Film This is somewhat old news but I've just finished watching Antoine Fuqua's film Training Day (2001) and I'm in a mood. This is the story of Jake (Ethan Hawke), a Rookie cop, who is being evaluated by a detective, Alonso (Denzel Washington) to see if he has the chops to join his team. There's really nothing worse than a film like this that manages to sustain tension for an hour and fifty minutes and then loses the sense of itself at the climax. The following gives away the ending and doesn't describes lots of things that only make sense if you've seen the film, so if you haven't been there I'd look away now.
One of the issues I've been dealing with over the summer in relation to my dissertation is which character has narrative agency in a particular scene or across a film -- in other words whose point of view is at the centre of the story -- who it's about. In most films narrative agency is deferred to one or two characters -- the hero and the bad guy -- Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and the story develops around them. In ensemble films this becomes more complex because of the number of characters who are in play.
In Training Day, from the opening moments, narrative agency is deferred to Jake. Every scene, from the opening few seconds, is played from his point of view and we see Alonso through his eyes and our attitude to the detective filtered through his opinion and perceptions -- our sympathies are with him. We do not see both sides of the opening phone call; when Alonso visits his girlfriend with Jake in tow, the audience doesn't see the detective in the bedroom and instead watches the rookie fall asleep on the sofa. When the go to the Sandman's house, there aren't any cutaways to what Alonso is actually doing in the bedroom. When Jake bursts back into the flat at the end, there isn't an intercut to the scene that awaits him. Effectively this creates mystery and leads to the twists that occur because narrative information is restricted to Jake -- the audience only ever knows what Jake knows. Which is fine and makes for an interesting, exciting and more importantly unusually experimental film right up until ten minutes before the end when everything goes horribly wrong.
For an hour and fifty minutes this has been Jake's story and then suddenly we are watching what happens to Alonso. We see him going to the meet with the Russians and being shot to hell. It's a crowd pleaser I suppose, because Washington's performance has been so potent that you really, really dislike him. But it feels wrong, and dishonest, and it hurts the movie -- because it stops being about Jake, he's not there, his story has already ended, and we didn't need to see it. It's about giving the audience what they want and it feels unsatisfactory given the storytelling which has gone before.
A much more potent ending would have been seeing Jake walk away, evidence in hand, down that street with Alonso being held at gunpoint behind. It shows that Jake doesn't care too much for being Alonso's kind of detective, that he would much rather, as he says earlier in the film, return to writing tickets. It shows him keeping his morals intact. It also shows that in the end Alonso's approach to policing doesn't work. A straight cut then to Jake returning to his house, the news voice over reporting Alonso's death. We'd still be in Jake's point of view. The only concession I'd make is the sound of his wife saying something like 'So how did it go?' which would lighten the mood slightly at the end of what's been a pretty gruelling film. As it stands I spent the scene when Alonso is killed wondering what Jake was doing and in fact whether he was watching from close by and even if he was in the pocket of the Russians all along and that was why we were seeing them.
On the dvd, there is a deleted scene that reveals that Jake was working for the wise men all along in attempting to capture Alonso in the act. That doesn't really work either because it devalues the rest of the film and knocks open some plot holes -- also as presented it still features the cutaway to Alonso being gunned down. I'll be looking forward to hearing the director's commentary to see if it reveals whether this is how the film had always been written or if someone blinked in the production stages. It really is a shame, because as I said, up until that moment it had been a finally crafted and entertaining film.
Ex-film students eh? Filmmaker's nightmare.
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