Jack's Back

By Rex Reed
THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
October 27, 2005

It gives me pleasure to welcome back Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 masterwork, The Passenger, re-released for a new generation to savor. This is a stunning, sobering film experience with some of the most breathtaking camera work it has been my privilege to see. The film is full of metaphor and cynicism, but its impact is astonishing. Jack Nicholson is magnificent as David Locke, a hack reporter doing a documentary on North African guerrillas, unhappy with his life, disillusioned with his work, frustrated and exhausted as he approaches burnout.

His moment of truth comes in a sand-swept village hotel surrounded by silence, heat and bugs crawling on the plumbing. The whir of a ceiling fan is the only sound he hears. In the next room, a man dies. Locke steals his passport, plane ticket and identity. People disappear from the film every time they leave a room, yet remain the same even in foreign zones—translating everything into their own personal codes of experience. Very puzzling stuff, yet bracing in its eventual clarity of vision.

The point of The Passenger (and Mr. Antonioni's psychic philosophy) is that life is not worth living. Trade in your own for a different model and you'll only discover that nobody else's life is worth living, either. I don't agree, so the film becomes ultimately depressing when Mr. Antonioni insists that I do. But the mystery, ambiguity and inner passion unrequited are gorgeously telegraphed through visual terms in Mr. Antonioni's best film after The Red Desert.

The Passenger has lost none of its power in 30 years. It exists on two levels: In a commercial, adventurous sense, it is an exciting mystery of chance, with Locke embarking on a new life only to discover, as he keeps the dead man's appointments, that he is a gun-runner in immediate danger from unknown enemies as well as his pursuing wife and employers. (Mr. Nicholson's perpetual look of a mangy dog whose fur has been rubbed by calloused hands in the wrong direction has never served him better.) On a starker level, it's an investigation of illusions and dreams in an ambiance of surreal disposition and mood. The quest for life turns ironically into an odyssey of suicide. Not for the TV crowd, but a sober and rewarding film worthy of the same attention and time it received the first time around. The more I reflect on it, the more it grows on me, like a lichen.