03/07 - RAG Magazine

The Number 23Cast: Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Danny HustonDirector: Joel SchumacherPsychological thrillers are a tough gig. You need an ending. The buildup,the suspense, the rising action, all that squirmy paranoia, it’s easyenough to build. It’s the ending that’s the tricky part. Films like Mementodo it right; films like Fight Club, too. Their twist, the unraveled knot ofanxiety that splays out in explanation and relief, comes with anotherbulge of knots; it leaves you breathless and troubled, disturbed if you’relucky. But without the ending, without the final flick in the nose andpunch in the gut, a psycho-thriller is just a bunch of untied shoelaces.FILMonce a whisper, is now a screech, and he worries for the safety of hisown family.Stop there. Just stop the film, put down your popcorn and walk away.Because that’s as good as The Number 23 will get. The bouncy humor,the family drama, the rise in paranoia, the fascination in 23, it all worksup until here. But it’s as if Screenwriter Fernley Phillips lost the thread.It was unraveling with speed and machismo, promising to towerupwards in a great final disturbance. But instead it turned inward andricocheted blindly backwards. Instead of opening up the throttle andletting the number have real meaning and significance, Phillips turnsthe plot inward and shells up the climax with a muffled grunt. - SamuelOsbornThis is the affliction born to The Number 23. It’s a finetwo-act movie. But that third act…with the climax allflaccid and the end a noiseless wheeze, it leaves uswith that let-down feeling of something promising turnedinstantly to a sham. I won’t give the ending away, butsuffice it to say that it’s summed up by the word “typical.”Commonplace is the ending. And commonplace issomewhere The Number 23 has no business being.The rest of the film is a good one; a fine looking few rollsof celluloid, in fact. Jim Carrey plays the lead, stillrounding off the sharper edges of his comedy andreminding us happily of Tom Hanks’ move from comedyto drama. He’s a hopelessly likeable actor pairedgracefully with Virginia Madsen, who plays Carrey’swife and mother to his teenage son. The family livescomfortably under Agatha’s (Madsen) cake shop andWalter’s (Carrey) job as an animal control officer. Theparanoia enters like a whisper, as feckless andunassuming as director Joel Schumacher can stand.The famously melodramatic director is often thought ofas the second-string choice for any theatrical filmmaking,just behind the dramatic grandmaster Baz Luhrmann(Moulin Rouge!). Schumacher revels in colors andcamera tricks, over-saturating and under-saturating hisimages until they’re hardly recognizable. The effect hereis controlled, but not empty of pizzazz.The book Agatha finds (or does it find her?) when waitingfor Walter outside a used bookshop is “The Number 23”by Topsy Kretts. Walter opens the novel on his day off,gorging himself on the minutiae of its hardboiled detectivehero and fantasizing himself in the lead role. Schumacherindulges Walter further, fancying “The Number 23’s”Detective Fingerling as a slippery-haired Mr. Carrey in acheap suit and a dry growl. Much of the story is actuallytold within the novel itself, with Fingerling getting lost in thenumerology surrounding the number 23 and slippingtowards the inevitability of murder. Back in reality, Walter isfinding uncanny resemblances between Fingerling andhimself. It’s as if, he once mentions, the author knows himbetter than he does. Agatha writes it off as an effect ofgood literature, but reconsiders when she finds scribblednumerology on Walter’s arm one morning with the underlinedwords “Kill Her.” He’s begun to see the number everywhere.It’s in his name, his social security number, his birth date,and even the day he and Agatha first met. His paranoia,