A Life Less Ordinary (1997, Danny Boyle)

Originally written 12 December 2008 for The Screengrab. Reposted by permission.

Since its premiere on the fall festival circuit, Danny Boyle’s new film Slumdog Millionaire has ridden a wave of ecstatic buzz, one which many believe the film will ride to numerous Oscar nominations. With his crowd-pleasing arthouse hit, it seems that Boyle has finally arrived for real in Hollywood, a full dozen years after his breakthrough films, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. However, it wasn’t supposed to take this long. In the wake of Trainspotting’s international success, Boyle was tapped by Fox to bring his directorial sensibility to America with his subsequent project A Life Less Ordinary, which paired Boyle’s favored leading man Ewan McGregor with hot Hollywood starlet Cameron Diaz. Life was the director’s take on the romantic comedy, and Boyle’s goal was to infuse the warm fuzzy genre with a liberal amount of mid-nineties indie edge while also indulging the audience’s romantic sides.

Under the right circumstances, A Life Less Ordinary might have been a zeitgeist-ready hit, particularly at the twentysomethings at whom it was aimed. However, it wasn’t to be. What’s more, the disappointing box office returns for the film were, for once, a reflection of its quality. It’s not uncommon for a filmmaker to blame his intended audience for not “getting” the movie when it flops, but if the movie in question isn’t very good, the filmmaker doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Part of the problem was that the convoluted storyline, in which so much business is happening at once that very little actually makes an impact. The setup: God, disturbed by the lack of love in the world, begins dispatching angels to Earth to bring people together. Two of the angels, O’Reilly (Holly Hunter) and Jackson (Delroy Lindo) are assigned to the case of Robert (McGregor), a down-and-out wannabe writer, and Celine (Diaz), a bitchy heiress. And how do they meet, you ask? Why, when Robert storms into Celine’s father’s (Ian Holm) office and somehow ends up kidnapping her. How else were they supposed to meet? From there, it’s off to the races, as Robert finds himself an inept kidnapper, Celine decides to help him in order to get a cut of the ransom for herself, and the heavenly duo (masquerading as bounty hunters) relentlessly pursue the mismatched couple. With all this going on, it’s a wonder they ever find time to fall in love, then out of love, then finally back in love again, precisely on cue.

But then, most romantic comedies depend on contrivances, just as long as we’re rooting for the romantic leads to turn out OK. However, in order for this to happen we’d actually have to care about them, and these two hardly seem to be worth the effort it takes to bring them together. McGregor is fairly likable as Robert, a pretty nice guy who is easily overwhelmed and somewhat over-eager to apologize for himself. However, Diaz is another matter entirely. On the page, Celine is a tricky character- a rich girl who lets herself be kidnapped in order to escape her life. But while the role might have worked if Diaz had made her a slightly daffy thrill seeker, instead she plays Celine as a harpy and a nag for most of the movie, until the plot suddenly demands that she fall in love with Robert. As the movie progresses, we’re rooting for Robert all right- rooting for him to get as far away from her as possible.

With a romantic vacuum at its center, the story becomes little more than a parade of quirky characters and situations, flailing about onscreen in search of a reason to exist. Where to begin? There’s a dentist (Stanley Tucci) who Celine shoots in the frontal lobe while playing William Tell, only to return to work mere days later. There’s also the crazy backwoodsman (Maury Chaykin) who encounters Robert and Celine shortly after the kidnapping, and his even crazier friend who barks instead of speaking. And then there’s the ever-dogged O’Reilly and Jackson forever in pursuit, with O’Reilly brandishing a machine gun and hanging off the hood of Robert and Celine’s car- not at the same time, of course. How is all this supposed to make the central duo fall in love? Your guess is as good as mine.

Late in the film, after their funds have been depleted, Robert and Celine decide to rob a bank. When Celine holds up a teller, she asks to make a withdrawal, to which Robert responds, “I thought we agreed there’d be no clichés.” Boyle and writer John Hodge seemed to have used this line as their philosophy when making A Life Less Ordinary. However, it’s not enough to avoid clichés- one must replace them with other, more interesting ideas, and this is the failure of the film. A Life Less Ordinary is a film that tries to liven up its genre, but it never manages to do so, primarily because it fails to be romantic or funny. When Robert and Celine end up together, it feels not so much like a logical conclusion to this story as a cue for the lights to go up and the credits to roll. I suppose A Life Less Ordinary isn’t exactly ordinary, but it’s pretty lifeless.