Sliding Doors Review
by "Richard Scheib" (roogulator AT hotmail DOT com)September 10th, 1998
SLIDING DOORS
UK/USA. 1998. Director/Screenplay - Peter Howitt, Producers - Philippa Braithwaite, William Horberg & Sydney Pollack, Photography - Remi Adafarasian, Music - David Hirschfelder, Music Supervisor - Anita Camarata, Visual Effects - Cinesite, Production Design - Maria Djurkovic. Production Company - Intermedia Films/Miramax/Paramount/Mirage Enterprises.
Gwyneth Paltrow (Helen Quilley), John Lynch (Gerry Flanagan), John Hannah (James Hammerton), Jeanne Tripplehorn (Lydia), Zara Turner (Anna), Douglas McFerran (Russell)
Plot: Helen Quilley is fired from her job with a London PR firm and returns home. Depending whether or not she bumps into a child on the tubeway steps she misses her train home. If she catches the tube she gets home in time to catch her boyfriend with another woman and from there walks out, finds and becomes involved with another man and successfully sets up her own business. But in an alternate scenario she misses the train, never discovers her layabout boyfriend’s continuing deception and continues on in a low-paying waitressing job.
I was preparing to start this review with something like "`Sliding Doors' conducts a unique venture into the concept of alternate timelines, the wildly divergent sets of circumstances that may result from a different choice made at a crucial point ...". At least I would have thought it a more unique film had two weeks earlier, I not seen the Hong Kong gangster film `Too Many Ways to Be No. 1'. `Too Many Ways' was made a year prior to `Sliding Doors' and both films are remarkably similar. Both conduct two different divergent stories dependent on the central character making a crucial choice in a trivial matter at the start of the story. It is hard not to believe that `Too Many Ways' was not an influence over `Sliding Doors', especially considering the timing and the sudden emergence of the uniqueness of this theme. Of course both films choose to tell the story in very different milieus. `Too Many Ways' is almost a parody of the hard-boiled Hong Kong gangster film while `Sliding Doors' is a romantic comedy made in the shadow of `Four Weddings and a Funeral'. Of the two `Sliding Doors' is certainly the more conceptually audacious in that it tells its two stories concurrently, interweaving and allowing aspects of one story to mirror the other, while `Too Many Ways' settles less challengingly for merely telling its two stories consecutively.
But of the two `Sliding Doors' is invariably the lesser. It tries a little too hard to be another `Four Weddings' - yet another cosmopolitan London romantic comedy and cast with an eye toward international box-office (with the beautiful swan-necked Gwyneth Paltrow at least conducting a creditable British accent here). Howitt writes some occasionally quite amusing one-liners but the characters are one-dimensional. The depth they are given seems to come only in terms of catchphrase descriptions - Jeanne Tripplehorn is just The Bitch; John Hannah is Prince Charming - we never even find out what sort of businessman he is; and John Lynch is The Cheating Loser Boyfriend. Lynch's character is so one-dimensional and he given so little motivation in his cheating and indecision that one cannot help but wonder what it is that two women see in him.
It's just that one finds it hard to swallow the basic premise. Howitt asks us to believe that not only does whether Paltrow misses the train or not make the difference between two paths she leads (fair enough) but also the entire difference between whether she leads a successful life or not. One could maybe have bought it if the two pathways were not so categorically black-and-white - if she makes the train she gets Prince Charming, makes a success of herself in business, gets a new sharp image; whereas if she doesn't she ends up unhappy, stuck in a low-paid job as a waitress and never finds out the truth about her useless, unfaithful boyfriend. It even makes the difference, for goodness sake, whether she gets pregnant to Prince Charming or to the loser boyfriend. Underneath it all the film is really a rather bland Yuppie daydream - beneath all its romantic ambitions it buys into the fantasy that success in life equates with success in business, a good image and true love; and Hell in life is being caught in a dead-end relationship and a thankless, low-paying job in the service industry. Sadly the film buys into the whole Cinderella Complex - that a woman's success and happiness in life is dependent on success and happiness being delivered to her. What is says is that success, fulfilment and uncovering the truth about the world are things that only really occur by chance happenstance as opposed to being dependent upon one's own decisions and self-determination, and that happiness is a result of external consequence rather than an attitude of mind. Personally I don't buy it.
Copyright 1998 Richard Scheib
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Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
