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Matt Dillon tries to do too much, achieves too little in 'City'
Gerard Depardieu and Matt Dillon in 'City of Ghosts'
United Artists
Director: Matt Dillon.
Stars: Matt Dillon, James Caan, Natascha McElhone.
MPAA rating: R, for language and some violence.
Now playing: Denis in Mt. Lebanon and Squirrel Hill Theater.
Matt Dillon co-wrote the screenplay with Barry Gifford, then not only took the leading role but turned the project into his directing debut.
That it's so ambitious a film, and that it falls so far short of coalescing, suggests only that Dillon might have tried to do more than he could manage well.
It's a two-hour movie that has a chopped-down-from-three feel. Numerous plot threads and motivations are confusing. Dillon lingers on characters who vanish without further mention.
Most damaging, "City of Ghosts" lacks a center despite Dillon's proven ability at characterization.
He inhabits every scene without imbuing his part, Jimmy Cremmins, with the qualities of a man transformed by an odyssey.
It's as if a preoccupied Dillon hoped the mystique and colorfully squalid locations would supply everything he couldn't. That and keeping all of the male characters sweaty and unshaven.
His Jimmy heads the New York office of an insurance company riddled by unpayable North Carolina homeowner claims.
It seems Jimmy's boss-mentor, Marvin, emptied the company's off-shore accounts and headed for the Far East. Hello, FBI.
We never do get a sense of Jimmy's culpability, but he heads for Bangkok, Thailand, where a contact named Kaspar (Stellan Skarsgard), instructs him to slip over to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and hang out at a hotel run by the volatile French expatriate Emile (Gerard Depardieu).
Everyone in the film has counterparts in about 150 films of the '40s and '50s, including Sophie (Natascha McElhone), an English art restorer thematically linked to Jimmy's semi-redemption, and Sok (Sereyvuth Kem), a pedicab driver who fills a time-honored role -- the knowing local who allies himself as guide and guard of the visiting American.
By the time the elusive Marvin finally appears, we can't help expecting Nick Nolte as another of his burned out cases. Instead, Marvin is James Caan, who seems less likely to vanish into post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia but, with his crooked smile and balmy charm, might be more likely to double-deal with the humorless Russian Mafia and an ex-general named Sideth (Chalee Sankhavesa).
The first movie shot in Cambodia since the underrated "Lord Jim" in the mid-1960s, "City of Ghosts" has too little suspense, surprise or emotion. Through it all, we barely get a handle on Jimmy, whose metamorphosis needs to be central.
If it were as vivid as its locales, it might have satisfied more of Dillon's honorable ambitions.
