‘Identity’

Top-tier Hollywood talent climbs on board for an escapist, B-grade slasher flick.   [R]

By: Bob Brown

"John
John Cusack is one of the motorists stranded in the middle of nowhere in the thriller Identity.



   As boundaries dissolve between high and low culture, it’s inevitable that film talent goes wading in the shallow end. Stars went midnight bowling once. Now it’s great fun to do a B-grade slasher film — as long as you’re allowed back in the deep end when you’re done.
   Maybe that’s why name-brand stars like Alfred Molina, John Cusack, Ray Liotta and Rebecca De Mornay all signed on for Identity, assisted by John C. McGinley and up-and-comers Jake Busey, Amanda Peet and Clea DuVall. This must have been an amusing diversion that wouldn’t hurt their careers too much, even if they had to spend a lot of the time soaked to the skin.
   The studio pitch for this film would have taken two minutes, and the treatment would fill half a page. The premise needed backfilling with ideas from Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. It’s a dark and stormy night. There’s this isolated desert motel with 10 rooms. One by one, guests trapped there in a storm are being bumped off by a shadowy murderer. Is it Larry in the diner with a baseball bat? Or Rhodes in the laundry with a hunting knife?
   For all its cheap thrills, there’s a certain guilty pleasure seeing good actors handle this pedestrian murder mystery. As if to point out how overworked the plot has become, the climactic "Aha!" moment is based on a shaky premise, needed to pump new life into an all-too-familiar plot. But to accept that premise, you must accept dissociative identity disorder, or DID (once called multiple personality disorder).
   MPD was first popularized in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), where Eve (Joanne Woodward) exhibits different personalities. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Luther (Lee J. Cobb), discovers the two other Eves through hypnosis and attempts to reconcile them. But in the real world, MPD is a controversial diagnosis that has fallen on hard times. Dr. Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Medical School wrote: "MPD . . . is created by therapists. This formerly rare and disputed diagnosis became popular after the appearance of several best-selling books and movies. It is often based on the crudest form of suggestion."
   In the opening scenes of Identity, a psychiatrist (Molina) is struggling to reconcile the personalities of an MPD patient, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince. Vince winds up getting a lot of these offbeat roles, not only because he’s good at oddballs, but also because he has nystagmus — involuntary "wobbly" eye movement. Ironically, Vince is among the few nystagmus sufferers whose condition has enhanced rather than impaired his employment opportunities. He’s worked steadily for more than 15 years, since there’s a lot of demand for shifty-eyed characters.
   As for MPD, medically sound or not, the games a mind plays on itself are breeding grounds for all sorts of narrative possibilities. Whether it’s a mind that lives only in 15-minute segments (Memento, 2000), or that is simple but tormented (Sling Blade, 1996), or beautiful but deluded (A Beautiful Mind, 2001), the mind and its detours are the current obsessions of Hollywood scriptwriters. That several different people could inhabit one body is fertile ground.
   Scriptwriter Michael Cooney (Jack Frost and Jack Frost II) applies what he knows of the horror film to Identity, and what he doesn’t know about psychiatry won’t hurt the box office. Audiences still want to embrace the sensational view. Director James Mangold (Kate & Leopold) adds what he knows of psychology from his direction of Girl, Interrupted and blends it with the mental and legal intrigue (yes, there’s even an 11th-hour judicial hearing involved in the plot).
   Whether it all works rationally is not for Hollywood to say. Nor will viewers care after everyone’s assembled at the no-name motel in the middle of Nowhere, Nev., as flash floods wash out all the roads. It’s dark, and there’s Darth Vader-ish music to announce the arrival of Officer Rhodes (Liotta) with prisoner in tow (Busey). You just know the bodies will start piling up when you see how flimsy the toilet plumbing is that Rhodes cuffs his prisoner to. You’ll jump on cue, as you know you will.
   All the other characters are types as well, played with glee by the cast: Cusack is a failed cop who’s a limo driver for a faded but vain starlet (De Mornay). McGinley is a timid stepfather who’s trying to hold on after his wife is run over. John Hawkes (Perfect Storm) is the suspicious motel manager, Larry, who has trouble hiding what’s in his freezer. Peet (who gets to wear all her clothes, finally) is a hooker who just wants to run an orange grove. And DuVall and William Lee Scott are a combative couple who got hitched in Vegas for all the wrong reasons. If only everyone could shield the innocent boy Timothy (newcomer Bret Loehr) from the horror of all these murders.
   Meanwhile, the psychiatrist’s star patient is missing from a last-minute hearing to void his own scheduled execution. How does this fit with a rain-drenched motel at midnight? Go wading.
Rated R. Contains strong violence and profanity.