Trauma

An unemployed loner (Firth) recovering from a road accident becomes obsessed with a murdered pop star and with the prospect that his wife, supposedly killed in the crash, might not be dead after all.

In recent months we have had two excellent British films released in our cinemas. Geoffrey Rush gave what could well be the performance of his life in "The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers" and "Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels" producer Matthew Vaughn made a fine impression with "Layer Cake", his directing debut. "Trauma" is a Warner-BBC co-production that is both confused and pretentious and it seems longer than it's running time. Director Marc Evans fails to generate any suspense and the twist in Richard Smith's screenplay when it comes is hardly worth waiting for. Some moody cinematography from John Mathieson and a good performance from Colin Firth offer a little compensation, but one can't help thinking that this should have been confined to the BBC's airwaves rather than our cinemas.

I can't remember being so disappointed by a film. I love psychological thrillers but this was just so pretentious and up its own ar*e that I found myself not giving a toss what happens to anyone in it (except Mena Suvari, naturally).

I guess the hope is with making such a film is that the viewer will, through repeated viewings, find more and more to enjoy in the film, but frankly I would resent the loss of 90 minutes of my life having to sit through it again. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if I did watch it again, I would find more to enjoy but directors ought to consider making their films suitably enjoyable at the initial viewing that you would *want* to watch it again. As it was I found myself justifying why I ought to watch the last half of it.

What a wasted opportunity.

Marc Evans directs this superior British made movie about a man who awakens from a coma to discover his wife is dead and he's haunted by images from the past.

Colin Firth is Ben, a traumatised coma recovery victim. He's confused about his life, and as a result of the death of his wife, possibly caused by himself during a road accident he's moved apartment only down the street near where a famous pop singer was murdered around the time of his wife's death. He has no concrete memory of the recent past, so cannot answer the questions his own mind is posing him.

Stricken by nightmares and bizarre visions, Ben is utterly flummoxed and scared by what is happening to him, and to attempt to escape it he teams up with an old art college friend as a work partner. However, add into the mix his intense grief at his loss, and the entry into his life of the lovely Charlotte, played meltingly wonderfully by Mena Suvari, and it is plain to see that he simply doesn't know who or what to turn to in order to truly get his life back on track. There is also the overriding suspicion that the murder of the singer, Lauren Paris, is in some strange way connected to what is occurring to him...

The direction in Trauma is absolutely fantastic. Psychological suspense is the name of the game here, and although it certainly takes a few nods from the likes of Vanilla Sky and Jacob's Ladder, it's unquestionably its own world. It is certainly the type of superb cinematography which disturbs in this sort of movie, hinting at innate 'wrongness' of certain things.

Firth is initially quite hard to accept as the troubled Ben, but you get used to him and in the end he actually convinces quite well. As said before, Mena Suvari is quite delicious as Charlotte, encompassing a sort of Penelope Cruz demeanour as she was in Vanilla Sky. Her warmth, enthusiasm and eagerness shines through at all times.

However, the only flaw I can find with this story is that I am *slightly* confused by what it all meant, and what the conclusion actually entailed. I am writing this review having read absolutely nothing about the movie, so for all I know, it was a terrible film which confused everyone! However, I really got a kick out of it, and although I am a mite baffled by it all, the polish and quality of everything about it shone through, for me, and I will endeavour to read more about it on this very site.

Personally, if you enjoy psychological thrillers (This *might* have been intended as a horror but it was nowhere near the level of scariness a horror should be) with a hint of the supernatural, give this a shot.

Trauma (2004)

The creepy, mind-bending aura of this very British contemporary film, starring a lonely and confused man named Ben striving most of all to find reality itself, has so many really interesting aspects you can't help but wonder why it doesn't quite sweep you away. Or worse, why it's downright bad by the end, all the building up and forced drama being affectations built on sand.

And leading man Colin Firth is one of our masters of brooding, interior acting, which he does extremely well once again, against the odds set up by director Marc Evans. Firth's portrayal of Ben actually makes the most of all the ambiguity of the clichéd plot, and we try to follow his mind as it keeps slipping from one point of view to another.

It sounds great, on paper. But this is no Coen Brothers film, nor a David Lynch or David Fincher film, even if there are shades of each of these styles and intentions throughout. The sets are gloomy if sometimes too obvious--Ben decides to live in a nearly abandoned former mental hospital, for example. And the background crime which pins together the various facts, the death of a beloved and lovely celebrity, leads to the usual hardboiled detective (Brit style) and to newspaper clippings and flashbacks and glimpses on crude surveillance monitors.

If you are curious about the approach, check it out. I think the first twenty minutes gives a great idea of the whole movie. It just isn't smartly made or cleverly written, and this kind of card game with possible realities, which the viewer is made to play as much as Ben, requires smartness and cleverness, for sure.

Ben may actually be insane, may actually have murdered the person we are led to believe he did, and may actually belong in the institution he is shown, or not shown, inhabiting. Yes, it's willfully confusing. He wrestles with where he lives, where he walks. He wonders about the darks stairs leading to the gloomy underground rooms. The camera whirls or blurs, many times, almost as if they run out of motivation and need to switch to a camera effect right when maybe, through some actual writing and thinking, we could piece together some of the implied complexity (the way they do in, say, "Memento"). In the end, we are given the police investigator giving it all a knowing eye.

Besides the faltering writing, there are secondary actors who are not at their best (and whose best isn't always inspired, at that). For one, Mena Suvari, who I know from "American Beauty" in a kind of odd role where her blankness works well, is just far to lifeless and wooden to make her mysterious presence across the hall either scary or provocative. And so, heads up on this one. It's not what it seems, or could have been.

TRAUMA is one of those films that invokes mixed responses from audiences depending on their expectations: it seems to polarize people into love/hate categories. While not a great movie, TRAUMA has the courage to pose a storyline that is more involved with the interior aspects of a mind altered by physical events. We are asked to observe the world through the eyes of a battered brain which happens to belong to a man with a tattered past. If linear stories are preferred then this is not a film to recommend. For those viewers willing to crawl inside the malfunctioning mind, this film is mesmerizing and full of rewarding moments.

Ben (Colin Firth) is seen in the opening flashbacks driving a car at night with his wife Elisa (Naomie Harris). There is a car crash and Ben awakens from a coma in a hospital, convinced that Elisa is dead. He wanders the hospital, drawn to the morgue where the caretaker (Cornelius Booth) enhances the mystery of the place. Ben learns from the TV room that a famous singer Lauren Parris (Alison David), for whom Elisa has been a dancer, has been murdered. His mind disintegrates and everything that follows is a mélange of delusion mixed with bits of reality that exquisitely define how the post traumatic stress syndrome can be driven to psychosis if not recognized and treated.

Ben leaves the hospital (or does he?) and continues his art career in a vast building undergoing reconstruction (a building that has been a hospital....), befriended by his mate Roland (Sean Harris) and by his landlady 'Charlotte' (Mena Suvari). More flashbacks (mostly childhood memories) occur as Ben talks things out with a 'psychiatrist' (whose face we never see...) and during episodes with channeler Petra (Brenda Fricker) he is informed that Elisa is not dead. Ben becomes a suspect in the murder of Lauren Parris and his chasing after evidence ultimately leads to a series of disasters, a series of metaphors and delusions, all of which find Ben sitting back in the hospital where he started.

Did any of this story really happen, or was it the fabrication of a mind traumatized to the brink of breaking? That is left for the viewer to decide. Though plagued with some static moments and a lot of conversation buried in background music and sounds, Director Marc Evans with writer Richard Smith take us on a suspenseful journey, made all the more bizarre by some extraordinary camera work and tremendously inventive settings. Not a movie for everyone, but for those willing to enter the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome mind, this case study is rewarding. Grady Harp