Time Code

I kept hoping this intriguing experiment from director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) would show up in a local theater, seeing how it’s split-screen format could be difficult to follow on video. On the other hand, the option to rewind makes it easier to take in everything that’s captured by four handheld cameras telling a story unfolding in four places at once. Shot simultaneously in continuous, unedited 97-minute takes, Time Code captures a pivotal mid-afternoon in the existence of an alcoholic movie producer (Stellan Skarsgård) whose life is crumbling under the weight of his own machinations.

The story is little more than a kaleidoscopic in-joke Hollywood soap opera improvised by Salma Hayek, Jean Tripplehorn, Steven Weber, Holly Hunter, Saffron Burrows, and Mia Maestro (from Tango), among others. But it’s a trip to watch, the story evolving in not only a narrative but a foursquare geometric sense. Characters sometimes wander into the adjacent or diagonally opposite screen, while the cameras occasionally view the same scene from different angles. The effect is like playing that game at Chuck E. Cheese where you have to bash rodents on the head with a rubber mallet, but you never know which hole they’ll pop up out of, so you have to scan then all if you don’t want to miss anything.

Give Figgis an A for effort and technique, but only a D+ for story. Most egregious, he sets events at the height of SoCal earthquake season, which means that several times we’re treated to everybody on every screen throwing themselves about like Captain Kirk. C

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