A Long Road to Nowhere

Danny Boyle's Trance, Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire

It is truly exciting when a movie decides to play with the times/space continuum and give your mind a good ride. I was hoping this would be the case with Trance, the new film by Danny Boyle. I’m sad to say it wasn’t. There is really nothing more frustrating than a story line that just doesn’t add up. Then you’re just faced with nonsense and pretentiousness. You can play all you want with the mind and memory in movies, but ultimately the pieces of the puzzle need to come together or, from the beginning, everything has to be surrealist, a l’ Un Chien Andalou.

Danny Boyle’s film is, in this respect, like Christopher Nolan’s Inception: there are too many gaps in the story for it to make sense, so then all that going from place to place takes you nowhere. It also made me think that although Trance played visually more like Boyle’s earlier and great film Trainspotting, it has the duality of Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire: a good and a bad movie rolled into one. In Slumdog, the character’s childhood is one movie; it is rich, it is visually stunning, it is dramatic and complex; actually very  heart breaking. Then there’s the quiz show part, the Hollywood (Bollywood)-like film; the formulaic, feel-good, happy-ending movie that no one believes.  In Trance, the movie starts as a good thriller with a twist, an intellectual heist movie, but ends up not really knowing what it’s about at all.  We are kept at a distance watching very flat, non-rounded out characters. At the end you're stuck trying to piece everything together and realize that  it’s much ado about nothing.

Guy Pierce in Memento

It’s sad when this happens to a good director, like Boyle. Christopher Nolan himself also  made the great Memento which is everything that his later film Inception isn’t. It is a movie that demands attention and thought. It breaks the straight story line and, piece by piece, takes you through the maze of the main character’s mind. It would seem that this is what Trance aspired to do, but the logic and the character just kind of slipped away.

I was reminded of Christopher McQuire’s The Usual Suspects as a contrast to this movie; both are  rather violent movies about a gang of criminals trying to get away with their crime, with only one of them succeeding, after many twists and turns. Where The Usual Suspects succeeds in reeling you in and concluding with a surprising and coherent story line, a great plot that comes together at the end, Boyle’s film does not.



The Usual Suspects

Trance could also have stuck with the psychological mystery thriller part of the movie, in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, also about a therapist trying to help an amnesiac, but it doesn’t start or end there either. The main character, whose mind we’re supposedly occupying, just kind of goes away and we realize maybe we weren’t meant to follow him anyway. In the end, he was kind of erased from our minds, much like everything was erased from his.