( Note: This conversation contains spoilers.)

GABRIEL SHANKS: Jill does science fiction!

JC: Jill occasionally does science fiction.

WHO:	Mixed Reviewers Jill Cozzi and Gabriel Shanks
WHAT:	A meeting-of-the-minds over a steaming hot cup of New York's finest
HOW:	Jill - coffee with milk and pink stuff; Gabriel - a nice cup of tea
WHERE:	The Cafe at the Angelika, New York City

GS: At the Angelika, no less!

JC: Jill actually did 28 Days Later...

GS: ...which I thought about a lot during this film.

JC: I thought about 28 Days Later during this film, I thought about Lost in Translation during this film...

GS: Well, with 28 Days Later and CODE 46, there's an alternate reality...not really futuristic in the way of spaceships and UFOs, but an alternative possibility for humankind. They also both share that gritty look--

JC: What it has most in common with 28 Days Later is that kind of desolation in the middle of civilization. Because in this film everything is either very desolate or very flashy, and he switches back and forth between the desolation of the desert and the desolation of the highway and everything that's "outside", and then the city is very frenetic and neon and high rises and all the lights being on at the same time, and the marketplaces...

GS: The movie is really talking about who is literally "in" and who is "out"..."inside" and "outside" the society. On one level it's a science fiction story about cloning and the ethical and social ramifications of a culture of that being a commonplace activity. But on another level, it's a discussion of authoritarianism in a global economy. Some of the most interesting things in CODE 46 have nothing to do with the story...the creeping multiculturalism, both in the cast and in the mix of --

JC: -- languages and the ethnicities and --

GS: Yes! Chinese, Arab...

JC: ...and the people don't have the ethnicities that we expect. We have Asians who are Asians, but also those who speak perfect English and some with non-Asian accents, and blond, blue-eyed people who are Hispanic, and it's very polyglot.

GS: It's a post-race, post-ethnicity kind of world. That was really interesting...to be honest, I wanted to explore that more than the issues the film brings up about cloning. It gets very interesting in the last hour. I mean, the ethics of genetic structuring and breeding...if a government controls that process...and if the government controls how you travel...if the government decides who can come into certain places and who has to stay out. Well, that's interesting, at least academically. I'm not sure I was very entertained by CODE 46. It wasn't escapist in the way most contemporary science fiction is. I, Robot or The Day After Tomorrow are designed to be escapist entertainment.

JC: This is almost hearkening back to films like 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, in which it's an intellectualized future, where the implications of the stuff going on AROUND the characters is a lot more important than the characters.

GS: And like 2001; there's a kind of Orwellian subtext to the technology and to the omnipresence of a government...

JC: And of technology running faster than the ability of society to deal with what the implications are. .

GS: Viruses in this film take on a really interesting out-of-control nature.

JC: What's interesting is that the viruses aren't necessarily malevolent. It's interesting that in a film like The Manchurian Candidate, it's literally a memory chip implanted into someone's brain, whereas here, it's called a virus, which we tend to think of as a malevolent entity. But the so-called empathy virus that the Tim Robbins character has obviously had implanted in his brain ---

GS: You can take a virus to learn Mandarin Chinese.

JC: Yeah...and the virus here is a benevolent thing, which we're not accustomed to thinking.

GS: And yet one of the beautiful things about Boyce's screenplay is that it doesn't bog down in trying to explain all of things to you. It's clear that the sun's rays have become toxic -- the ozone is clearly gone -- but we don't really stop to talk about it.

JC: It's a triumph of "Show, don't tell."

GS: Right.

JC: In that five-second shot in which Tim Robbins checks into his hotel room and turns on the tinted glass, we can see what's happening.

GS: And I was sitting there thinking, "If Boyce's screenplay had been made by Steven Spielberg, he would have explained all of it."

JC: I think part of the reason that they're able to do this is that Boyce comes out of British television, and he comes out of these kind of serialized British dramas like detective shows. And I think that because they are limited to an hour, it's got a very compact kind of style. And there's a lot of story here, in a movie that would be two-and-a-half hours if done by anyone else, and it clocks in at like 93 minutes. It's very compact, and it's very economical, and there's not a shot wasted here.

GS: I also give Michael Winterbottom a lot of credit for that. The presentation of the futuristic elements is very low-key; he's not interested in explaining it all to you in the way that I, Robot did, sludging through more exposition every three or four seconds to make sure you were caught up with whatever technology they were talking about. Winterbottom and Boyce are simply not interested in having that conversation...or more to the point, they're interested in an audience that's going to work to keep up with them. THAT's interesting sci-fi. THAT's Kubrickian. That's an interesting universe to experience.

JC: Part of the reason for that, I think, is that there isn't the money for a lot of fancy gewgaws. There's a lot of strong elements of Minority Report here, although somewhat less futuristic, in terms of the screens showing all that information and that sort of thing. But the emphasis is not on the technology in terms of of whiz-bang, it's --

GS: It's not dazzling the way it was in Minority Report.

JC: No, but it's completely integrated into people's lives. And Winterbottom gives you credit for accepting this stuff as being part of YOUR life through the characters instead of it being "Oh, look at this cool thing we did over here."

GS: Well, the best science fiction novelists do that. Arthur Clarke, Octavia Butler, Dan Simmons. They assume that you will accept the world as it's presented. On a related tangnt: the great thing about Winterbottom is that his movies don't look like anybody else's.

JC:No, and they don't look like each other, either, for all that he had an interesting bit of self-reference in this film, which only if you loved The Claim are you going to catch.

GS: Well, but there's reference of 28 Days Later. There's references of -- .

JC: Well, 28 Days Later was --

GS: -- Danny Boyle.

JC: -- Danny Boyle. But they're all out of the same school, pretty much.

GS: That was the point I was going to make. Some of the vistas of the desert reminded me of Rabbit-Proof Fence. There's a sort of European ethic to the images, yet somehow, Winterbottom's visions are totally his own. They're very singular.

JC:And he understands the power of a very simple visual, and this kind of came into its own in The Claim, with the burning horse, which has a horrible kind of beauty. At the end of this film, there's an overhead shot where there's nothing but desert and road, and you see these camels in the middle of nothing running across the road, and it's so weird but it's so spectacular.

GS: But also, in the cities there's all these whites and grays, and muted browns -- everything's kind of washed out and muddy, and it feels like 2001 or THX1138 -- those great science fiction films of the 1970's that sort of created this field of vision. Winterbottom certainly has a sense of what came before him cinematically. But still it's totally his own.

But we're talking about how beautiful it is technically, and we're talking about the screenplay...here we are five minutes into this conversation and we haven't brought up the story itself. I'm curious what you thought about it. I mean, it's so emotionally murky. Is it a love story?

JC: Well, this is another thing about Winterbottom; he directs some of the most opaque characterizations you're ever going to see. I always go back to the claim that it's the most recent film that he did that I saw that I really liked, since I wasn't crazy about 24 Hour Party People,and I didn't see In This World, but you have a Wes Bentley in The Claim, and he's about as opaque an actor as there is. And I think the story really isn't important because it's very low-key and the characters are not developed. There's nothing here that makes you care a whole lot about these people. The characters are there to drive the story along, for all that they're part of it.

GS: Well, I'll ask again: Is it a love story? Is this a romance? The ramifications of cloning, without revealing too many spoilers --

JC:I guess this means we can't get into the Oedipal elements of the story then, right?

GS: Well, all right, you just have to write "spoiler, spoiler, spoiler" at the top of the article! Okay. Genetically this woman is very similar to his mother, but he seems to have no problem with that. The erasure of memory is an enormous issue; it's the only way these relationships -- Tim Robbins' relationship with his wife, his relationship with Morton, her relationship with the guy in the bar -- it's the only way that all of them can function. In the real world, we don't have that option, to say "OK, you ran off with another woman, but since we've erased your memory of it...it's moot".

JC: Well, this brings up another question. If you don't remember, did it happen? If you don't remember, can I be angry with you? And this is another interesting part in the movie: the one scene with the wife talking to the doctor and she looks very angry, and then she goes in and there's all this emotion that's kind of roiling around this person who doesn't seem to be dealing with empathy viruses and all the rest of this. The wife lives in this little cocoon of normal life, where she's insulated from all of this stuff.

GS: But she used to work as an empathy investigator too -- they worked together before they got married. She knows what this is about, but she's part of a culture -- an authoritarian culture -- that depends on the erasure of memory in order to continue.

JC: And what a scary thought THAT is.

GS: Well, this is the Jill Cozzi and Gabriel Shanks Show, so of course we're going to extrapolate everything into the current political situation. (Laughs.) But there are some interesting ideas in this film about how the personal and the political affect each other. Cloning is a very real problem in these people's lives. It seems to be wreaking some havoc in this culture that has clamped down so hard on reproductive rights.

JC: Well, this is almost a post-cloning society in that they have started to understand the ramifications of cloning. There are things touched on in this movie that most people who talk about cloning don't really touch on, which is that with cloning, you're not going to really know necessarily, how closely the person you're with may be related to you, and what happens when you start with the possibility of people having children with people who are clones of themselves.

GS: Right.

JC: I suppose that medical ethicists who deal with this stuff all the time -- and fundamentalist Christians looking for reasons to oppose stem cell research, probably ponder this a lot. But it's not something that most of us spend our day-to-day lives thinking about.

GS: No, but it really becomes this -- for me, I think we both said, tell me if I'm wrong, that the story between Samantha Morton's character and Tim Robbins' character is less interesting than the ideology and social issues it discusses.

JC:It's less interesting because we don't really know them, we don't know what makes them tick, we don't know what draws them to each other --

GS: Let me go another route, to a movie like Cold Mountain, where there is this central relationship that informs a larger world, one of the Civil War. And yet, the extrapolation of that relationship is not very interesting. What's happening to Jude Law and Nicole Kidman couple does not interestingly inform a larger context. What's happening to this couple in CODE 46 informs everything we see around them.

JC: It informs everything to such a degree that the characters get a little lost. The characters in some way exemplify the story rather than carrying it.

GS: You're not as interested in THEM, I think, because of that.

JC: And part of that is -- a lot of that is intentional, and I think this is the reason why the leads were cast the way they were, although if anyone had told me that Tim Robbins would turn into this kind of quiet, intellectual, interior actor back when I was watching Bull Durham, I'd have said that they were crazy. But this is a very guarded kind of a performance.

GS: He just won the Oscar, so I'm very surprised that this movie hasn't taken advantage of that.

JC: It's not a showy performance the way his performance in Mystic River is.

GS: I wasn't a fan of his work in Mystic River.

JC: I think he was a little histrionic there. I think something like this plays a lot more to his strengths, because he has this kind of rubbery, mobile face, that's very expressive.

GS: He's clearly become a "Winterbottom actor" in this film. He is more muted. He also steps his game up in the scenes with Samantha Morton, who I think is one of the most underrated actors of our time. She is extremely good at finding those gradations between breaking down and covering emotions up. I thought that she brought very good work out of Robbins.

JC: I think so too. The only thing with her is that she is tending to play the same character over and over and over again. Part of is this kind of gamine look she's chosen for herself, but there are parts of this movie, like the strobe light scene, which I think goes on a little too long, where it felt like the scene was lifted from either Under the Skin or Morvern Callar, or both. This is the "Oh, isn't Samantha Morton interesting" shot.

GS: She has such big, liquid eyes. I think directors -- I keep thinking of In America -- are in love with her face and in love with watching her. Minority Report...there's something about the way Spielberg shot her....

JC: And it's interesting that they all photograph her the same way.

GS: That's my point. So....in terms of recommending this film or not. We've both talked about how interesting it is. I think we both had a good time.

JC: I wasn't bowled over by it, but it is artistic, interesting filmmaking rather than entertaining.

GS: Well, you and I have done a lot of these Critics over Coffees. Maybe more than any film we've ever done, this is one that I think is not for everybody.

JC: It's really demanding of the audience. It does not seem to be linear. It is hard to follow. I expected there to be some twists there.

GS: You have to play catch-up.

JC: Yeah. And maybe it's just here because the soundtrack was muddy, but there were parts that were hard to understand. There were some parts of the conversation between Tim Robbins and the taxi driver at the beginning that I felt were important to the story, and I wasn't catching what was being said. It's a movie that demands a lot of its audience, and I'm not sure how much it gives back.

GS: Right. The rewards are modest for the investment. You have to bring a lot to the film, and I'm not sure you get back an equal amount for your effort. For sci-fi movie fans, I'm not sure that it will appeal to all of them -- it's heavy on the science. I mean, who's this film for? Who's supposed to go?

JC: Michael Winterbottom fans.

GS: He has fans?

JC: A few.

GS: People who liked In This World? You're a big fan of The Claim. These two films are very far apart in terms of subject matter, and interest.

JC: Well, I think that with the possible exception of 24 Hour Party People, there IS a common thread that runs through his films, although it's a slim one. I've always felt that he was kind of a passionate, angry filmmaker, railing at societal strictures and expectations, and against authority figures. He directed the first episode of the Robbie Coltrane Cracker mysteries, in which the unorthodox methods used by Coltrane's character are constantly pissing off the police brass. Now in Jude he regrettably focused more on the romantic subplot than on the sociopolitical bitterness of Thomas Hardy, but the "rage against the machine" was still there. The Claim is another Hardy adaptation -- a loose one, but there the "mayor" of the title was the authority getting his comeuppance. And clearly here both of these characters in this film are rebels.

GS: I don't know...I liked it, but I'm not sure I would send my friends to it. I think opening as it is right now in the summer of 2004, at the end of the summer, we're starting to see a lot of character-driven emotional dramas -- sort of the hangover of the summer. A Home at the End of the World, Garden State...We Don't Live Here Anymore is about to open -- there's a lot of these intimate films. And truthfully, I think all of those might be more accessible than this film.

JC: I would think so, because they deal with more with what people could experience in their own lives.

GS: This is mixed genre, of course. But I don't want readers to get the impression that it's not a good movie or not worth their time. But if you're looking for a satisfied feeling when you leave, you may find it a little wanting, even though it's well-made; even though it's interesting, at times extremely interesting and provocative.

JC: I think what's driving the filmmakers is to generate discussion --

GC: Political, intellectual, social discussion. And you have to be into that.

JC: So it's more of a film for political junkies than for science fiction fans.

GC: Yes, or for intellectuals vs. escapists. What you think CODE 46 is, is perhaps not at all what it is.