‘Passion Play’ movie review: All-star drama …

Mickey Rourke, Kelly Lynch, Megan Fox and Bill Murray star in an attempt to cross fantasy with film noir

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

If you’re expecting a religious theme in the all-star drama “Passion Play,“ you’re looking in the wrong place. The passion the film’s title refers to is the more earthy kind, although it’s not altogether earthly. Written by Mitch Glazer, the screenwriter of “Scrooged” and “The Recruit” making his directorial debut, “Passion Play” is an attempt to cross fantasy with film noir, and while it’s not successful, it is an interesting failure.

It’s all there in the first shot, where the flickering neon sign The Dream Lounge invites the viewer into its hallucinatory interior. That’s where Mickey Rourke’s beaten down character Nate Poole plays trumpet while his friend and protector Harriet, played by Kelly Lynch, does an old-fashioned striptease, complete with feathered fans. (Remember those feathers.) Nate establishes himself as a savvy guy when he picks up his pay from a poker table, so it’s a surprise that he’s jumped as soon as he walks to his great old muscle car and finds himself in the Mexican desert with a mean-looking guy at the wheel. The driver is about to shoot him when he’s killed by a band of Indians dressed in white. But not before Nate spies a mysterious hawk hovering above. That’s when we know we’ve left the standard underworld picture and entered another, more imaginative realm.

Beautifully shot, the movie captures the dreamlike state that combines hyper-realistic details with fantastical actions. The interiors of the strip club, of Nate's seedy motel room, and later of the villain's luxurious villa are meticulously realized, but those interiors exist against backdrops that seem as fake as any 1950s melodrama.

Nate doesn’t find anything peculiar about a traveling carnival perched in the middle of nowhere, and politely asks if he may use the phone. It’s at the carnival that Nate sees Lily, the beautiful bird girl played by Megan Fox. Lily sits behind glass, looking sadly out, spreading her wings when a customer walks by. Her job isn’t much different than Harriet’s, but for some reason, we’re supposed to feel sorry for Lily while we can admire Harriet’s grit.

Lily’s boss, the charismatic Sam (Welsh actor Rhys Ifans), warns Nate that he’ll never let her go since he found her as a downy child in the trash and saved her life. For some reason, Lily is desperate to leave despite her cozy trailer and secure job. How many different careers can a bird woman realistically expect to have? In any case, she ends up rescuing Nate from Sam so they can make their escape. Throughout the film, Fox doesn’t act so much as she radiates states of being — innocence, distress, disappointment, and so on. Lots of lip gloss and moisture-filled dark eyes are supposed to let us know that she’s suffering in the clutch of brutish humanity. The most brutish is Happy Shannon, the gangster who owns The Dream Lounge and put the hit on Nate for sleeping with his wife. But Happy is played by Bill Murray, an actor who is impossible to dislike, even when he’s portraying a sadistic murderer. “What a wonderful dream,” he murmurs when he first hears about the beautiful winged girl.

Happy is by far the most interesting character in the film, with Sam a close second. These two villains at least have energy and wit, while Nate and Lily seem strangely passive and prone to lines like “You sure are a pretty little thing.” Rourke is a highly expressive actor as he showed recently in “The Wrestler.“ He is almost always convincing (although he couldn’t make me believe that he can play the trumpet), but there isn’t much for him to do here. Once he meets Lily, he seems to lose what little judgment he had, and begins to do inexplicably foolish things. For her part, Lily doesn’t do anything except wait for a man to take care of her. If she’d stayed with Sam, she’d have saved herself a lot of bother. We would have missed seeing her all dressed up, though, covering her wings with a white mink shrug. We also would have missed marveling at Nate’s wardrobe, which is so hipster cool that it distracts attention from what‘s going on. That may be a good thing.

“Passion Play” is often beautiful with a fine score and some great musical spots, but it ultimately makes no sense. By definition, fantasy is not realistic, but it must make emotional sense. Characters may have supernatural characteristics and powers, but they need to have human feelings and motivations for us to believe in them. Lily’s feelings are not credible, and ultimately, neither are Nate’s. Therefore, we don’t accept any of the rest of it. In contrast, the great German film “Wings of Desire” with a very similar storyline, is totally persuasive. There, the angels walk unseen among people, but their loneliness and need for love is completely human.