A Life Less Ordinary

I knew Danny Boyle was a genius before knowing who Danny Boyle was. I saw Trainspotting when it came out, and it blew my mind – but that’s a different movie review. The important thing to remember about Trainspotting is not to drag along your mother and her bridge partner to see it. I’ll know in a next life.

Recently, I saw by pure chance “A Life Less Ordinary” on TV. I still didn’t know who Danny Boyle was. The movie was again mind-blowing in its unambitious way. The proof of its unambitiousness is that I subsequently found it in a 3-for-the-price-of-one DVD set alongside two other irrelevant chick-flicks, which will enhance their usefulness as bird scarers in my allotment.

In this goofy kidnapping story, total loser Robert (Ewan McGregor) loses his job as a janitor – what else – to a robot, and ends up more or less accidentally kidnapping the boss’s daughter (Cameron Diaz). Not only do they fall in love, but their love transcends all things including death in the form of a bullet that pierces Robert’s heart but only manages to let the sun shine through his body. Goofy, what?

The characters are perfect. Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz are impossibly good-looking, Ewan in the cartoon character shirt that he wears throughout, while Cameron being the girl would of course change outfits regularly, even though she is held captive in a remote cabin. This is Hollywood after all. Then there is the parallel story of the two bounty hunters who are in fact angels (don’t ask), similarly superb characters.

And then there is The Scene. There would have to be a Joycean scene in a movie I like. The lady bounty hunter is lying in bed reading a trashy romantic novel and carrying on a conversation with her associate at the same time. The way Danny Boyle executes this scene is by alternating the internal reading (her voice reading excerpts of the novel) and the external dialogue, seamlessly. She is obviously more concentrated on the steamy action in the book than on what her interlocutor is saying and by this simple, incidental scene, the Director has established what kind of a person she is. It’s surreal, it’s true, and it’s a flash of genius.

The Scene being sadly not on Youtube, you might watch the ransom scene as a taster.