Trauma

One description of Trauma is "An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption". Thats exactly what this film did to me because I was distressed from having to pay £10 to see it (two tickets) and disrupted from having to spend a VERY long hour and a half watching it.

As soon as I saw the BBC films logo I knew I was in for something rubbish. Don't get me wrong, some BBC funded films are good but this is just dire. A lot of the set pieces have smacks of Jacobs Ladder about them and about half way through the film I thought thats exactly just what this film was about.

Performances by Colin Firth et al are not bad although being a British film it suffers from the grime and depression that most films from our island seem to conform to.

Disjointed, hard to follow and with an ending that leaves you with a horrid taste in your mouth, Trauma is definitely one to wait either for DVD rental or TV.

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

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.

Another dismal dud from the British film industry. This has all the things that make the average Brit movie so dire: downbeat story and settings, pretentious 'realistic' performances and an incoherent, showy style. Any film that starts with the death of a character that we - naturally - feel absolutely nothing for gets off on the wrong foot. After a short while we're as confused as poor old unshaven Colin Firth, who wears a puzzled frown throughout. Mena Suvari turns up now and then, but really shouldn't have bothered. Indeed, she might as well have phoned her performance in like she did in American Pie 2. Everything stinks about this film: the laughable press headlines (would The Mirror really have 'Caught You! Killer could be on film' as a header in the circumstances the film presents?), the stupid, grim settings (who lives in a barely converted hospital?) and the obscure, confusing story development that tries to be clever but just annoys. I can't imagine anyone enjoying this turkey.

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.