Quick take: Gattaca

In response to my recent post about non-action, non-thriller sci-fi movies, someone kindly lent me a DVD of Gattaca. More about the DVD itself in a later post. But as for the movie, first of all, it's an excellent film. Writer-director Andrew Nicoll found a good balance between mythic, futuristic, sociological, and suspense elements. The cast, which amazingly brings together Gore Vidal and Ernest Borgnine (!) along with stars Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law, is superb.

You'll notice I mentioned "suspense elements." Gattaca has plenty of suspense. I'd even call it a thriller, of a sort. There's definitely a conspiracy. But the story is so original that it won't fit into any pigeonhole. It defies the conventions of a typical thriller: It pits one determined man against a sophisticated bureaucracy, but in a very original way. And the plot doesn't come close to answering all the questions the screenplay raises, leaving a delicious sense of mystery.

But along with being the rare sci-fi movie that's not a (typical) action or suspense film, Gattaca is also a (less rare) gay movie with no overtly gay characters. The film opens with the first of many of what I'll call, to avoid giving too much away, male shower scenes. (They're not what you think, and yes, this is a movie that passed the "What the hell?" test right out of the gate.) Then there's the situation of having two young, smartly dressed, impeccably coiffed men living together in a starkly modern luxury loft. One of them being Jude Law. And there's more, but it's all behind a sort of curtain. Gayness is never "there" in the story, either spoken or unspoken, but it doesn't have to be. After the closing scene, featuring one of the oddest and most inspired wardrobe choices ever, I just laughed out loud. Gattaca is the sci-fi film as a modern Hays Code movie.