Loopholes

Willis and Gordon-Levitt tie themselves in loops.

««« ½  Looper. Written & directed by Rian Johnson.

All things being equal, this writer is suspicious of time travel stories. Drama, after all, requires causality, that actions have consequences. But when you can always just travel back to the moment before some fateful event and undo it, an infinite number of times if need be, then no act really has consequences. Time travel is just the more sciency brother of the "relax, it was all just a dream" trick, where the hero wakes up and realizes all he just suffered through never happened. Though we justifiably groan at the latter, we tend not to at time travel—possibly because of the pseudo-science element.

            But all things aren't equal in Rian Johnson's slick, absorbing Looper. You've heard the premise already: sometime late in the 21st century time travel into the past is invented. But instead of using it for cool things like exploring history, stalking dinosaurs, or killing the boy Hitler, the time travelers of the future are mainly just gangsters. To kill people in the future, they send them thirty years into the past, to the year 2045, where "loopers" like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) blow them away as soon as they arrive. That way, there are no bodies to dispose of in 2075, and dead guy in 2045 may not even be born yet. Stands to reason, right?

            Of course not, because this is the kind of idea that seems great when the screenwriter pitches it to some studio suit over too many mojitos, but actually makes no sense. (For starters: if you can make a live wise guy disappear in 2075 by sending him back in time, why not just kill him in 2075 and dump his dead body back in, say, 50,000 BC? And if you have a time machine, why bother with dangerous criminal pursuits like drugs and prostitution at all? Why not just go back seven business days with some cash and stock market records, and make a perfectly legitimate bundle beating Wall Street?)

            Johnson, the young gun behind the likeable Brothers Bloom, tries to preempt such criticism by having Bruce Willis admit, "If we start thinking about this time travel stuff, we'll all be sitting here forever making diagrams with straws." True enough. And indeed, when you get on Looper's wavelength, it's easy to forget about causality and straw diagrams, because it's got that much raw momentum. The key twist in Johnson's script is that a looper's career ends with a very special assignment: in exchange for a generous pay-out and thirty years' retirement, he must kill his future self. (Yeah, that sounds like an invitation to trouble to me, too—why not delegate some other looper kill the future version of yourself? But never mind...)

            Here Gordon-Levitt has to kill Willis, the future Joe, who has a good reason not to go quietly. Watching the two versions of Joe face off is perversely fascinating, like the coming intergenerational war over Social Security made literal ("You've had your life. Why don't you do what old guys do, and die," the wage-earning Joe tells his retired self.) The anachronistic styles of the actors give it an added kick. Willis is sweaty and frantic like the '80's Die Hard hero he is, but Gordon-Levitt  channels icons from generations earlier, looking a bit like the young Connery combined with the whip-crack physical presence of Cagney. Together they really do make Looper feel like a story where the laws of common sense are suspended.

            There's a sub-plot here with Emily Blunt as the mother of the future criminal kingpin, whom future-Joe wants to kill before he grows up to kill him. (Or something like that.) This actually feels like that famous Twilight Zone episode ("It's a Good Life", 1961) with Billy Mumy as a vindictive kid with telekinetic powers who keeps the population of a small town in terror. The premise actually not as compellingly handled in Looper, but the fact that this added element of fantasy works at all in the context of all the other time-travel nonsense is a pretty neat trick. For keeping that many balls in the air, Johnson has made himself a juggler to watch. 

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro