Trauma

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.

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.

I watched this all the way through, though I cant pretend I liked it. The overwhelming impression of this movie was confusion. I had zero idea of what the hell was going on. All the effects of a shocker movie were there, the insects,the momentary glimpses of things undetermined, to raise the tension, the creepy caretaker, the muted colouring, the mutilated corpse, flashbacks, the almost abandoned building which was an ex hospital with, handily, a morgue in the basement ! etc etc. For me a movie must have entertainment value, there was none here, the story was nasty all the way through. Acting ? Colin Firth, Mena Suvari... first class as you would expect when you manage to acquire actors of their standing you want to put them in a better vehicle than this movie.

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.

Not a horror movie, which I wasn't really expecting, but not a spooky psychological thriller, which I think it was supposed to be. What was it? confusing. This movie tried so hard to find its place, but just wandered around & around. I found myself using the repeat button to go back and see if there was something I had missed, to make sense of what followed. There were a few good scenes, a couple good jolts -and I do like Colin Firth - but the movie just couldn't find its rhythm and stay there. There *was* some good acting, but not enough to make me care about the characters. There *was* some dark atmosphere, but it wasn't sustained. There *was* some shock value in the end, but not enough. Can I have my 88 minutes back, please?