Track 29: Passatempo Mortal

A woman suffers mental trauma twenty years after being raped - at least that's the most obtainable synopsis for this bizarre but entirely unengaging drama. Theresa Russell plays the bored housewife, trapped in a passionless marriage with doctor Christopher Lloyd. When a man claiming to be her son - stolen from her arms at birth after the rape - appears out of nowhere, knowing an awful lot about her, it releases the trauma she has kept hidden for so long.

What should be intriguing is anything but. It is impossible to care for Russell because she's embarrassingly bad. Lloyd has nothing to do (never mind nothing funny). The young Oldman is shown up in this most difficult of roles. That's probably thanks to the director more than himself. Roeg's output is horribly inconsistent. You would have hoped that working from a script by the late, brilliant Dennis Potter would have inspired him to make a masterpiece. He can't even keep the film on the ground.

But then again, the Americans never got a grasp on Potter's humour. And Roeg has hardly been worth watching since he went to the States.

Hard as it is to imagine a film starring Christopher Lloyd, along with Gary Oldman and the incredible Theresa Russell as long-lost mother and son reunited in the most unmateral way, to be unwatchable, but this one was. Her accent was so atrocious I could not get past that, fascinating as her relationship with her son--whether dream, fantasy or reality I could not figure out and soon lost any interest in deciphering--may have been.

What comes out is a jumbled, middled mess. You really can look away from a trainwreck.

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.

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. (**)