There's a good movie somewhere in Passion Play. There may even be a great one, or at least the beginnings of something halfway decent. It never shows, though. The ideas are certainly there, but the movie strains under the weight of its own ambitions and a scattershot script that could have benefitted from a polish or ten. It's not that the film isn't interesting. It's just so awkwardly assembled, so self-seriously preachy that it's actually exhausting to watch, let alone understand.
The plot? A down-on-his luck trumpet player (are there any other kinds of trumpet players in the movies?) named Nate Poole (Mickey Rourke) escapes a mob hit and, through a series of rather bizarre events, finds himself at a carnival run by Rhys Ifans, the star attraction of which is Lily (Megan Fox), a googly-eyed bombshell with a pair of wings sticking out of her back. Lily insists she's not an angel, but her escape from the carnival initiates a redemptive story for the archetypal screw-up Nate in any case. There are also some hard-learned life lessons for Lily herself, and, through more contrivances, the arrival of Nate's would-be killer, a mobster who is bizarrely named Happy Shannon and even more bizarrely played by Bill Murray.
You know the rest: bullets are fired, Nate hits rock bottom and redemption is courted, but despite the appealing underdog story, Passion Play still plays out like an extremely rough sketch of a much better, smoother film. To be fair, the foundations are in place. The cinematography from Christopher Doyle (Rabbit-Proof Fence) and Dickon Hinchliffe's score give the movie a strong base in its imagery and music; you get the idea that Passion Play could have mustered up the romantic grandeur it aims for if it had been made as, say, a short silent movie.
But alas, there are 94 dialogue-filled minutes of this to get through, and the movie plods through every single one of them. The pacing is exhausting, characters come and go at random (why is Kelly Lynch in this movie again?) and while subtlety may be a lot to ask from a movie featuring a winged Megan Fox, writer/director Mitch Glazer seems to never have met a line he didn't want dropped on the audience's head like an anvil.
All of which, it's got to be said, has nothing to do with the actors. Nate is pretty much the same broken-down shell of a man that has become Mickey Rourke's specialty since The Wrestler, which is to say Passion Play at least cast the right man as its hero. Nate has the same world-weariness of Randy the Ram and Tool from The Expendables, but without the tough-guy façade that they wore like armor to conceal the soft soul beneath. It's a chance for Rourke to play vulnerable for more than a single soliloquy between action scenes, and he certainly acquits himself to the best of his ability.
Fox, meanwhile, definitely looks like a heavenly creature, as anyone who's seen Transformers can attest. But the script here never calls for Lily to progress beyond a wild-eyed innocent, even when she's blindsided by betrayal in the second act, and it's tough to buy the outspokenly jaded, media-wary pinup star in the role for the entire movie.
But the script ultimately makes fools of them all. Glazer (who wrote Scrooged and the Ethan Hawke/Gwyneth Paltrow version of Great Expectations) reportedly wrote Passion Play some twenty years ago and kept it out of the Hollywood system because he didn't want anyone else to interpret a work so near and dear to his heart. His devotion to the material shows, but the film falls under the strain of living up to his vision.
Murray does have one particularly telling line in the film, during Happy's first meeting with Lily. "You will have an audience of one: me."
Which, when you get down to it, sounds a lot like the relationship between the film and its director. A scene towards the end provides a pretty apt summary of what's going on here: a pretty girl flaps her wings before a gathered crowd, but nobody really knows who she is or why she's there. Something important is going on, but we're likely to mistake it for something weird without a little help. We don't get it. It is what it is; take it or leave it. The audience, confused, scratches its head, and way in the back, one man sits and smiles.
