A Wrinkle in Crime

Déjà Vu Directed by Tony Scott

It’s funny that Denzel Washington and director Tony Scott’s new collaboration is titled Déjà Vu because their particular combination of sexual arrogance, high-tech gloss and ludicrous storytelling has certainly been seen before. Déjà Vu only differs from Crimson Tide and Man on Fire in that it is a science-fiction variation on their previous military and revenge dramas. This time Washington plays Doug Carlin, an ATF agent called to investigate an incident of domestic terrorism when a ferry blows up in the New Orleans Harbor. Carlin stumbles upon a secret government device, an elaborate piece of surveillance technology that can “bend time,” resurrecting events and people from the past four days. It’s called Snow White for some reason, perhaps a sly tribute to Washington and Scott’s interracial command of sleep-inducing fantasy.

This is a literalized version of Spielberg’s Minority Report, but all the complex moral and logistic issues are laughably oversimplified into insipid heroics. Washington must have played more cops than Bette Davis played smokers; it seems to be the only role Hollywood can conceive to show a black man as an authority figure, a position in which he is pre-approved—doesn’t stretch credulity for cynical audiences—and yet is socially contained: He’s a minority figure who will enforce the social order and fulfill expectations. The wrinkle here is that Carlin falls in love with the dead woman whose body washed up on shore concurrent with the terrorist bombing. Snow White allows him to reawaken the victim (Paula Patton) and change the destiny of those 543 ferryboat casualties.

Shameless commercialism like Déjà Vu has the confounding license to get past audience’s usual moral qualms. Those faint-hearted folks who whined “it’s too soon” for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center now get to enjoy the sight of sailors and families blown up in a huge diesel-oil cloud. It’s for entertainment, not thoughtfulness. Scott has transformed the temerity of his advertising background into such craven manipulation that he’s turned treating audiences like morons into a skill. Déjà Vu displays Scott’s usual precision-tooled busyness. His state-of-the-art ad techniques not only vulgarize the dreamlike, politically-astute futurism of Minority Report, but they out-Fincher David Fincher’s slickness: Washington steps into the past like a 3-D video game figure, saves the day and gets the girl—a smiley face refutation of history that actually insults the post-9/11, post-Katrina experience. As Snow White’s tech whiz advises, “We changed one thing but, by changing one thing, we didn’t change anything.”

Maybe the Scott family’s ruination of cinema into advertising was predestined. Déjà Vu cheats viewers of emotionally-involved spectacle. The Snow White machine allows Scott and his screenwriters to hide or reveal clues at will to the terrorist mystery without wit or sense (the techno jargon is mumbo-jumbo). Washington’s infatuation with the dead woman flips Big Brother skepticism into voyeuristic porn. (Washington is such a facile actor that his “cool” is unsympathetic.) The crime-solving/love affair is illogical in that Matrix way that teases and fools susceptible viewers. Scott is so uninterested in the drama of life that the time-travel gimmick allows him to emphasize image manipulation, but not the way film artists do; Déjà Vu fakes emotion like a two-hour TV commercial.