Skewing Time: Art or Artifice?

Waking up in bed, fully clothed, after a night of drinking and dancing and who knows what else, Rick, a disheveled young lawyer in the new movie “Body Shots,” raises a puzzled brow when the young lawyer next to him opens her eyes and asks, in a hung-over, whispery voice: “What the hell happened?”

It’s a straightforward question. But anyone who expects a straightforward answer hasn’t been paying attention at the movies of late, because straightforward has gone out of style.

Ever since Quentin Tarantino killed John Travolta in the middle of “Pulp Fiction” and then time-shifted back to show him alive--or maybe it was the loopy way that movie opened and closed with the same diner scene, jamming a trio of hopped-up tales in between--filmmakers who think of themselves as cutting edge and hip have felt obliged to juggle time.

In the last two months we’ve had “Fight Club,” “The Limey,” “Body Shots” and “Best Laid Plans,” all messing with our linear sense of time. (This list could also include “The Sixth Sense,” which flowed straightforwardly but caused audiences to mentally rewind after it was over, in essence creating their own flashbacks.) Earlier in the year there was “Go,” not to mention the audacious metaphysical games of the German movie “Run Lola Run.”

For certain kinds of films, aimed at a certain kind of audience, nonlinear storytelling is becoming de rigueur, much like the obligatory rock score and casts packed with pretty teen actors from television.

Fractured times yield fractured tales. The dislocations of modern life, the “death” of God, the seeming arbitrariness of it all--out of such fissures tumbled a century of modern art. But with some recent Hollywood movies, it’s hard to shake the notion that the chopping and dicing have less to do with the traditions of Picasso and T.S. Eliot or with dadaist cut-and-paste aesthetics than with channel-surfing and MTV. The filmmakers aren’t looking for the best way to tell a story or get across an idea; they just want you to keep watching.

Flashbacks Work in ‘Fight Club’

In some movies the scrambled stories have purpose. “Fight Club” is told largely in flashback, and its visual effects and scenes have disorienting, hallucinatory power. It’s in keeping with the thematic aims of director David Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls.

The look isn’t arbitrary; it’s integral to the story. Because ideas undergird the flashiness, the film is more engaging than movies like “Go” or “Best Laid Plans,” which, though well made, operate on the level of a jigsaw puzzle.

Also, “Fight Club” works like “The Sixth Sense” in the way it forces viewers to think twice about what they’ve seen. This greater involvement on the part of the viewer is like the difference between listening to a play on the radio and watching a television show: We work harder, so the experience is more meaningful. But to achieve this, a filmmaker needs to know how to make an emotional connection, how to make a viewer care about the characters or what happens next. In many cases, it feels like these (mostly young) directors are using trickery as a substitute for story.

Tarantino was justly praised for his “Pulp Fiction” screenplay, which won the Academy Award in 1995. “Pulp Fiction” established him as a distinctive and important new voice, a consummate synthesizer whose borrowings from Hollywood B-movies, European art film, Hong Kong action flicks and hard-boiled literature combined to make something original and fresh.

It’s not his fault that lesser filmmakers scrambled to adopt his strategies, populating their low-life stories with quirky motor-mouths and juicing up their tales with out-of-joint narratives.

Tarantino toned down the strategy and reprised it in “Jackie Brown,” an adaptation of a novel by Elmore Leonard for whom such time jumping is a trademark. Steven Soderbergh time-shifted in “Out of Sight,” another adaptation of a Leonard novel, and the director takes this splintered approach much further in his new movie, “The Limey,” which also inventively incorporates snippets from an old film in which his star, Terrence Stamp, appeared.

Doug Liman’s “Go,” from last spring, owes a clear debt to Tarantino, in its nonlinear narrative as well as in its juxtaposition of caustic humor and sudden violence and the way it humanizes petty criminals to make them seem like the boy and girl next door.

The makers of “Best Laid Plans,” a rural noir that opened in September, also seem to be following the Tarantino blueprint. After the first disjointed, enigmatic scenes, the story begins in the middle, with the movie setting up a desperate situation. (A frightened man is shouting on the telephone and thinking of killing the woman he’s handcuffed to his pool table.) Then it flashes back four months to tell us how we got to this point, eventually showing us those early scenes again in a way that allows them to make sense.

Similarly “Body Shots,” which opened Oct. 22, begins on “the morning after” a drunken night on the town. The lawyer’s question--”What the hell happened?”--becomes the movie’s mantra as the eight principal characters sift through the alcohol-sodden events of the previous night.

The movie eventually settles into a “Rashomon”-like examination of whether a friend committed a rape. But before we get to that, director (and uncredited co-writer) Michael Cristofer seems to take the view that any scene worth showing is worth showing three or four times. Flashbacks are interspersed among present-time scenes and are themselves interspersed with images of characters speaking directly into the camera.

The movie resembles chopped salad. But it isn’t as visually restless as “The Limey.” Soderbergh has been lavishly praised for attempting something similar to what John Boorman did in his 1967 movie, “Point Blank.” Boorman used European-influenced quick cutting and out-of-order sequences to powerful effect, creating a disorienting, near hallucinatory mood that fitted the story.

But in “The Limey” it mostly feels like empty posturing. Soderbergh’s cutting is at its most frenzied during the talky scenes when the movie slows down. (Once or twice, with soft piano music playing on the soundtrack, the dialogue scenes resemble perfume commercials.) During action sequences, when he assumes he needs no help holding the audience’s attention, Soderbergh tells the story straight.

Soderbergh mimics something of the look of French filmmaker Alain Resnais’ challenging movies. Resnais fractured time and shuffled sequences in films that explored mental processes by attempting to replicate in celluloid the nonlinear structure of memory. But Soderbergh’s movie feels closer to a Fiona Apple video than to “Last Year at Marienbad.”

“Run Lola Run” differs from the other movies mentioned here in that it doesn’t scramble sequences but instead retells the same scenario over and over, each time altering one element that changes the outcome. The movie is good, kicky metaphysical fun.

It’s also fun when director Liman and writer John August do something similar in “Go.” They tell three distinct but interlocked stories, all splintering off from the same point, but each time the movie follows the stories of different characters.

Part of the pleasure of watching “Go” is in the mental gymnastics. Not that there’s anything weighty here (one critic called the movie “Tarantino Light”). It’s hard to object to filmmakers’ borrowing when it yields a fun movie, but too much of anything grows tiresome. And if catching the attention of a been-there-done-that generation is all the current flurry of fancy cinematic footwork is about, then you’ve got to ask what filmmakers are going to do for an encore when audiences tire of Tarantino-esque tricks.

Maybe that’s when they’ll settle down and relearn how to tell a story.