Welcome to the new bi-weekly series "Reader's Choice." For the first episode I gave you a choice of several films currently streaming and you picked Gattaca (on Amazon Prime). I hope you enjoy and comment since we haven't talked about this movie ever, that I can recall. - Nathaniel
Memories of Gattaca are fuzzy at best. I saw it only once in theaters 19 years ago. I remember: Jude Law in a wheelchair; sterile, sleek, and awesome production design; Uma Thurman being an icy receptionist?; Ethan Hawke being less of a perfect specimen than Jude Law in the context of the movie (this remains true out of context); a hard to buy premise about violence being bred out of the human race?; something about brothers swimming? That's it.
Join me in this revisit...
An odd juxtaposition: When the costume design credit arrives we're looking at a naked body
Gattaca begins with a beautiful blue credits sequence which becomes eerier as it goes along once you realize what its macro imagery is telling you. Ethan Hawke is ridding himself of all human detritus: dead flesh, body hair, cuticles, until he's smooth as a statue. He repeats this in several ways though sometimes (at work) the detritus isn't his. All the workers at his job get their fingers pricked upon entering like its a diabetic research center. There are even daily urine tests... which seems extreme for a world that's so into cleanliness. What if someone misses the specimen cup?
At the pee test the doctor (Xander Berkeley) looks right at his penis and says the following. [more...]
Julianne Moore's husband in [safe] checks out Uma Thurman's soon-to-be husband's junk.
Beautiful piece of equipment there, Jerome. I see a great many in the course of a given day. Yours just happens to be an exceptional example. I don't know why my folks didn't order one like that for me.
You could order Ethan Hawke's penis in the Nineties ?!?
First good shot of Uma as she approaches Ethan to tell him not to gaze up in the sky if he wants to pretend not to care. They're astronauts of some kind (this is all very vague) so I was wrong about her being a receptionist. It's the perfect segueway to a flashback of World Building. It's a doozy of a longwinded flashback, too, travelling all the way back to his conception. Take that, stuffy old biopics that only think to begin with the birth!
Look at the delivery nurse. It's Maya Rudolph delivering Ethan Hawke as a baby in her very first film
The flashback goes on for 25 entire minutes, which is about a fourth of the movie's running time. This "Not Too Distant Future" needs a lot of backstory. As Ethan Hawke narrates we get the full account. He is not Jerome but Vincent Freeman (note the unsubtle last name!) doomed to second class citizenship because he had a natural birth rather than a genetically modified start. In this future there are genetically perfect people and a caste like system where everyone else is bottom rung. Vincent had a perfect younger brother Anton so he's even second class even his family and but one day after beating his brother surprisingly in a swimming match he leaves the family behind for good and vanishes.
Vincent devises a plan to buy a genetically perfect person's identity that's for sale on the black market -- that shady Tony Shalhoub's always selling something. There's even a cutesy name for people who try to get away with this trick, a "borrowed ladder" or a "de'gene'rate" get it? Enter the real Jerome (Jude Law) genetically perfect but doomed to a wheelchair because "there's no gene for fate" and he was paralyzed in an accident.
the first shot of Jude most moviegoers ever saw. Also the moment Nathaniel pledged undying fandom
His credentials are impeccable. An expiration date you wouldn't believe. The guy is practically going to live forever. An IQ off the charts. Better than 20/20 in each eye. The heart of an ox. He could run through a wall.
...If he could still run.
I don't know about all that but living forever is a possibility with the performances Jude Law's given over the years.
Gattaca received only one well deserved Oscar nomination in its year, for Production Design, but if there were an Oscar for casting Francine Maisler would have deserved that nomination. Her work on this film is truly inspired: Uma Thurman and Jude Law (before he was famous even) as "perfect specimens" is self explanatory but even better is the idea of Ethan Hawke as someone who can kinda sorta get away with being perfect but isn't; there's something just a little off, and not just in that lopsided smile. Then there's great casting for the younger versions of the characters in the flashbacks and Loren Dean as Ethan Hawke's genetically perfect brother. Younger readers probably won't know who Loren Dean is but he was sort of the Jake Lacey of his day... strong jawed, all America handsome... or perhaps blandsome if that's not your type. If that all weren't superbly cast there's also smart deployments of Xander Berkeley, Alan Arkin (as a cop), Gore Vidal (as Uma & Ethan's boss) and Ernest Borgnine (a janitor) as key older figures.
When Gattaca came out Jude Law was on the cultural rise but far from famous. In the summer of 1995 he had been a (full frontal) sensation on Broadway as Kathleen Turner's young lover in Indiscretions (the first of his two Tony nominations) and by 1997 he had a handful of movies in the can but mostly people didn't yet have a face for the name. Gattaca was, for all intents and purposes, the "introduction" for most moviegoers. Within a couple of years he was an Oscar nominee and major star but they really could have jumpstarted the Oscar business right here.
Gore Vidal & Uma Thurman discussing "Myra Breckenridge"... no, wait, a rocket launch
Because he's great great great in this movie, exuding superiority and privilege but also subtly selling a shift in feeling toward Vincent, and ably displaying Jerome's seething resentments and unhappiness without being a drag on the movie. How does he do it? By puncturing some of the heaviest drama with rapier sharp jabs of wit. After one particularly tense verging on awkward scene with Vincent who's about to give up his life's work because he fears he has been discovered (long story but his eyelash was discovered near the scene of a crime), Jude lets Ethan overplay the freakout and then delivers a perfectly timed, ideally weighted retort:
Keep your lashes on your lids where they belong.
But this is not Jude/Jerome's movie but Ethan/Vincent's. As Vincent gets closer to his launch into the stars, he's also getting closer to Irene. (Trivia: Ethan & Uma met on this movie and married the next year). She admits a very minor heart defect which she can't know endears her to him even further. They take in a concert with a 12 fingered pianist. That's taking genetic engineering too far! Vincent reveals how uncultured he is when he tries to point out that this flaw is an advantage for a pianist. Duh Vincent he was genetically engineered that way. Quoth Irene like Vincent's stupid
That piece can only be played with 12.
As Irene and Vincent-as-Jerome fall in love the evidence at the workplace continues to point to the real Vincent as the culprit though he is innocent. One of Gattaca's neatest visual tricks is the how warm the light is when Vincent is at peace or longing for the stars and how increasingly bold and lurid the light and color gets when the murder investigation escalates. These two modes shouldn't work so well side by side but somehow they do.
Look at how beautiful this movie is!
This would have made a great BEST SHOT subject as 90s movies go
Cinematography by Slawomir Idziak (Black Hawk Down, Three Colors: Blue)
Though impeccably visually constructed, the film its building is far from perfect. The plot is vague but also filled with incidents, coincidences, and gets especially bogged down with the swimming rivalry of its brothers as children and adults. Gattaca mistakenly leans on this subplot in a "prove your manliness!" kind of way which might well be fitting for a film that has two conversations about the protagonists dick but it's still obnoxious for such an otherwise thoughtful sci-fi film. The swimming business makes for a major anticlimactic climax. Some of the script's more dramatic moments are also clunky.
Beyond the beautiful crafts on display, Gattaca's secret weapon is its clever variations on body horror. That's a strange thing to say about a film that looks so winningly sterile but the characters are constantly and forcibly focused on their physicality and the reality of their totally human bodies. Nearly every character, no matter how genetically beautifully, is painfully obsessed with being found out for a fraud over some minor defect or faiure. Eyelashes, hearts, eyes, saliva, hair, fingernails, skin, spine, genitals... any part of us can betray the whole at a moment's notice and expose who we really are or aren't. It's a uniquely potent thematic throughline and makes Gattaca something special, flaws and all, to this day.
And it should be stated again, in conclusion, that Jan Roelfs and Nancy Nye more than earned their Art Direction Oscar nomination -- they probably should've won! Here's the final beauteous shot of Vincent on Planet Earth. Note the two circular structures behind him. It's like yin and yang, Vincent/Jerome finally in balance, as our self-made if forged hero prepares to leave this globe behind for good.
