Translated into Hollywoodese from the original Dutch, George Sluizer’s “The Vanishing” loses more than its language.
The point of view of this fable-like thriller has vanished as well, shifting from European irony and distance to an American subjectivity-to a demand for immediate identification with an unambiguous hero and heroine.
A compellingly bleak moral tale becomes, in this version, a disappointingly conventional cliffhanger.
Filmed in the Netherlands as “Spoorloos” in 1988, Sluizer’s original film became a cult hit on the American art house circuit, largely on the basis of an ingenious flashback structure and a surpassingly cruel surprise ending.
Though the American remake follows the original virtually scene for scene, transposing the action from the French alps to the American Northwest, the sense of the action has changed almost completely.
The dual-pronged plot follows the intersecting obsessions of two men. Barney (Jeff Bridges) is a mild-mannered, deeply psychotic high school chemistry teacher who has decided to test his capacity for evil by kidnapping a total stranger.
Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) is an aspiring novelist whose girlfriend, Diane (Sandra Bullock), suddenly and definitively disappears during a service station rest stop on a vacation drive.
Three years pass, but Jeff remains preoccupied with discovering Diane’s fate, devoting most of his time and money to posting handbills, searching for witnesses and appearing on talk shows.
Though Jeff tells his new companion, a warm-hearted waitress named Rita (Nancy Travis), that he no longer loves the missing woman, he feels he can’t rest until he knows exactly what happened to her-he is consumed by curiosity, rather than driven by passion.
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Only when Jeff’s curiosity appears to flag-the handbills that he posts periodically have remained unchanged for months-does Barney decide to step forward, offering Jeff an unholy bargain: full knowledge of Diane’s destiny, but only if he agrees to experience exactly what she did.
As suits a film about obsession, Sluizer’s direction, both in the original and the remake, is entirely linear and narrowly concentrated, concerned with character only as it relates to the central situation (there are no extraneous details or nuances). The scenes succeed one another with the inevitability and rigor of a mathematical progression. We are not invited to sympathize with the barely humanized characters, but only to dispassionately observe them.
But things begin to derail with Bridges’ excessively campy performance-one of the very few occasions in his long and distinguished career in which he can be seen flaunting his technique.
Where French actor Bernard Pierre Donnadieu was all concentrated strength and silence in the original, Bridges makes Barney a lisping, prissy nerd, begging for laughs with a broken speech pattern that recalls the psycho characterizations of his co-star’s father, Donald Sutherland.
Bridges wants the audience to like him, and his character becomes a variation on the sympathetic serial killer of “Silence of the Lambs”-admired for his superior intelligence and the power it gives him.
Still, screenwriter Todd Graff (“Used People”), who prepared the English-language adaptation, may have been right in assuming that knowledge for its own sake is not an American value. The movie backs away from the theme of consuming curiosity, substituting action for reflection and insisting upon a bang-up finale that throws away the most perverse and memorable moment of Sluizer’s original.
It is too late, however, for “The Vanishing” to switch gears into a good guys/bad guys shoot-’em-up. Once established, the ironic distance and chilled emotions of the film’s first half can’t be easily shrugged in favor of traditional identification techniques.
In trying to make the American version more emotionally accessible, the adapters of “The Vanishing” have made it far less distinctive and far less satisfying.
“The Vanishing”
(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by George Sluizer; screenplay by Todd Graff; photographed by Peter Suschitzky; production designed by Jeannine C. Oppewall; edited by Bruce Green; music by Jerry Goldsmith; produced by Larry Brezner and Paul Schiff. A Twentieth Century Fox release; opens Feb. 5 at the Water Tower, Webster Place and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:49. MPAA rating: R. Violence.
THE CAST
Barney . . . . . Jeff Bridges
Jeff . . . . . . Kiefer Sutherland
Rita . . . . . . Nancy Travis
Diane . . . . . Sandra Bullock
Lynn . . . . . . Park Overall