THE FACE OF ANGEL
★ 1/2
Michael Winterbottom must have a blind spot for metafictional narratives: How else to explain how one of our surest hands on the camera grabbed at such a flaming turd of a script? Miles away from the heady but playful postmodernist work he’s done with Steve Coogan ( 24 Hour Party People, The Trip, A Cock and Bull Story), to say nothing of his usually sharp dramatics, The Face of An Angel is almost interminable slog that finds infinity in its own navel, only looking up long enough to sneer at the corrupt, empty world that occasionally intrudes on it.
Based ever so loosely on the Amanda Knox case — young student abroad in Italy is accused of killing her roommate — Angel lays itself out immediately as a head-scratcher about where the truth lies. Director Thomas (Daniel Brühl) meets with a journalist who has been covering the case (Kate Beckinsale) who warns him it’s a mess of conflicting stories: “You can’t tell the truth unless you make it a fiction,” she explains, and Thomas sets off to do exactly that.
Early on, the movie is feinting at making a morass of all the potential stories: with skewed angles and jumpy cuts, it crosses between media members, lawyers and testi- monies, muddying the waters and suggesting some of the confusion that attends the case, where everyone has both a different agenda and an entirely different set of facts. Getting bored of that in short order — Thomas even admits at the start he’s not much for true crime — it quickly decides that the most interesting, truthful story it could tell would be about a haughtily intellectual filmmaker going through a mid-life crisis while trying to tell the story of a murder case.
So then we get a bunch of overstated Dante references, and a series of ham-fisted dream sequences, and a lot of scenes of Thomas staring down his nose at someone — grubby producers who are salivating at the prospect of casting two young women, greasy tabloid journalists who care only about their next scoop — and moping around cobblestone streets. He eventually meets a young bartender (Cara Delevingne, so charismatic you wonder why she wasn’t fired on the spot) who acts as a sort of weirdly eroticized daughter figure and helps Thomas out of his funk.
The overall effect is to make all the people Thomas sneers at seem right: sure, they might not be borrowing the structure of The Divine Comedy —a blindingly obvious highbrow reference the movie treats like a revelation — but at least they’re willing to let a story happen without crushing it under the weight of solipsistic self-examination. The message of The Face of an Angel isn’t so much that the truth is elusive, or even open to interpretation: it’s that there’s nothing more interesting to a middle-aged man than his own pain and any young blond that smiles at him. ★½
You can’t tell the truth unless you make it a fiction
The Face of An Angel opens May 22 in Toronto, with more cities to follow.