Trance: Boyle Elevates a Sinking Script

The release of a Danny Boyle film may not be an event like the release of a Christopher Nolan or a Quentin Tarantino film; but because Boyle's films, like those of fellow Brit Sam Mendes, can fluctuate dramatically in genre and tone from title to title, they are always at least worth checking out. Though Boyle has proven to be proficient at handling whatever genre comes to him (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Millions), one thing that has always remained consistent is how he's been able to marry pop and art together, like a British Martin Scorsese with more of a reliance on club music.

It's fitting then that his latest film, Trance, is a psychological crime thriller incited by art. Simon (James McAvoy) is an art auctioneer with a bit of a gambling problem. Simon's handsomely pressed suits and his modernly decorated and wired apartment are all illusions covering up crippling debt from some bad luck at hold 'em poker.

It's through Simon's point of view that we enter the film (though we don't stay there for long) as he informs us through voiceover how the process and protocol of training, in case of an art auction robbery, will reiterate that no painting is worth a human life. However, when Frank (Vincent Cassel) and his crew show up to highjack Goya's "Witches Flight"—sold at a price tag north of $27 million—something within Simon compels him to ignore his training and play the hero. For this, Simon receives a shotgun butt blow to the head. And for Frank's efforts, he gets a fancy frame with a missing canvas.

It becomes clear that Simon has hidden the painting, but also clearer that the blow to the head has caused him to legitimately forget what he did with it. When interrogation doesn't work, Frank resorts to extreme measures—hiring a hypnotherapist, Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), whose uncanny ability to manipulate and/or rehabilitate people through hypnotism borders on superhuman. For the purposes of Trance's narrative, this is essential. It's important that Elizabeth successfully dig through Simon's submerged consciousness because his life is on the line—it was Frank who made Simon's debt disappear and it's Frank who will do the same with Simon's existence if the Goya is not found.

The therapy begins, but it's not long before things go south. Hallucinatory forays into Simon's mind weave through recollections that are stylistically and absurdly melded together as only dreams are, while depictions of events that have never seemingly happened point toward something pre-existing and buried in his past. Simon's desires, most notably his sexual desire for Elizabeth, begin to bleed into his sessions, and the emotions, convictions and suspicions that continue to arise and perpetuate blur the line between memory and hypnotic suggestion. Relationships change as loyalties shift and questions about intentions arrive about both Simon's and Elizabeth's—real and imagined—past and present.

With the attention Trance pays to modern technology and the way the camera lingers on refracted images and mirrored surfaces, it seems that Danny Boyle doesn't want us to just witness Simon's splintered mindset, but to experience it as well.

The therapy and psychiatry in the film may be oversimplified and omnipotent psychobabble, but there's still psychology at work. The ever-present, electronic soundtrack, with its pulsing beats and methodical repetition, lulls the mind into an unanticipated relaxation, effectively blurring delineations between when sessions begin and end. Boyle doesn't get the film caught up in any ambiguity of what's real and what's not, but as the beats from the soundtrack march us from the past of memory to the tangible present, they become inextricably and subliminally linked in our minds.

Boyle actually seems to have the most fun when Trance dives into the subconscious, exploring Simon's mind with a barrage of visually stunning tricks and psychological chimeras that echo Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's beautiful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But as Trance progresses, the necessity of the aesthetic delights increase not just because of how they serve the story, but because they need to make up for a script that oversimplifies and ultimately disappoints. In the waking world we're left to explore relationships and motivations between characters that don't really make much sense, the complexities of which are all sorted out for us thanks to one of those obnoxious, tell all Act III monologues.

Trance postures to be a much smarter film, but instead ends up feeling like a middle of the road thriller that didn't require the greatness of a talent like Danny Boyle to bring it to life. Without too much imagination, one could picture this film being brought to a life by a competent but less prestigious director like Neil Burger or Francis Lawrence. Boyle's able to elevate the material, but it all feels undeserved or unnecessary—an over-bet on a hand in poker that didn't have that much money in the pot to begin with.