TIFF10 // Passion Play: A trumpeter without soul

Mitch Glazer's Passion Play opens with Mickey Rourke's Nate, a trumpeter in trouble with the local gangster (Bill Murray, played with his usual comic acerbity), stumbling onto a woman with wings in a carnival in the middle of the desert and escaping the clutches of her carnie benefactor to a new life. Glazer attempts to deflect the absurdity of this premise with a throwaway remark but the material never elevates itself to a level where one can excuse the ludicrous nature of the hook.

The film moves at a slow, ponderous pace as Glazer clearly wants it to be a melancholy tonal poem and a reflection on redemption (note the religious reference in the name of the film) but just like Megan Fox's birdwoman, Lily, the beauty is all on the surface with nothing but vacuity underneath. Instead of the jazzy moodiness that Glazer so clearly is aiming for, we are left bored by the lack of passion and energy on display, with only Bill Murray's ridiculous but intermittently amusing gangster character, Happy Shannon, to liven things up on occasion.

The attempts at poetry in motion nearly all fail with an astounding lack of good judgment on Glazer's part, as we get slow-motion imagery of feathers falling, Lily framed by wings on a pane of glass (nevermind the hackneyed convenience of those wings in that particular place), and inexplicably terrible and fake-looking shots of Lily half floating in the air that look like they came out of a perfume ad's discarded takes.

The film glides along for a short while on Mickey Rourke's charisma but the increasing leaps in reason, logic, and motives on the parts of the characters (shocking for an established screenwriter) eventually leech any goodwill built up on his part.

Not content with sheer mediocrity, the film finally implodes with its own self-importance in a climax that had the audience chattering throughout the theatre. It is a sequence so ridiculous, absurd and laughable, complete with such cheesy, bad CGI that I wanted to reach over to Glazer's seat and slap him in the face for the sheer pretentiousness of it all.