Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 seeks to conjure the ghosts of Godard's Alphaville, the sophisticated approach to grunginess, provocative sci-fi texture accomplished with a minimum of technical trickery, a haggard protagonist discovering love amidst the dehumanization. Godard, however, was an artist, a dazzling manipulator of form and a pop-imagist to rival Warhol, where Winterbottom is merely a poseur. What Code 46 achieves is not a vision but a day-dream, the spooky, drifting quality of a Nyquil reverie. The director's off-hand approach is meant to call forth a sense of mysterious undertones, ideas moving beneath the action, a certain spiritual hum, but what he accomplishes instead is an insufferable meaninglessness, the sense of throw-away characters occupying a disposable story, Tim Robbins trying to seem enigmatic but only looking wrung-out, Samantha Morton voice-overs offering philosophical nuggets that don't have to melt in your mouth because they've already gone to goo.
The plot might've made for a decent sci-fi potboiler, telepathic insurance investigator travels to multi-cultural Shanghai to uncover fraud involving temporary passports, falls for girl involved in crime, tries to flee but is drawn back, becomes embroiled in genetic weirdness, crazy future laws, the sense of a world where ethnic identity is disappearing, except that Winterbottom the artiste thinks himself above his own material, cannot condescend to treat any of it with a real storyteller's touch (or simply doesn't know how to). It's all dimly interesting but never really engaging, not intellectually and certainly not on the pop-level most movies like this succeed at (even Alphaville, for all its scruffy/elegant ambiguity, has pop-cred). Winterbottom is going for something quite beyond his talents, a mix of the tangible and the elusive, the very thing Godard achieved in Alphaville, lofty ideas sprung from pulpish places, a dogged romanticism existing within a vaguely nightmarish vision of humanity's future. Winterbottom is simply not enough in the spirit of what he's trying to do, doesn't love images enough to carry off such a conception. He comes across like a music video director who's gotten in over his head.
The plot might've made for a decent sci-fi potboiler, telepathic insurance investigator travels to multi-cultural Shanghai to uncover fraud involving temporary passports, falls for girl involved in crime, tries to flee but is drawn back, becomes embroiled in genetic weirdness, crazy future laws, the sense of a world where ethnic identity is disappearing, except that Winterbottom the artiste thinks himself above his own material, cannot condescend to treat any of it with a real storyteller's touch (or simply doesn't know how to). It's all dimly interesting but never really engaging, not intellectually and certainly not on the pop-level most movies like this succeed at (even Alphaville, for all its scruffy/elegant ambiguity, has pop-cred). Winterbottom is going for something quite beyond his talents, a mix of the tangible and the elusive, the very thing Godard achieved in Alphaville, lofty ideas sprung from pulpish places, a dogged romanticism existing within a vaguely nightmarish vision of humanity's future. Winterbottom is simply not enough in the spirit of what he's trying to do, doesn't love images enough to carry off such a conception. He comes across like a music video director who's gotten in over his head.