Limitless. Written by Leslie Dixon, based on the novel by Alan Glynn. Directed by Neil Burger.
It’s taken a while for Hollywood to discover the concept of the “pharmacological thriller.” No, I’m not speaking of movies about garden-variety drug addiction. I’m talking about movies about the potentials and pitfalls of performance enhancement, of drugs we take not to escape the real world, but to function in it—or even get an edge. With more than 10% of all Americans now taking antidepressants for such uses as overcoming acute shyness (“social anxiety disorder”), there’s a rich vein of experience to tap into about those little pills. Neil Burger’s Limitless goes there. A sharp, visually inventive thriller, it’s the story of Eddie (Bradley Cooper), a would-be writer who appears to be washed up before he’s begun. Facing a deadline for a book he can’t even start, he turns to an experimental drug that—his sleazy drug-dealing ex-brother-in-law says—will help him focus better. Sure enough, “NZT” is a cognitive performance enhancer on steroids, revving up his dormant synapses to such an extent that he can write a best-seller in four days, crack the stock market in four weeks, and soak up Chinese and Russian in his spare moments.
Eddie’s meteoric rise to fiscal superstardom gets noticed, leading him into some deadly territory to protect his secret and his supply. On a slightly deeper level, and as anybody who enjoyed Flowers for Algernon can attest, the poignance of this kind of story lies not in the rise of the artificial genius, but in the bitter decline. NZT does turn out to have a few side-effects, most of which, alas, end up disappearing into holes in Leslie Dixon’s script.
Overall, this represents a step up for Neil Burger, who is best known for directing 2006’s The Illusionist—otherwise known as the less-good hocus-pocus movie that came out around the same time as The Prestige. (Indeed, it’s such an improvement one wonders if Burger got some pharmacological help…) Much of the credit for the success of Limitless has to go to Bradley Cooper. Until his breakout in The Hangover, Cooper was the kind of annoyingly handsome guy who seemed destined to play the smug ex-boyfriend or the dick career competitor in the next cubicle. As he metamorphoses here from unkempt underachiever to master of the universe who may or may not be guilty of murder, he never loses our sympathy. That’s not an easy trick.
One place Limitless doesn’t really go is the morality of its subject. To be sure, our hero does encounter obstacles and competitors, but the film seems to come down in an oddly amoral place, typified by how it just seems to lose interest in Eddie’s possible murder charge. The issue it raises—would a world full of drug-enhanced intellects be one we should like to live in?—is essentially answered by its silence: silly question! With the game seemingly rigged against the little guy, of course we want NZT. Just as long as that dick in the next cubicle doesn’t have it too.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
Where can I get NZT?
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