The Tourist (2010)

by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

A Review

A cloaked Elise (Angelina Jolie)

International woman of mystery, Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie), attracts into her orbit an unsuspecting American mathematics teacher, Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), whom gangsters and MI6 mistake for the elusive former mafia accountant Alexander Pierce, Elise's boyfriend. Set on Venice's beautiful canals, bridges, and rooftops, The Tourist has hopes of being a charming thriller of old, but manages only to be an unintentional parody of itself.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the writer/director of his Oscar-winning debut film The Lives of Others (2006), has made a poor second feature film, a remake of Anthony Zimmer (2005) (unavailable on DVD). The production went through at least two leading men and one leading woman prior to settling on Depp and Jolie, as well as multiple directors, including von Donnersmarck's own departure and return.

Following stupendous success with his first film, von Donnersmarck's decision that his second film remake a recent French film as a big-budget American film is seemingly unprecedented. Apparently for good reason. Perhaps lured by Hollywood's brightest--or did he lure them?--and working with a different crew (writer, cinematographer, and composer, to name the three most glaringly different), The Tourist fails to deliver the suspense and character development of The Lives of Others. It blows three kisses to Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959)--via its case of mistaken identity (“the wrong man”), with its train as the romantic setting where our two lead actors first meet and woo, and by ending with a visual double-entendre. The Tourist lacks North by Northwest's charm, humor, and romance. Though Jolie simmers in a Grace Kelly role, Depp stumbles in his parallel role to Cary Grant's John "The Cat" Robie (To Catch a Thief (1955)). When a director has such great success as a writer/director, “remake” should not be the first opportunity siezed.

Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) and Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) cruise Venice

Too many parts of this film we have seen before, all of them superior to The Tourist's attempts. 

• Venice has been shot many times, and much-accomplished Director of Photography John Seale has beautifully shot Italy before (The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)), but this latest effort pales against what the rest of cinema offers. 

• Having been shot in Italy, it seems appropriate to note that some scenes could have benefited from Michelangelo Antonioni's preference of silence from the orchestra, challenging von Donnersmarck to create mood without cheap assistance of a musical score at odds with the scenes' lack of power. With Vittorio De Sica's son in the cast, perhaps his presence in post-production might have taught how powerful silence can be, especially when the alternative is this particular James Newton Howard score.

• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) shot a much more compelling Venice motorboat chase scene. Perhaps it is true, but does von Donnersmarck expect us to believe that Venice canals are abandoned at night, especially during motorboat chases?

• Quentin Tarantino's own hands gave us cinema's greatest strangulation scene in Inglourious Basterds (2009), so von Donnersmarck, and all subsequent directors, must expect his/her strangulation scenes to be measured against Tarantino's.

Clichéd plaza pigeons

Tupelo's dumb American use of Spanish-as-Italian went unnoticed at first by my audience, but multiple visits to the joke got older each time we heard a “gracias” or a “Bon Jovi” instead of a “grazie” or “buon giorno.”  The lone exception was a bellhop, upon receiving Tupelo's "gracias" responded with a very funny confused/amused "de nada." The importance of understanding multiple non-English languages spoken in a scene is perhaps best experienced in Godard's Le Mepris (a.k.a. Contempt) (1963), but surely it has been used to greater humorous effect than in The Tourist. And how many times must we see the clichéd man traversing a plaza, only to scatter the mulling-about birds? For goodness sake, Seinfeld made fun of this scene more than a decade before it was shot.

To revisit Hitchcock briefly, The Tourist features a substantial MacGuffin, the thing in a movie that all the characters care about, but about which the audience does not.  For instance, the audience does not actually care what happens to the missing $40,000 in Psycho (1960) or to the Death Star plans in Star Wars (1977), but all the characters in the movie who know about the money or plans certainly care. If von Donnersmarck knows it's a MacGuffin at all—the identity of Alexander Pierce (if Pierce even exists)--he mistakenly thinks we care about it. We do not. And treating it as if we do, hurts this film.

Elise (Angelina Jolie)

In The Lives of Others, every move its characters make are not only unexpected, they feel more real than all the clichés the brain imagines.  By contrast, the characters' actions and dialogue in The Tourist are painfully predictable or unnecessary. The film's strongest feature is the sculpted beauty of Elise, who has numerous costume and hair changes—each more elegant than the previous.  Though she is worth seeing, her beauty is insufficient to carry this film.

The only commonality The Tourist has with von Donnersmarck's earlier The Lives of Others is a faint nod to Germany via Tupelo's fictitious pulp read The Berlin Vendetta.  Nothing else in this movie looks or feels like it was shot or written by the same man who so beautifully crafted The Lives of Others.

I hope von Donnersmarck's subsequent films see a return to self-penned screenplays with his initial director of photography and music composers, if not the rest of his The Lives of Others core crew.  We need him to create his own films, not to reluctantly remake the films of others.

The Tourist trailer