Time and Time Again
‘88 Minutes’ may be shorter than ‘Four Minutes’ but it feels a lot longer
By Andy Klein
While 88 Minutes – the wretched new Al Pacino thriller – actually runs 108 minutes, Four Minutes is about 110 minutes, which is just fine, since, unlike the Pacino film, Chris Kraus’s drama (winner of the German equivalent of the Oscar) fills its length with minor mysteries and compelling characters.
Frau Krueger (Monica Bleibtreu, mother of Moritz Bleibtreu, the boyfriend in Run Lola Run) teaches piano to inmates of a German women’s prison. Krueger is eightyish and stone-faced; she rarely displays any emotion, except the occasional outburst of Prussian impatience. Her only love appears to be classical music, though we later discover (once again) that appearances can be deceiving.
As much as Krueger is prim and regimented, Jenny von Loeben (Hannah Herzsprung) is tough and violent. Serving time for a really grisly murder, Jenny is such a hard case that, after sleeping through her cellmate’s suicide, she nonchalantly swipes a cigarette from the dangling corpse’s pocket.
It’s impossible to imagine a connection between these two, but, while playing Mozart in the chapel at the suicide’s memorial service, Krueger spots Jenny silently fingering along. Immediately spotting talent and well-developed technique, she recruits the sullen girl as a student, hoping to enter her in an upcoming competition.
The two women do a sort of uncomfortable dance, testing each other’s limits. As they do, Jenny is revealed as less awful than she seems, even as we learn that Krueger is haunted by her own weakness of character and the horrible betrayal she committed 60 years earlier. (Early on, Krueger’s constant complaining about Jenny preferring to play “noisy Negro trash” marks her as a racist – always a delightful trait in Germans who experienced World War II as adults.)
It may or may not be a matter of cultural translation, but the film has bits of confusing exposition: We see Krueger moving her piano to the prison, yet are told that she has taught there for years. Is some of that a flashback? Or was there another piano that needed replacing? Or what?
On the surface, Four Minutes – the title refers to the time Jenny will need to play a Schumann selection at the final competition – is a classical music version of another German film, Katja von Garnier’s memorable 1999 Bandits, about a rock band breaking out of a women’s prison and managing to record a hit while on the run. (One of that film’s stars, Jasmin Tabatabai, also has a small role in Four Minutes, further suggesting the connection.) But, while Bandits was designed as Thelma & Louise with a kicked-up energy level, the slow pace of Kraus’s movie is determined by the central character – the elderly Krueger.
Bleibtreu is excellent at working within the restrictions of Krueger’s painfully repressed personality, but what really sparks the film is the performance of newcomer Herzsprung. Her transformations from controlled defiance to nearly lunatic outbursts are convincing, and she carries herself as though her personality has been stripped of both sexuality and any potential for love.
Now, as promised above, we will move on to that other time-stamped new release, 88 Minutes, which has absolutely nothing in common with Four Minutes beyond the coincidence of title. (There have been exactly four movies with “minute” in the title released in L.A. in the last 20 years, and two of them open a week apart? What are the odds of that?)
This shockingly stupid suspense film has already been raked over by critics with looser deadlines than my own. Still, can’t I get in on the fun too, albeit a week late? 88 Minutes is currently running at 6% approval on rottentomatoes.com, and I consider it a professional duty to knock that down to 5%.
Is it as bad as everyone says? Why, yes! It is!
But this isn’t just another bad thriller. For, while it is mostly bad in the same ways as all the other lousy thrillers, it is additionally bad in other ways rarely seen.
The hook – in case you’ve missed all the other savagings – is that Seattle-based forensic psychiatrist Jack Gramm (Pacino) receives a phone call telling him he has 88 minutes left to live. It is presumably the work of condemned killer Jon Forster (Neal McDonough), who is due to be executed that very day, thanks to Gramm’s expert testimony. Can Jack find and neutralize Forster’s minions in time?
Hoo hah! Sure he can. Even though he has to drive around from one location to the next so quickly that one can only assume Seattle is geographically about half the size of Beverly Hills. He is constantly yelling into his cell phone, instructing this assistant or that FBI agent to go find one thing, then go find some other thing, then meet him at his office in 10 minutes. In the real world, just finding your car, buckling up, and leaving the parking structure would consume most of that.
Okay, that’s allowable in movies pretending to unfold in roughly real time. (For those who keep track, it takes about 74 minutes of real time for the 88 minutes of story time to elapse.) In fact, it’s standard: Even High Noon cheats a little.
And I’ll accept that almost no one here behaves in ways that make sense. And I didn’t groan too loudly when Gramm, with only about 15 minutes left on the clock, stops everything to explain to teaching assistant Kim (Alicia Witt) the story of his little sister’s murder – a tale that seems to be known to everyone in the universe except the woman he’s been working with for two years. It’s such common knowledge that Forster makes an offhand reference to it in a cable news interview.
Oh ... did I mention that Forster’s attorneys, while not good enough to get him off, are good enough to convince the authorities to let him appear on TV the day of his execution? Happens all the time.
88 Minutes is littered with a million little stupidities like that – insane violations of plausible reality, inexplicable violations of the film’s internal reality, lines of dialogue that so contradict what’s happening that one can only guess they were left over from earlier drafts.
Where the awfulness of 88 Minutes goes beyond your average imbecilic suspense movie is its utter lack of understanding of the plot requirements of the genre ... or of narratives in general. Its idea of plotting is to simply pile one incident on top of another, each of equal weight, never going anywhere. You could shuffle them any which way with no deleterious effect.
And then there’s Pacino, delivering his lines as though in a trance, his hair pouffed up like a cockatoo, his flesh darkened with what is presumably supposed to be a deep tan. (Because the sun is always shining in the Pacific Northwest.) His skin tone triggered some vague association in my memory. It was only on my way out that I realized what it was: Go to the Chinese takeout joint at Pico and La Brea; order the orange chicken; compare; and see if you don’t agree.
To be honest, 88 Minutes has defeated me; 23 years a critic, and yet I am unable to adequately convey its deficiencies – a humbling experience.
Four Minutes. Written and directed by Chris Kraus. With Monica Bleibtreu, Hannah Herzsprung, and Sven Pippig. Opens Friday at Laemmle’s Music Hall 3.
88 Minutes. Directed by Jon Avnet. Written by Gary Scott Thompson. With Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger, and Neal McDonough. Citywide.
Published: 04/23/2008
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