It seems odd that after his wonderful Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Dammersmarck would choose a fanciful caper comedy/romance as his next project. Here we have a grand thriller in the Hitchcock tradition, with two gigantic stars and fascinating locations (John Seale's cinematography does them justice), directed by the man who made the somber character-driven drama about the sympathetic East German policeman. The Lives of Others was an amazing film; The Tourist less so, but it is no less amazing that it got made in the first place.
What this movie needed was a Stanley Donen type of director, one who knows how to play the audience like a piano. That is not quite what von Dammersmarck does here; he focuses less on the adventure and more on the characters, as you would expect the director of The Lives of Others to do. Audiences might go into The Tourist expecting a romantic thriller, when what they'll get is a thrilling romance.
And so The Tourist is not quite as interesting as it might have been. We get the sense that von Dammersmarck is primarily interested exploring a facet of the film that isn't meant to be terribly deep. Though romance can be the soul of a thriller, the fun is really in the thrills, of which The Tourist has too few. On this level it is a failure, but still an amiable and uncharacteristically ambitious failure.
We meet Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie) as she casually enjoys breakfast at a Paris cafe, tailed not-so-inconspicuously by police. Turns out she has a connection to a well-known British criminal named Alexander Pearce, who's been on the lam for two years, and Scotland Yard is hoping she'll lead them to him. To throw off their scent, she befriends an average schlub named Frank (Johnny Depp) on the train to Venice and casts the suspicion onto him. Once in Venice, Frank finds himself the target of the police and, more urgently, the very rich man that Pearce most recently stole from (Steven Berkoff).
This would have been the perfect setup for a lighthearted twisty-turny caper like Charade, with Depp in the Audrey Hepburn role as the unsuspecting innocent, and Jolie in the Cary Grant role as the player with all the cards, choosing which ones to deal at which times. Though Depp received some of the worst reviews imaginable, he's actually quite good in the role. Critics lambasted him as plain and melancholic, but that's the point: he's adept at playing someone who's plain to the extreme. Depp perfectly captures the bemusement of a regular Joe who's just been invited to spend a night in Venice with a gal who looks like Angelina Jolie, and overnight has police and thugs after him. Jolie is radiant, and she was born to play roles like this.
Then von Dammersmarck reveals that the movie will mainly be about their love affair, rather than the chase. These two really do end up falling in love, and the urgency, from von Dammersmarck's point of view, comes from the threat to their love rather than to Frank's life. Though the love story is well played, it renders secondary the more interesting part of the story. He essentially uses The Lives of Others as a template, and it doesn't fit.
I am giving the movie 3 stars. Why? Because it still made me smile in spite of its failures. I enjoyed Paul Bettany as the weathered Scotland Yard agent who's at the end of his rope. It's always good to see Steven Berkoff as the villain; he still possesses the same effortless menace that he did in Beverly Hills Cop all those years ago. And then there's Rufus Sewell, in an enigmatic role as a man who keeps turning up prominently in brief shots and on the side of the screen. Sewell is probably one of the first actors I'd notice if he were on the side somewhere.
Though The Tourist is not the refreshing diversion that we sometimes get when an auteur decides to take a break and make a genre film (like Steven Soderbergh did with Ocean's Eleven), it's not a case of the independent director selling out either. Though it's a big studio, big star movie, it is purely a Florian Henckel von Dammersmarck film. The romantic comic thriller may not be his strong suit, but now we know this is how he would have made one.
*** out of ****
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