Jude Law – ReWatch List

Road to Perdition (2002)

I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the 20^th century. I’ve always found it fascinating, as so many others have and probably always will, given how much significant stuff happened and how well documented it is, compared to earlier historical periods. I’m not a history buff, and for me it’s always been a layman’s interest, low-key and not very sharply focused. But it has, perhaps inevitably, been supercharged in the past year and a half. Nowadays, any time before Covid belongs to a bygone age of innocence, and the years before the new millennium…come on, now. Of course, my rational mind knows it’s not ancient history—I was, after all, born in the 20^th century, deep enough to remember a bit of it—but now more than ever, it seems like the days of yore, more similar to the murky, distant past than the world we live in.

Tom Hanks, director Sam Mendes, cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, and the rest of their collaborators obviously couldn’t have foreseen the Covid pandemic—or the Trump presidency, or the rise of social media, or any of the other phenomena that now make the early 20^th century feel so far removed from the present. But that fact is, I think, a key reason why Road to Perdition, the solidly good Depression-era gangster movie they all made in 2002, remains so appealing today.

It was only Mendes’s second feature, but he had been a prominent stage director in England since the late 80s, and his debut, American Beauty (1999), had been a massive success, winning several of the most prestigious Academy Awards. (In more ways than one, that movie hasn’t aged particularly well, but it remains an impressive display of Mendes’s skill.) He’s been a dependable, respectable fixture in the industry ever since, making mostly good movies at a measured, steady pace. He made two well-received dramas, Jarhead (2005) and Revolutionary Road (2008), then a sweet-tempered dramedy, Away We Go (2009) that I, like some critics, found unremarkable, and more than a little smug. He made one of the best James Bond movies of all time, Skyfall (2012), promptly followed by one of the worst, Spectre (2015), of which only the spectacular opening tracking shot is worth seeing.[i] Most recently, he went all in on that concept with 1917 (2019), a First World War movie whose single-take conceit was so technically stunning its other elements were not so much overshadowed as rendered practically irrelevant. His work has been criticized, with some justification, as excessively deliberate and composed, holding the emotional core of the story at arm’s length. But it’s impossible to deny his great talents, both as a director of actors (most stars seem eager to work with him, and he guides almost all of them to fantastic performances) and as an elegant visual stylist with a keen eye for detail.

So it is with Road to Perdition, which, unlike some movies I write about here, I wouldn’t call a spotless masterpiece, sublime from start to finish. One could take issue with its rather cold and clinical approach to the story, for example; or with its conception of some supporting characters and the resulting performances: Jude Law as the twisted freelance killer Maguire, and Daniel Craig as the hotheaded Connor Rooney; or with the way that a random but important elderly couple, and the perfunctory episode where the protagonists recuperate at their farm, end up feeling somewhat shoehorned into the larger narrative. Still, these are minor flaws, and all are notably tempered in some way; how significant they are is likely to be different depending on the viewer. I, for one, think the movie would benefit from being a little less aloof, but I understand why Mendes took that approach, and it pays great dividends in other ways. Whatever you think of Law and Craig, neither of them actually has much screen time, and that efficiency of use is a key reason why I find both their performances quite effective. For similar reasons, I don’t mind the interlude at the farmhouse; it’s a bit awkwardly handled, but it quickly and efficiently fulfills its function in the narrative, and it is in keeping with Mendes’s restrained vision for the movie.

None of these issues, certainly, are serious enough to overshadow the movie’s great strengths—with which they are often closely intertwined. Mendes, as we’ve mentioned, has always been great with actors, and whether those supporting characters work for you or not, Road to Perdition is undoubtedly anchored by some fantastic lead performances. It was marketed as a major departure for Tom Hanks—America’s friendliest, most neighborly movie star plays a cold-blooded hit man! There’s some truth to that, and Hanks is more than capable of pulling off the transformation: with a slightly bulked-up frame lurking under a thick overcoat and fedora, and that subtly intimidating moustache, he looks the part of Irish Mob enforcer Michael Sullivan, and despite the character’s outwardly calm demeanor, his willingness to kill comes as no surprise. And yet, the role isn’t quite as radical as the promotional materials claimed; as Stephen Holden writes, “because Sullivan is played by Mr. Hanks, an actor who invariably exudes conscientiousness and decency, his son’s question [whether his father is “a good man” or “no good at all”] lends the fable a profound moral ambiguity… Acutely aware of his sins, Sullivan is determined that his son, who takes after him temperamentally, not follow in his murderous footsteps.”[ii] The ruthless gangster who’s also a devoted husband and father, striving to shelter his family from the violence of his work life, is a classic figure in cinema, and Hanks turns out to be an ideal actor for such a role. He has the dramatic range to convincingly capture both the character’s hard edges and his tender core, and perhaps because of his broader image as the designated decent guy of Hollywood, his performance illustrates more vividly than most how easily a basically decent person, who might otherwise have led a perfectly moral life, can become a killer if they are rescued from deprivation by a violent community like the mob.

That element of the story also comes across especially powerfully because of the masterful performance on the other side of it: the late, great Paul Newman as mob boss and local patriarch John Rooney. It was something of a swan song for the 77-year-old star: his final role in a movie, at least in the traditional sense. (He would go on to appear a few more times on stage, on television, and as a voice actor before his death in 2008.) It’s a perfect part for him, and the Oscar nomination he received for it was not one of those token nods given to an icon at the end of an illustrious career; Mick LaSalle expressed it well when he wrote that “Newman, who has [apparently] been playing too many crotchety geezers lately, finally gets a role that does justice to his gravity and presence. As Rooney, he’s a picture of healthy old age, straight-backed and clear-eyed, but with the look of someone who has seen horrors. Like virtually everything else in Road to Perdition, not much is on the surface of Newman’s performance. Yet every moment is alive with what’s underneath it—the weight of a misspent life, of guilt, of the certainty of damnation.”[iii] Like Hanks, Newman seamlessly captures both sides of his character: the ruthlessness and resulting capacity to inspire fear, as well as the better angels—devotion to those he loves, guilt for the violence he’s done, and desire to limit it as much as possible—struggling for space in the soul of a deeply conflicted man.

Hanks and Newman are superb on their own terms, and their performances are also crucial to the success of Mendes’s subtly unconventional approach. At first glance, this movie seems like a prime example of what’s often called ‘prestige’ filmmaking, in which major studios (DreamWorks and 20^th Century Fox, in this case) attempt to bolster their artistic integrity by bestowing their unmatched financial resources on reputational counterweights to all those frivolous, spectacularly profitable blockbusters—often lavish period pieces that lean into the ‘magic of cinema’ aspect of the medium. Road to Perdition is undoubtedly such a movie, and it bears some of the hallmarks: the star-studded cast, the richly realized Depression-era setting, the mostly classical-Hollywood score by Thomas Newman, and the thematic focus on the emotional complexities of family bonds in the midst of crisis.

Here, that focus rests squarely on fathers and sons, and it’s not limited to the primary, relatively familiar journey of the hardened Sullivan learning to connect with his son, Michael Jr., when the rest of their comfortable existence is violently torn away. The movie explores a triangle of father-son relationships—between Sullivan and Michael, of course, but also between Sullivan and his surrogate father, Rooney, and between Rooney and his biological son, Connor—which feed off each other and collectively serve as the primary driver of the story. Technically, the inciting incident is when Michael, consumed with curiosity about what his father really does for a living, ends up witnessing a murder, leading Connor, who doesn’t trust him to keep the secret, to decide to kill the whole Sullivan family. But Connor’s reckless plan is also motivated by jealously and resentment of the special relationship between Sullivan and Rooney, full of the sort of paternal love and approval that Connor himself craves—and which, going back even further, is the ultimately the reason why Sullivan is involved in the mob in the first place.

The thematic implications of this tangled emotional web, and the story it sets in motion, are interesting and varied, and Road to Perdition does a compelling job of exploring them. As Holden writes, “the movie captures, like no film I’ve seen, the fear-tinged awe with which young boys regard their fathers and the degree to which that awe continues to reverberate into adult life. Viewed through his son’s eyes, Sullivan, whose face is half-shadowed much of the time by the brim of his fedora, is a largely silent deity, the benign but fearsome source of all knowledge and wisdom.” Tyler Hoechlin (in a fine performance for a 14-year-old actor) makes this dynamic clear, but it also persists, in a subtler way, between Sullivan and Rooney, blinding the younger man to the darker sides of their relationship (a definitive highlight of Newman’s performance is the scene in the crypt when he eloquently disabuses Sullivan of his illusions). And it’s certainly the case for Connor, who flails in his efforts to please his father and make a name for himself, and still wilts in the face of the old man’s anger.

And at the same time, we see the same dynamic working in reverse, confirming Rooney’s early pronouncement that “sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers.” Sullivan’s determination to keep his children away from his violent world is complicated even before wife and younger son are killed, by the mounting evidence that Michael has inherited some of the harder edges of his personality. Connor, of course, causes all sorts of problems for Rooney, who, in turn, finally meets his maker at the hands of the surrogate son whom he loved more, but who was, at the end of the day, not his own flesh and blood.

Another closely related theme is the effect of violence on these relationships. Is it possible for a father to shield his son from the cost of his own sins—or even, perhaps, achieve some measure of redemption through that effort? How does exposure to violence affect children, and does it inevitably lead them to violence themselves? These are thorny issues, and the movie doesn’t presume to offer definitive answers. On the latter question, we initially get the pessimistic answer in the characters of Sullivan and especially Connor, whose psychosis seems to be, at least in part, an inevitable result of growing up in the mob. But the ending, in which Michael finds himself unable to pull the trigger, offers a more hopeful conclusion that tempers some of the grimness that came before.

That grimness also stems from the air of inevitability that follows these characters for much of the movie. This isn’t so much about the old truism that it’s impossible to walk away from the mob; in fact, Sullivan is effectively offered that chance multiple times, and he refuses. Nor is it about the damage that the mob does to society; as Roger Ebert notes, “the movie shares with The Godfather the useful tactic of keeping the actual victims out of view. There are no civilians here, destroyed by mob activity. All the characters, good and bad, are supplied from within the mob. But there is never the sense that any of these characters will tear loose, think laterally, break the chains of their fate.”[iv] There are twists and revelations here, but for most of the movie, the main source of audience engagement isn’t a burning desire to find out what will happen, or what a character will do. As Rooney points out, Michael was always going to find out what his father did sometime. Once he does, and Connor sees that he has, and Rooney, enraged at his son’s reckless response to that problem, relents and hugs him tightly, the paths of the main characters are more or less set. In the tradition of classical tragedy, the story feels driven not so much by mounting pressure as by the pull of gravity, as that tangled web of relationships and motivations gently but inexorably nudges the characters toward their fates.

And yet, most of us don’t come out of Road to Perdition feeling that we saw a brutally bleak movie, or a boring one. It may not be particularly ground-breaking in a narrative or thematic sense, but great acting nevertheless makes those aspects powerfully felt, and that gives Mendes the space to put a more distinctive stylistic stamp on it than we often see in this sort of prestige filmmaking. To characterize his style, the first word that comes to mind is ‘minimalist,’ but that’s only true in a narrative sense. The movie is based on a graphic novel by Max Alan Collins, but only loosely, as the screenplay by David Self and some uncredited re-writers (probably including Mendes, in some capacity) ended up departing quite a bit from the source material, adding the Maguire character, toning down the carnage and the brutality of the protagonist—as great an actor as he is, Hanks can’t convincingly play a character known as ‘The Angel of Death’—and distilling the narrative down to its fundamental elements.[v] As a result, the story unfolds at a stately pace, but with great efficiency, and most of the dialogue remaining after all those cuts is concise and expressive, allowing the actors to convey great deal not only through words, but through the other tools of their trade.

A better way to put it is that Road to Perdition is narratively minimalist, but sensorily lavish. It’s simply a lovely movie to experience, in both a visual and auditory sense, and this is the other major reason it’s so engaging. The sound design is understated but highly effective; all gun-related sounds, from shots firing to the slides and clicks of other functions, ring out in harsh contrast to the otherwise subdued soundscape, representing the jarring incursion of violence into everyone’s outwardly respectable lives. And Mendes has a cool habit of subtly jacking up tension at key moments by slowly increasing the volume of a single sound within the scene: music in the other room at a brothel, the whir of a stock market ticker tape during a standoff, or waves breaking outside as Michael tries to pull the trigger on Maguire.

But first and foremost, we’re talking about the visuals here, because they are remarkable. As it was for Newman, Road to Perdition turned out to be a swan song for the legendary cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, who died in 2003, less than a year after the movie came out.[vi] Taking inspiration from the paintings of Edward Hopper, Hall does exquisite things with light, shadow and darkness, crafting a vision of the early-30s Chicago area that’s too gorgeously stylized to be called realistic, yet somehow never completely abandons realism. It would be futile to try to unpack the gorgeous images that result (where would you even begin?), but suffice it to say that I never get tired of looking at them; I think Holden put it best, writing that Hall and Mendes “have created a truly majestic visual tone poem, one that…inspires a continuing and deeply satisfying awareness of the best movies as monumental ‘picture shows.’” Even the thrill of so-called ‘action,’ of which there is a decent amount (this is a gangster movie, after all, in which many people get shot), is mostly conveyed not through stunts, but through visual flourishes that are conspicuous without being overly indulgent. When Michael witnesses the shootout, we see it all from his vantage point, under a door; when Rooney’s men are gunned down, we see the muzzle flash in darkness, then a slow tracking shot, drifting from man to man as they fall; when Sullivan finally gets his revenge on Connor, we see the dead man only in the mirror on a door swinging shut.

This is what I meant earlier, about the 20^th century and the enduring appeal of Road to Perdition. There are many reasons for the lasting popularity of gangster movies, but Mendes, Hall and the rest understood that especially in recent years, a large (and underappreciated) part of the genre’s appeal is simply aesthetic. So they chose to lean in to that element of the story, an effort that involved not only Hall, but also production designer Dennis Gassner, art director Richard L. Johnson, costume designer Albert Wolsky, and the countless artists and technicians working under them. They did a magnificent job, and the result is a movie that, even back in the carefree year of 2002, when they didn’t even have to worry too much about climate change (I mean, they did, but the world wasn’t literally on fire yet), indulges the nostalgia for the 20^th century that we can’t help but feel, even though we know better. Of course we know that clothes in the 30s were pretty uncomfortable, but people sure did look good in them. Of course vehicles back then didn’t work nearly as well as they do today, but god damn, those cars are cool. Of course these cities and towns were pits of despair at that time, but man, those images sure are stunning.

We don’t really wish we were back in that world. But especially amid the madness of 2021, it’s lovely to spend a couple hours there. ◊

[i] Very awesome. The rest of the movie, not so much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbqv1kbsNUY

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/12/movies/film-review-a-hell-for-fathers-and-sons.html

[iii] https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/HARD-ROAD-Hanks-gets-inside-a-killer-s-head-2823445.php

[iv] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/road-to-perdition-2002

[v] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Perdition#Writing

[vi] Newman and Hall had collaborated before, with impressive results: Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Gattaca (1997)

September 3, 2020March 3, 2021 hbswanLeave a comment

For a certain type of science fiction story, there are few higher honors than to be characterized by the much-coveted phrase: ‘thinking person’s sci-fi’. In a perfect world, such a descriptor would be superfluous; you’d think that science fiction, by its very nature, would give us something to think about every time we venture into it. And, technically, I suppose it does, but as with any well-defined genre, in reality there’s quite a chasm between the genre’s full potential and most of what the entertainment industry offers up. So it has always been with science fiction, and especially in the past few decades, as superhero and fantasy movies have come to dominate the box office (to the point of providing the lion’s share of yearly revenue for the studios who make them). Most sci-fi movies these days seem to fall into two broad categories. On the one hand, we have the ‘serious’ ones for the thinking audience: small and narrowly focused, engaging us on lower budgets either by venturing into wild and weird territory, or by creating imagined worlds that look mostly like our own, with only a few select suspensions of disbelief. And on the other hand, we have the massive blockbusters, using the now-basically-unlimited capabilities of special effects to entertain us largely through extraordinary visuals: the physics-defying action set pieces and the vividly rendered fantasy worlds. There are exceptions (Ex Machina, The Martian, pretty much everything Christopher Nolan does), but overall, the combination of interesting ideas, compelling visuals, and excellent filmmaking is so rare in sci-fi that it feels like a real gift from above when it does come about. And there are few better examples of this than Gattaca, a wonderfully crafted, visually exquisite dystopian parable whose concerns about genetic engineering are just as thought-provoking today as they were when it came out in 1997—so much so that a 2011 poll of NASA scientists rated it the best sci-fi movie of all time.[i]

Gattaca isn’t perfect (no movie is) but it’s still something of a cinematic miracle—and an interesting one, both on its own terms and in the ways it stands out from its genre counterparts. It’s always notable when a speculative sci-fi movie still feels relevant and insightful multiple decades after its release, and that’s certainly the case here. Gattaca’s vision of a world based on genetic discrimination arose out of events and realities specific to its time: the use of genetically modified crops was exploding; the Human Genome Project was humming along and nearing completion; and Dolly, the first successfully cloned mammal, had just been born. But the issues the movie raises have only grown thornier in the intervening years, especially recently. With the new CRISPR gene-editing technology potentially enabling exactly this sort of selective conception, and with growing awareness of the depth of humanity’s discriminatory instincts and of its commitment to the increasingly dubious social ideology of meritocracy, some version of the (smartly unspecified) ‘not too distant future’ portrayed in the movie seems both closer and more dangerous than ever.

The movie was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, a thoughtful Kiwi filmmaker who left New Zealand at age twenty-one and paid his dues in London, directing TV commercials for over a decade before he finally got the chance to make a proper movie. Gattaca was that first feature, and it’s kind of miraculous that Niccol was ever allowed to make another; like so many eventual classics, the movie was popular with critics but a pretty resounding failure at the box office. I’ve noticed that this has become a standard feature of these articles: the part where I explore, in perhaps unnecessary detail, how this month’s great director got to this point, how we might define their artistic sensibilities, and how our given movie relates to the rest of their estimable body of work. We’re still doing that, obviously, but it’s at least a bit different this month. Niccol’s story is a somewhat rarer one in the film industry, and one that I actually find much more interesting: the filmmaker who makes an inspired first (or early) feature, but whose subsequent work never quite rises to the same level. Niccol’s interest in science fiction and the human ramifications of new technology has continued, and he’s still had a successful career, working slowly but steadily over the past twenty-odd years. Some of his movies have been so-so (S1m0ne, 2002), some bad yet commercially successful (In Time, 2011), and some quite good (Lord of War, 2005 and Good Kill, 2014)—but so far, he’s never quite managed to equal the peculiar magic that he worked with Gattaca, when he was still in his early thirties. (Interestingly, his best work besides Gattaca was around the same time, on a movie he wrote but did not direct: the 1998 dramedy classic The Truman Show.)

The reasons for Niccol’s uneven filmography are perhaps unknowable, but we can certainly shed some light on why Gattaca, in particular, works so well. I mentioned before that it’s not a perfect movie because no such movie exists—and that’s true, but in this case there are specific weaknesses that even an ardent admirer like myself can identify. Especially in the first act, the movie is a bit too heavy on exposition, delivered via voice-over narration that starts to become excessive. There are a few holes in the plot and world-building that can rankle if you can’t suspend disbelief. And while the writing and acting are strong overall, there are clunky phrases that, combined with the rarefied, highly mannered setting in which the story takes place, lead to moments of awkwardness in the performances. These are all minor issues, none of which would come close to spoiling the movie for me in any case. But Gattaca is one of those happy instances in which such minor flaws are almost completely overshadowed by other aspects of the movie that are not just great, but genuinely unusual and interesting.

The most obvious of these strengths would have to be the movie’s wonderfully distinctive aesthetic. In its own unique way, this is one of the most visually stunning sci-fi movies I’ve seen, which is remarkable when you consider how few stunts and special effects are involved. Slawomir Idziak’s cinematography, for example, is a gorgeously interesting exercise in contradiction. On the one hand, it’s very reserved, almost stately, working mostly with carefully framed static shots; the camera moves, when they do occur, tend to be discreet and intuitive, rarely drawing attention to themselves. The few instances of jittery, handheld camerawork are reserved for moments of high tension, and specifically those involving real physical danger, like a scuffle and chase through a back alley, or the nerve-racking swimming competitions between our protagonist, Vincent, and his brother Anton. Obstacles that are conquered via quick wits and composure, like an endurance test at Gattaca or a nail-biting traffic stop, are depicted with the usual precision and restraint. But on the other hand, ‘restrained’ is not necessarily how you’d describe the cinematography as a whole, because it doesn’t account for Idziak’s dazzling use of color. He infuses all those stately images with strikingly rich color schemes: warm yellows for the sleek, sun-drenched living areas and outdoor spaces; cool blues and greens for clinical settings, like the Gattaca testing facilities and the home laboratory where Vincent and Eugene prepare the tools of their deception; and for the grander areas of Gattaca and the ritzy public establishments, a lavish medley of silver, gold, and deep brown, evoking the mixture of cutting-edge modernity and old-school elegance that defines this world. The cinematography captures the essential, contradictory nature of this imagined future and the lives of those who inhabit it: beautiful and luxurious, representing new heights of human sophistication, yet so aggressively refined and tightly regimented that it becomes impersonal and oppressive—sometimes even surreal.

And yet Gattaca is just as much (if not more so) a triumph of another key aspect of visual filmmaking: the purview of a small army of people who are essential to any movie, but whose names are hardly ever known outside the film world. Case in point: I’ve barely mentioned the art department in previous articles. But you can’t discuss what makes Gattaca great without noting the work of production designer Jan Roelfs and his many lieutenants: art director Sarah Knowles, set decorator Nancy Nye, costume designer Colleen Atwood, and the dozens of stylists, concept artists, carpenters, painters, and laborers of all kinds who (often literally) craft the remarkable images that the camera captures. Niccol is instrumental in this as well—it’s his vision that these people are bringing to the screen—but the task is so comprehensive, and the work so varied, that it’s hard to see it exclusively, or even primarily, as the achievement of one person. Gattaca is a prime example of a wonderful thing that sometimes happens in the movies. Maybe Niccol always had a crystal-clear vision, maybe Roelfs and the rest guided him to it, maybe it was a happy instance of the right people linking up with the right premise… only those who worked on the production can know the exact reasons, but however it happened, everyone seems to have let their imaginations run away with them in the best possible way. We see this in some of the other great sci-fi and fantasy movies of recent years, like The Matrix, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or Dark City and Mad Max: Fury Road (both of which I’ll write about someday): the sense that the art department was inspired to go above and beyond the call of duty, creating an imagined world that’s not just exceptionally detailed and beautiful, but genuinely original and unique.

Specifically, they’ve done one of my favorite things in speculative sci-fi, which is to infuse the aesthetic of the future with various aesthetics of the past. This is a whole realm of artistic possibility all too often ignored by movies set in the imagined future, which tend to restrict themselves to some combination magnifying the style of the present, and creating a new one far removed from the world we know. There’s plenty of that in Gattaca, to be sure; many of the sleek interior spaces and the (now rather charmingly) retro-futuristic technology are in the same vein as the ultra-advanced futures of Star Trek, or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even the 1972 Russian classic Solyaris. Here we must note the accomplishments of yet more unsung crew members: location manager Robert Earl Craft and his scouts and assistants, who managed to not just find, but wrangle permission to film at, some choice specimens of California architecture that fit perfectly into the movie’s elegantly streamlined world.

Yet even these advanced-future elements sometimes seem to be filtered through the aesthetics of the past. The Gattaca headquarters, for example, is played by Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1960 Marin County Civic Center, and to varying degrees, the other locations share a similar kind of postwar-futuristic vibe. And the world of the movie is filled out, so to speak, with a wonderful mash-up of past styles, like this future society has cherry-picked the aesthetic highlights of the 20^th century. The interiors of leisure spaces, like lounges and concert halls, showcase the opulence of the Gilded Age; the clothing and hairstyles harken back to the glamorous 1940s and 50s; and while the cars are electric, everything else about them is straight out of the 60s, the decade when cars looked best. It’s all lovely to look at, and it also helps to deepen the overall impact of the movie; just like the cinematography, the production design captures both the great sophistication and the stifling rigidity of this imagined future in a beautifully unconventional way.

Something similar is going on with another element that I’ve rarely discussed before: the score, composed by Michael Nyman, which is not exactly what you’d expect in this sort of movie. I’m far too musically illiterate to analyze exactly how Nyman does it, but his music dovetails so well with the movie’s overall aesthetic that it’s easy to miss how unconventional it is for the genre. I don’t recall hearing any synthesizers, or many electronic tones of any kind—certainly none of the doomy, low-thrumming synths that the soundtracks of dystopian sci-fi thrillers are often built around. In keeping with the old-fashioned elegance of this world, Nyman sticks mostly to traditional analog instruments, most notably some beautifully resonant string arrangements, which also give the movie an undercurrent of melancholy that’s crucial to its emotional impact—it’s almost as if, even as the characters rarely express as much, the music is mourning the flawed but essential facets of human life that this society has stamped out in the name of progress. A perfect example is my favorite scene, when the adult Anton, now a detective, comes to the home of the Gattaca employee known as ‘Jerome Morrow,’ hoping to expose Vincent as an imposter; after his agonizing crawl up the stairs, the real Jerome, now known as Eugene, impersonates himself and foils Anton’s blood test. It’s one of the most conventionally thriller-like scenes in the movie, and Nyman’s music does add tension, but the oscillating strings also capture the essential weirdness of the situation, the underlying sadness, and the emotional turmoil beneath the composed facades of every character involved. It’s unconventional, but it dovetails perfectly with the movie’s larger aesthetic.

It all fits together because Niccol, takes a similar, subtly unconventional approach in his dual role as writer and director. Gattaca is a dystopian sci-fi thriller, and it holds our attention like one, but for a good chunk of its overall runtime, it moves away from the sort of storytelling that typically defines such movies. For one thing, the near-total absence of stunts is conspicuous enough to make you realize just how much contemporary sci-fi relies on action elements to keep us engaged. Here, many of what I call the ‘oh-shit’ moments, the surges of tension and the big reveals, are actually built around very simple things: an eyelash being sucked into a vacuum; the results of DNA tests popping up on a screen; Anton yelling, “Vincent!!” down a dark alley; a pair of contact lenses being surreptitiously removed; or a distinctive trinket placed on the hood of a car. Even the scenes of real physical peril, when you get down to it, simply raise the stakes on otherwise ordinary actions: swimming, running down an alley, crossing the street, or that house call of Anton’s, which consists, in the end, of a simple blood test. And then there’s the murder that he’s investigating, which seems set up to be a major focus of the plot, but then just as quickly recedes into the background; the victim is a character we never meet, and the story never feels primarily like one of a suspected murderer evading justice. Instead, Niccol folds the investigation into the larger narrative, using it not only to raise the stakes, but to give us a clearer sense of the way Vincent-as-Jerome lives in constant danger of being exposed, and to make more immediate the struggle he’s waging—both on a societal level, rebelling against the oppressive systems that restrict his prospects; and on a personal level, proving his worth to his genetically optimized brother. And despite the fact that the movie doesn’t unfold like a murder mystery, the investigation is still an essential part of it, both narratively and thematically; whatever his faults as a writer of dialogue, Niccol structures the story tightly and thoughtfully, ensuring that everything in it serves a clear purpose.

He also benefits from the efforts of his actors, who do a great deal to help sell this speculative, stylized world as a place that feels real to the people living in it. As is often the case, Ethan Hawke’s performance is, upon reflection, better than it initially appears. He can seem, at first, almost like a caricature of the obsessively driven, seductively brooding genius who often shows up in dystopian sci-fi, but after a while, Hawke lets us see how this persona is at least partly an act, making Vincent more sympathetic and lending credence to the idea of his transformation being so complete that the outside world sees no trace of his old self. Uma Thurman has less to do, but she lets just enough emotion sneak through her meticulously refined exterior to make her eventual change of heart seem plausible. Loren Dean, an actor I’ve never seen in anything else, is similarly effective as Anton, mixing flickers of doubt into his character’s air of ingrained confidence. And then there’s Jude Law (before he was famous!), who gives the movie’s best performance as the paralyzed Eugene, capturing the character’s understandable bitterness, his deepening investment in Vincent’s success, and his undiminished intelligence and wit—he’s the source of much of the humor that helps set Gattaca apart from most dystopian sci-fi. So too is Xander Berkeley as Lamar, the doctor who administers Gattaca’s DNA tests; it’s a small but important role, and with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes and a certain deadpan humor in his lines—bookended by two of the most decorous dick jokes in movie history—Berkeley conveys hints of a much gentler, more interesting guy behind the veneer of professionalism. Alan Arkin does something similar as Anton’s partner; as great a threat as he poses to Vincent, his canny instincts and blunt mannerisms carry a certain inevitable appeal amid the stifling refinement of Gattaca. And who better than Gore Vidal to embody the haughty entitlement of those who thrive in such exclusive spaces?

The point of all this is not to claim that the world of Gattaca is exceptionally realistic or believable. Which is fine; in fact, dystopian sci-fi that makes credibility its primary goal, trying to explain every conceivable plot hole and convince us that this absolutely could or will happen someday, tends not to work very well. And to be fair, I don’t think that’s really what the movie is going for; Niccol and his many collaborators, from the art department to the camera crew to the cast, choose instead to make full use of the creative freedom that speculative sci-fi allows—hence the beguiling aesthetic and the restrained storytelling. And they do it without sacrificing the one quality that really matters: whether or not this imagined future is strictly plausible, it is, in its own way, coherent—a world that adheres decently well to its own internal logic, and to which the characters respond in relatable ways.

And this, I think, is the main source of the Gattaca’s thematic resonance. Its immediate concerns about eugenics and genetic engineering were relevant in 1997 and are newly relevant today, and the movie posits a world that’s rather far-out, but coherent enough to make us think seriously about what a social order based on genetics might look like. But for me, it comes across even more powerfully as an indictment of institutionalized discrimination of any kind; the language used to enforce the genetic hierarchy echoes the language of oppression throughout history, and scenes like the one where a young Vincent is wordlessly intimidated out of a job interview by the prospect of a DNA test, bring to mind contemporary realities of unequal access to opportunity.

And more broadly, Gattaca is a forceful critique of any attempt to fully quantify human capability and potential. The message is ultimately hopeful: we may know more than ever about our genetic makeup, but we’re not slaves to it. Tellingly, almost every character goes against their genetic code in some way, and the results, good or bad, are always hugely consequential. There’s Vincent, obviously, overcoming his genetic limitations to realize his dream of going to space. Irene, the model of corporate conformity, turns out to be not just tolerant of, but actively attracted to someone who defies the system, and receptive to the idea that her own limitations might not be set in stone. Anton’s superior ‘helix’ leads to a level of overconfidence that nearly kills him, while his partner, older and more experienced but genetically relegated to subordinate status, turns out to be a better detective in pretty much every way. The director, who doesn’t have “a violent bone in [his] body,” turns out to be perfectly capable of cold-blooded murder. And Lamar, who was presumably hired for his genetic predisposition to do this job impeccably, is perfectly willing to bend the rules when he knows it’s right.

And then there’s Jerome, who doesn’t exactly go against his genetic code, but is still the movie’s best character. A lesser film would have made the arrangement between him and Vincent a major source of tension, with Jerome coming to resent Vincent using his genes to get ahead. But after bit of initial suspicion, that source of conflict melts away; the two men become good friends, and Jerome is soon just as committed to the deception as Vincent is. And he’s much more interesting as a result, exemplifying the problems with treating our DNA as the final word on who we are, and the dangers of organizing society around it. His genes place him at the tip-top of the privileged elite, but in a world that ranks people by their capabilities, his paralysis renders his perfect helix largely irrelevant. And even worse, we learn that this society is the reason he’s paralyzed in the first place; despondent over finishing second, and thereby not realizing his full genetic potential, he attempted suicide by stepping in front of a car. He could have been just another antagonist; instead, he’s a living, breathing reminder of the ways that discrimination hurts everybody in the end.[ii]

Whatever happens with genetic engineering, and whether or not future society adopts this retro-chic aesthetic, that message will continue to resonate. ◊