirt getting shot as a blonde woman screamed running after him. And the dream keeps changing over and over with James seeing Jeffrey as an agitated man with a suitcase who nearly runs into him and Kathryn as the blonde running after the shot man. James and Kathryn learn Jeffrey started the Army of the Twelve Monkeys with some militant animal rights activists to get back at his father.
Along with Willis, Pitt gives a performance that totally shatters the Hollywood Hunk magazine cover boy persona that had sprung up. Pitt received an Oscar nomination for his performance and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. It’s easy for an actor just to act goofy and say silly things. However, Pitt adds a little mystery to the role. Is he really a psychopath out to wipe out the Earth’s human population? Or was it all a mistake what they did? Pitt has played bad guys before and since. Yet here, he starts off playing the role for laughs and by the end, you can tell he’s a lot more dangerous.
Stowe herself has the difficult job of playing someone who has to be both cautious and caring for James not because the movie calls for it but it’s in her nature. Stowe has always been one of those actresses who seems to never received the true credit for her work. Take her role as an investigator who gets the best off a misogynistic Army soldier in The General’s Daughter. She could’ve just been the generic role of Army officer wife Julia Moore in We Were Soldiers but managed to give her some three-dimension as she took up the difficult task of notifying other military wives of their husbands’ deaths. It’s a shame she hasn’t appeared in a movie in the last 20 years and done most of her work on TV since.
And the movie’s ending can divide audiences but I’ve noticed something I didn’t when I watched it a few years ago. SPOILERS AHEAD!! The movie ends with James being shot by police at the Philadelphia airport, echoing the dreams. It wasn’t Jeffrey but Dr. Peters (David Morse), an employee of Dr. Goines’, who released the virus in several cities all over the world. He is boarding a plane and finds himself sitting next to one of the scientist from the future (Carol Florence) who calls herself Jones. She sets a champagne class in between herself and Peters and says she’s in insurance. Jones has intentionally infected herself being sitting next to Peters who already released the virus during a bag check examination. “Jones” is going to be sent back to 2035 for the other scientist to study as she has made herself the guinea pig.
The script was written by David Peoples and his wife, Janet. I’m glad they kept it from falling down the same rabbit hole of other movies where you can tell where it’s head like in the movie-within-a-movie in The Player that Willis was mocking. And Gilliam is a director that doesn’t like normal conventions which is why it’s sometimes hard for him to get movies made. He’s come a long way from an animator who used feet from other paintings to squash animated people. This is probably one of Gilliam’s best reviewed, best honored and highest-grossing movies.
But it’s a shame Willis didn’t use the clout from this and other movies during these era to make better movies. Instead, his career began on its downward spiral during the 2000s with some forgettable movies and the first of which went direct-to-video. Willis did his best work here.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 