A decade ago, a caper like Contraband might have been in line for a fashionably
fragmentary narrative treatment – so why not now?
Straight and narrow … Contraband tells its story in a convenational narrative.
It’s a berth on the USS Contemporary all the way for Mark Wahlberg in his new
thriller Contraband, with its story about the counterfeit-money supply lines between
Panama and the United States. In fact, the film is a testament to the glories of (above
board) free trade: once known as 2008 Icelandic production Reykjavik-Rotterdam,
this piece of intellectual property has crossed the Atlantic with star Baltasar
Kormákur, who, as the new film’s director, ushered it smoothly into the Hollywood
warehouse.
Contraband is a solid enough 110 minutes, a bit like a lengthy episode of the Crystal
Maze set in a sweating central American metropolis overseen by some crazed UPS
official. But its feverish overplotting made me think it had missed a trick. It might
have benefitted from stringing together some elegant non-linear connections, like Traffic and Syriana, with whom it shares a fascination with international
logistics.
A decade ago, when globalisation was becoming a buzzword, a cargo-container caper
like Contraband might have been in line for the narrative treatment befitting the
continent-spanning global film: that characteristic web of connections and
coincidences, vibrating to a tremulous score all the better to emphasise Life’s
Evanescent Fragility. But Contraband keeps things straighter than Marky Mark’s
haircut, and gives us a customs and excise Ocean’s 11 instead.
Somewhere in the last few years, non-linear narrative has fallen out of favour. At the
turn of the millennium, it was having a moment. Films like Pulp Fiction and
Magnolia had pushed it into the mainstream during the 90s. Memento and Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind postulated that this was exactly how our brains
perceived the world. The world, as it hit the 21st century, seemed to agree: non-linear
found perfect subject material in globalised complexity. Both the haphazard mesh of
human interactions in booming world city-states, and the butterfly-flaps-its-wings
patterns of cause and effect on a shrinking planet seemed best dealt in disorderly
fashion.
It was fitting that the story shape was best moulded by film-makers from the
developing world who were the newest and most exciting guests at the globalisation
party. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga’s Amores
Perros, in 2000, was the film that shattered plot most thrillingly, taking in every
social tier of teeming Mexico City, bonding its characters in a central car crash.
Dissonant shards of meaning and poetry lay everywhere.
How quickly it has been cleaned up. Iñárritu and Arriaga fell out over credit for the
story for their third film, Babel, and the former ditched their trademark fractured
style in his next film, Biutiful. Arriaga’s career seems to have stalled; though inspired
by his hero William Faulkner, he was still flying the flag for border-crossing fractured
narrative in the Tex-Mex drama The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
Without truly evolving, the global-connections film has continued to flicker here and
there: Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness and 360 dabbled; Dubai thought the format
was the one to announce its cinema ambitions to the world in its first full-length
feature, City of Life; Fatih Akin made the best running with it in his soulful Eurasian
drama, The Edge of Heaven.
It’s true that non-linear must be a nightmare to write. Amores Perros, still the
tightest and most kinetic noughties example, went through 36 drafts. But labour-
intensiveness (and I thought globalisation was meant to fix that kind of thing) can’t
be the sole reason it’s fallen out of favour. After Iñárritu and Arriaga released Babel,
the New Yorker critic David Denby, in his essay The New Disorder, had started to see
problems with the whole approach, finding its prizing of coincidence a dangerous
temptation for film-makers: “‘Life is like that,’ I heard people in the audience say.
Actually, a certain kind of pseudo-serious bad fiction is like that. Babel feels like the
first example of a new genre – the highbrow globalist tear-jerker.”
Denby even accused Iñárritu and Arriaga of using non-linear to disguise their
political agenda. “The privileged carelessness of the First World characters, giving
their guns away and leaving their kids behind, plants the seeds of what goes wrong.
There’s a pattern to the disasters: a punitive attack on the selfishness of the rich can’t
pass itself off as the mere impersonal merciless working out of fate. Experience can’t
be random and also structured like a cage.”
I think Denby was being a little harsh in writing off the whole project. A cage is what
it might have become, but the global non-linear story originally felt like a liberation;
a swerve out of the confines of traditional first- or third-person narration, and a
recognition that (adopts Trailerman voice) in a world without borders, there was
always a perspective beyond your own.
Global capital was flowing freely in the early noughties, the internet was breaking
down geographical and social barriers, and it was easy to feel a sense of exhilaration.
But I wonder if, now that we’ve hit rockier times, the temptation is to look after No 1,
and take refuge in your own narrative. Contraband, despite the noisy swerves and
feints of its plot, is only interested in taking us to the happiest ending by the quickest
route; it lionises getting away with it in an era cursed by self-interest.
But I hope Arriaga and the broken brigade aren’t done yet. Non-linear stories were
about making the effort to form meaningful connections. They were about
intelligence, patience and empathy. Those qualities shouldn’t have to be marked
“contraband” yet.
Phil Hoad – guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 March 2012