Track 29: Passatempo Mortal

A doctor's wife (Theresa Russell) tires of his obsession with model trains, and spends her days wondering about the son she gave up for adoption at birth...

How can you not love a film with Christopher Lloyd as a masochist doctor who drops his pants? And Gary Oldman as a weird, British man-child? And directed by the wonderfully under-appreciated Nicholas Roeg ("Don't Look Now")? Well, with this film, it is possible.

Janet Maslin has more than a few problems with it, as she says "the direction is so laden with contempt for the characters... Roeg's films can often be perverse... (but) they are rarely this silly." The film is "too mindless to have any impact" and she believes the actors' skills are "regrettably wasted". I will agree with that last point -- for as much as I love Oldman and Lloyd, I felt they were too confined by this film to really show off.

Roger Ebert gave the film three stars, despite saying he did not like it. He posits the idea that the film is "perhaps deliberately" unlikeable. Yet, the film is still a good one and "more interesting" because of it. Roeg's work is "strange" and "convoluted", as well as "bad-tempered, kinky and misogynistic."

While I am unsure of all that, I do agree with the overall point Ebert makes. I, like him, did not enjoy the movie. Yet, I see the psychological message it was trying to send, the odd symbolism and the cacophony of images. The direction is, in fact, top-notch. Oldman is frustratingly annoying, but that is who his character is. I think the goal was met, despite being a goal I had rather they were not striving for.

Yet another indecipherable movie from director Roeg; it plays like a puzzle that is never solved. Definitely not uninteresting, because of the unique nature of the plot, but so muddled and inconsistent (for example, a seemingly imaginary character interacts with other people as if he really existed) that it's not likely to satisfy many viewers. One or two (intentionally) funny scenes help. Extremely offbeat performance by Gary Oldman. (**)

Poor Theresa Russell is once again subjected to her husband Nicholas Roeg's own unique brand of cinematic shock therapy, playing a frustrated southern belle trapped in a loveless marriage to model train fanatic Christopher Lloyd (hence the oblique title). When a disturbed young stranger wanders into town claiming to be her long-lost son, she begins to wonder if her mind has snapped, but there's much less to the film than what meets the eye. Roeg likes to mask the meaning of his scenarios behind a smokescreen of self-indulgent style, inside of which is a more-or-less conventional story struggling to get out. His collaboration here with writer Dennis Potter would seem to be a match made in heaven, but stripped of its visual and narrative razzle-dazzle devices the film emerges as little more than a perverse and uneasy mix of satire and psychodrama, with several flamboyant performances and a great mental breakdown montage, showing trains colliding and buildings collapsing, all inside Theresa Russell's pretty, mixed-up head.

The bored, lonely wife of a retirement-home physician in North Carolina dreams up an adult embodiment of the baby boy taken away from her when she was an unmarried teenager who got knocked-up at the county fair. Her husband, a train enthusiast, has no patience with his wife's melancholia and cheats on her with his lascivious nurse, while the young man/substitute son comes to represent the wife's anger and isolation. Disconnected filmmaker Nicolas Roeg predictably provides no simple solutions for our heroine, and screenwriter Dennis Potter (who would seem to be the perfect movie-companion for Roeg) merrily keeps the inscrutable scenario on a schizophrenic track. This isn't the weirdest movie to come from either Roeg or Potter--the film, in fact, is one of Roeg's more accessible entries--but very few of the details or ideas come to fruition (such as the wife always being dressed in lavender, or her fetish for cartoons and dolls). Gary Oldman, just off "Sid and Nancy", seems stuck in a revolving door of violent angst and aggression (only in a later scene at the piano does he show some charm), while Christopher Lloyd (as Henry Henry--perhaps an ancestor of Humbert Humbert) relies far too much on his rubbery facial expressions. In the lead, Theresa Russell works hard at conveying her character's inner-demons; in the vivid flashback scenes to her youth, she makes a terrific impression just by using her faraway eyes and smile. However, Russell never gets her little-girl twang quite right--her voice sounds disembodied--and her temper tantrums aren't shaped and have no comic pay-off (which is the fault of the director, who turns a blind eye). After the perverse-glossiness of something like 1986's "Blue Velvet", the scrubby ordinariness of "Track 29" is disappointing and dispiriting (it was shot by Alex Thomson, who has worked with Roeg before). Roeg, a brilliant cinematographer in his youth, gets a kinetic vibe going in the flashbacks to the fairground; however, aside from those startling early shots and some stray funny moments, "Track 29" seems to lose its way awfully soon, and the apocalyptic final act is simply a mess. *1/2 from ****

Nicholas Roeg's "Track 29", while confusing and frustrating, appears to accomplish what the director and writer set out to do. The film introduces and examines many aspects of Linda's life that are never very clearly answered. If Martin is a figment of her imagination, what is truly imagined? He does appear at the hamburger stand, so is he real after all? Early in the film, a television program is overheard discussing the idea that "two things may ocupy the same time and space". If this is indeed true, than maybe one thing can ocupy more than one time and space. It appears that Linda and Martin may in fact be "exploring" alternate dimensions. The film seems to explore the occurrence and outcome of many different events, and ends with the viewer unclear about what truly happened and what did not. After undergoing real or imaginary emotional torture, Linda calmly collects herself and leaves the house a new woman. To further confuse the lines between imaginary/real, her husband is heard calling to her, even though a pool of blood is forming over her head. (presumably from the stabbing death of the same husband) It is through these very strange events and ideas that the director and writer force the viewer to attempt to decide what is real and what is imagined. The most frustrating thing of all is that there is no real answer to this question.