FauxNixon

With its story and its screenplay written by none-other-than James Cameron, Strange Days is director Kathryn Bigelow (K19: The Widowmaker) vision of a beautiful dystopian Los Angeles on the precipice of the turn of the millennium where violence is everywhere, the police are out in force like something in Bosnia or Northern Ireland with full-on riot gear and automatic weapons.

In this disturbing future in place of drugs has come virtual reality “clips” which when coupled with a player and an apparatus that looks a bit like a wig, allows a user to either record all of the emotions, feelings, sensations and other elements of consciousness from an experience or play it back.  It is said to originally have been designed by the federal government to replace the body-wire and has since gone into the black-market, allowing wealthy gentleman to know the thrills felt when robbing a bank, or for someone without legs to feel what it’s like to take a long run on a beach.

The dealer and main character Strange Days is Lenny Neo (Ralph Fiennes), a former vice cop turned street-hustler who deals the clips just as a drug dealer deals in drugs.  He is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), a beautiful singer who is now the companion of the owner of a shady record label named Philo (Michael Wincott) and has a huge number of contacts in the underground, one of which has seen the LAPD do something which, if seen publicly, could spark a full-on race riot, if not race war. Lenny is a perpetual loser and an expert at talking his way out of problems.

Lenny’s two friends in the movie are another former cop who is not working as a private detective, Max Peltier (Tom Sizemore) and Mace (Angela Bassett) a single-mother who works as a bodyguard and limousine driver, who she met when her child’s father was arrested and she saw Lenny caring for her child while they waited for her to come home, shielding the kid from the trauma of seeing her father arrested.

Lenny is anonymously sent a clip of a vicious rape and murder of a friend of his who works as a prostitute and seems to be connected to a recently-murdered politically-active rap artist on Philo’s record label.  He is about to be drawn into a very intricate web of blackmail, murder-for-hire, extortion, and intrigue in the course of his investigations because he believes the clip also puts Faith in danger.

The disturbing truth about what two rogue cops from the LAPD were chasing the prostitute who was killed, about the rap artist’s murder, and about the anonymous snuff clip Lenny was sent are all brought to a cataclysm during the millennial celebration and Lenny emerges, with the millennium and Mace, no longer a loser or a hustler, but an honest human being, sharing his romantic feelings with Mace and entering the new millennium as a couple with a clean conscience and a new degree of honesty.

The film is technically brilliant.  It utilizes very advanced prototype cars and sets to create a very realistic look at what could easily have been the 1999-2000 envisioned in 1994 when this movie was in production.  It puts the racial politics of Los Angeles to the forefront in manner reminiscent of Spike Lee, but the real beauty of the film itself is in the coloring, set design and other ephemera which make up the background of a movie, because it is in these details that one finds the beautiful care with which they are all created and arranged.

The point-of-view action pieces alone took over a year to plan, prepare, rehearse, shoot and then edit.  The director developed her own POV camera system, finding the existing systems too cumbersome for her purposes.   Much of the editing work was actually done by James Cameron himself, though he couldn’t be properly credited at the time due to his not having joined the editors’ union yet.

This isn’t to even discount the acting abilities of Ralph Fiennes, who, in my opinion, should have been an Oscar candidate for his work in this film, or the supporting work from Angela Bassett.  Tom Sizemore’s performance leaves a bit to be desired, but is quite sufficient to the movie and playing Philo Gant, Michael Wincott, is simultaneously a controlling sociopath and a charming public speaker.  Impressively, Juliette Lewis did all of her own vocal work in this movie, including the songs on the soundtrack, which, when added to the acting ability she brought, makes her quite a force in the movie as well.

Strange Days is, and has been since its release, under-appreciated.  It is not a matter of awards or notoriety and I do not think that any of the cast signed on to achieve those things.  It is actually irritating because so much of the cinema-going public goes without seeing movies like this and when, once they see them, are so impressed that they themselves are annoyed they did not take notice of these films when they were initially released.  That said, Strange Days has been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it in 1995 and I have seen it in repeat viewings probably at least forty times at this point and love it more each time because I notice new details and new things to be appreciated.