I’ve often wondered why directors attempt to follow in the
steps of Alfred Hitchcock. Having nearly
singlehandedly created the paranoid thriller, modern filmmakers unwisely invite
comparisons to the master’s work and they usually come out on the losing end,
unable to build the sort of suspense or use the kind of intelligence found in
such films as “Notorious,” “Rope” or “Psycho.” Rowan Joffe’s “Before I Go To
Sleep” is a case in point, a would-be thriller with an intriguing premise that
winds up not being nearly as clever as it wants to be, becoming far too
ridiculous to be taken seriously.
A game Nicole Kidman stars as Christine, a woman with a
tragic condition – she wakes up each morning with no memory of anything from
her life – not her name, not her husband, not any of her experiences. (If you’ve seen the Adam Sandler-Drew
Barrymore feature “50 First Dates,” a film with a distinctly different tone
than this feature, you have some idea of what this woman’s up against.) Thankfully she has a patient husband in Ben
(Colin Firth) who gets her up to speed on a daily basis and seems to have no
problem with the fact that any progress he may make on a given day to garner
her trust, will be wiped clean once Christine’s head hits the pillow and her
eyes are closed.
However – and this is a big “however”- Christine is getting
help from Dr. Nasch (Marc Strong), a therapist who calls her each day to remind
her that she’s keeping a video diary of all she’s learned from previous days
and that she needs to watch it to keep current with what’s going on in her
life. Upon looking at the footage of
herself dictating to the camera, she finds out that Ben is hiding things from
her and should not be trusted.
Well, this is quite a lot to swallow and, as always happens
in films of this sort, leads to other questions. Such as, why is Dr. Nasch taking so much time
out of each day to minster to Christine? Is theirs more than just a
doctor/patient relationship? And just
what role does her best friend Claire (Anne-Marie Duff) play in all of this? And
what really happened to her son?
For sure, there’s a great deal on Christine’s plate and
Joffe plays both ends against the middle, succeeding in making us doubt both
Ben and Nasch, though their motives are murky at best. More than any other Hitchcock film,
“Suspicion” comes to mind here, the feature in which poor Joan Fontaine thinks
that her husband played by Cary Grant actually wants to kill her. This idea crosses Christine’s mind more than
once and the only thing that keeps us engaged long after the script has taken
up residence in Sillytown is Kidman’s performance. She perfectly captures her
character’s sense of confusion and frustration as well as her growing sense of
strength throughout. She does her best
to will this into being a good film and its fun to watch her try. She gets
little help from Firth, who’s far too distant and cold, while Strong is given
too little to do for us to care about him one way or another.
In the end, it’s Joffe who’s responsible for the film’s
undoing and while he did adapt the story from a best-selling novel by S.J.
Watson, he needs to realize that some things that play on the page, appears
clunky and labored on screen. Such is
the case with “Before,” a film that stumbles towards its finish, taxing our
patience every step of the way.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2014.
