Butler's Cinema Scene

Rachel Weisz

“COMPLETE UNKNOWN”  My rating: B (Opens Sept. 9 at the Tivoli)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Some films dole out facts.

Others, like “Complete Unknown,” trade in mood.

Joshua Marston’s film isn’t a thriller exactly…more like a character study…except that’s not quite right either, since the main character of Martson‘s screenplay (written with Julian Sheppard) is a sort of human chameleon.

In a brilliantly assembled opening sequence we see a woman (Rachel Weisz) in a variety of situations. She’s a grad student renting an apartment. A magician‘s assistant in what appears to be China. An E.R. nurse.

The woman is Alice (at least that’s her current name) and we slowly realize that she is a master imposter, someone who every few months or years changes her identity, personality and career.

It isn’t like Alice is antisocial. She’s witty, charming, entertaining, and has terrific stories about the various jobs she’s held all over the world.

Now she shows up at a dinner party as the date of Clyde (Michael Chernus), a schlubby government paper pusher and colleague of Tom (Michael Shannon), whose birthday is being celebrated.

Tom immediately realizes that this woman calling herself Alice is in fact Jenny, with whom he was living when she vanished 15 years earlier. Tom is now married (though that union is shaky). Nevertheless Alice/Jenny has befriended Clyde precisely so she can reconnect with her old flame Tom.

“You were the last person who really knew me before I left,” she explains.

Michael Shannon

Over the course of a long night on the town Tom tries to get to the bottom of Alice/Jenny’s fear of intimacy, of why she left her grieving parents without a clue as to whether she is dead or alive, of what drives her to live serial lives built on lies.

In one remarkable digression, the couple befriend a woman (Kathy Bates) who has fallen in the street. Taking her home to her husband (Danny Glover), Alice introduces Tom as a physician — just so he can get a sense of how liberating radical role playing can be.

The film’s title clearly references the Bob Dylan song:

How does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

Ultimately Tom — and the audience — will be frustrated.  If there is a real Jenny inside this woman, she’s buried so deep that no mere mortal will be able to excavate her.

The closest she comes to explaining herself is her response to Tom’s question about how difficult it is to keep track of her different selves:

“Keeping track isn’t the hard part. It’s when everyone around you seems to know who you are and try to lay claim to you, and then you’re trapped. That’s the hard part.”

The good news is that Weisz is such a nuanced and subtle actress that she can suggest depths and feelings not articulated in the script. We get the sense that after years of deception Jenny may be ready to genuinely share with another human being.

But is Tom ready to follow her into the unknown?

Director Martson (“Maria Full of Grace,” “The Forgiveness of Blood”) has shot most of the story in closeups.

But he also delivers several tour de force moments. Tom’s birthday party is an almost flawless depiction of the casual intimacy of old friends. And there’s a nighttime interlude in a frog-infested forest (“Alice” claims to once have been an amphibian researcher in Tasmania) that has the dislocating weirdness of a waking dream.

| Robert W. Butler