To celebrate almost getting a job(mouthshut you listening), I took my girl to a local theatre to see Russell Crowe’s latest flick, Proof of Life, a good time marred mostly by the presence of crinkle-nosed pain-in-the-ass Meg Ryan. Actually, the girl paid since I’m a little low on cash(as I alwayz am), but I promised to finally get my life together.
In Proof of Life, Ryan plays one of those goddamn hippies with money. She lives in South America with her do-gooder engineer husband David Morse, who is building a dam for an oil company. When Morse is kidnapped by local guerrillas, Crowe is brought in to negotiate for his life.
Crowe is a badass, he works for a company that insures foreigners from kidnapping in third world countries, and his job is to retrieve the people as cheaply as possible. The movie opens with him stealing money from corrupt Russians on another Ransom mission in Chechnya. Ryan immediately swoons when Crowe takes her case (if I was gay or a woman, I would too). But, Morse’s oil company has dropped their insurance, and Crowe won’t take the job. That is, until Ryan makes a whiny plea for him to work for free (yeah, right) and he agrees.
For more than 120 days, Morse is held in the mountains of this spectacular South American country while Crowe whittles the ransom demand from five million bucks to a few-hundred thousand. Slowly, way too slowly, Crowe and Ryan fall for each other as they spend four tense months in each other’s presence, leading to a moral problem for Crowe. Why rescue the husband of the woman you want when you can just as easily screw it up and get her to yourself? (This is assuming you believe that Ryan is worth desiring, which I don’t.)
Crowe strikes a deal with the kidnappers, at the same time Morse unknowlingly tries to escape his captors, which queers the whole deal. The only solution is for Crowe and a band of commandos to go in Rambo style and save the day.
Proof of Life has a ton of things going for it. First is Crowe, a genuinely great actor. The guy produces more testosterone in two hours than a porn star will in a lifetime. He carries himself almost always exactly right, never getting hammy, and even handling a few corny lines with feeling. Crowe commits to the material and does a hell of a job as a man of infinite macho. David Morse also does a fantastic job showing the slow descent of a man into a kind of insanity. Alone with guerrillas for four months, he grows believably batty, shaggy and beaten.
The reality of the kidnapping story is also damn good. The details of this business are more fascinating. The details of negotiating and hostage taking feel damn real. Crowe’s character doesn’t always have the right answer, just the best guess. And the terrorists aren’t shown as third world cartoon villains. Some are sympathetic and their motives are clear. Director Taylor Hackford and writer Tony Gilroy deserve a truckload of credit for assuming we have brains in our heads and presenting this material with the right amount of detail.
The setting, in South America, is stunning. It’s ramshackled, lush and rambling, just like the place really looks in National Geographic. I’ve never been there, but I want to go more now than ever. The mountainous tropics that Morse and his captors trek through are a much more involving character than Meg Ryan.
Speaking of that bag of bones, she almost single-handedly drags this movie into the abyss. She belongs in Nora Ephron’s aren’t-I-cute-when-I-crinkle-my-nose crapfests, not in a serious drama where she’s totally lost. She handles drama about as well as my 86-year-old neighbor handles a tray full of glasses, only she gets nowhere near it . Many scenes have her gawking wordlessly, and she fails to even express what her character is supposed to be thinking. I think she doesn’t know. Her line readings are generally bad, like she’s talking to a wall, not another person.
Similarly, the relationship between her and Crowe drags this movie well over two hours. If Hackford had cut their dull romantic coupling, the movie could have clocked in a half-hour shorter and been a fantastic thriller about an interesting subject. But, Ryan and Crowe never connect other than what the script tells us, and there are almost no consequences to their single tonguing.
Just bring ear plugs for Meg Ryan’s scenes and you’ll have a smash-up time.