The Reel Deal

I've been noticing an unusual amount of movies with fractured timeframes recently.
This weekend's releases "The Prestige" and "Flags of Our Fathers" are the two latest to jump around between past and present, all but willy nilly, within their period settings. Others that have done so to a distracting extent include "The Illusionist," "All the King's Men," "The Science of Sleep," "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" and "The Black Dahlia."
And I can't say I've really liked any of them. Not because their non-chronological narratives were hard to follow - done right, as it was in "Prestige" director Christopher Nolan's "Memento" and most of Quentin Tarantino's films, non-linear storytelling adds extra intrigue, resonance and sheer enjoyment to a plot - but because it tends to undercut character and thematic developments just as they're getting interesting. As soon as you're getting involved, for example, in the ironies of "Flag's" history-distorting fund-raising tour, director Clint Eastwood takes you back to the Battle of Iwo Jima that inspired it, to watch some Marine characters you hardly know die hideous deaths. And vice versa, presto change-o.
It's frustrating, especially when compared to the season's more effective dramas - "The Queen," "Little Children," even "The Departed" and "Marie Antoinette" - which tell their stories in a straightforward flow with minmal to no flashing back or forward.
That said, filmmakers have every right to manipulate time as well as space in their movies. And, convinced that some do it for better reasons than just to cover up lame or ludicrous scripts, I asked Nolan, one of the past masters at this, why it has became so prevalent and what the tricks to doing it well were.
"It's never been an unusual thing in storytelling generally, in novels or drama," the English director noted. "I mean, it goes back to 'The Odyssey.' Only in films.
"This is my gross oversimplification. 'Citizen Kane' (1941) was the epitome of the flashback structure. What happened after that, effectively, was that television came along, and all movies had to be made to be watched on telelvision, ultimately, from the 1950s onward. What that means is, when the doorbell rings and you have to get up and go pay the pizza guy, when you come back and sit down you have to be able to have, basically, missed 10 minutes of the movie and still follow it.
"With the invention of home video, that changed. The doorbell rings, you press pause, then you come back and pick up exactly where you left off. So suddenly, all kinds of narrative freedoms that novelists and the earliest filmmakers enjoyed are viable. And DVD particularly, because it has the random access feature that lets you flip around like the chapters of a book or a magazine, prompts everybody to think in different terms.
"I think it's very much just getting movies back on track," Nolan concluded. "The key is, there has to be purpose and there has to be reason for non-linear stories."
Perhaps it's those elements that are absent from the underwhelming non-chronological movies of recent vintage. But I'll be the first to admit that the strategy can work marvelously when it's integral and well thought-out. Proof comes next Friday when "Babel," the latest time-warping meta-tragedy from Mexico's directing/writing team of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga, hits theaters. They've done this kind of thing quite nicely before in "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," but "Babel" takes it to a new height of formal, dramatic and humanistic grandeur.
It's well worth anyone's time.

Out of Time

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