When Reality Is Much More Complicated Than It Seems

Is there something about the times we’re living in that’s making reality too hard to bear? Amnesia, hallucinations, dreams within dreams, video game sequences as reality and aliens.... All of these things have been featured heavily in the plots of movies in the last year.

I mean, I just saw a trailer for Thor, an adaptation of a comic book in which a powerful but arrogant warrior is cast out of the fantastic realm of Asgard and sent to live among humans on Earth, where he becomes a defender against hostile intruders. Judging by what Hollywood is selling, and what we’re buying, it seems we’re all craving a bit of escape—even if it’s of the mind-bending kind.

Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan, is the second feature film from English director Duncan Jones. His first was the excellent and compelling Moon, in which Sam Rockwell starred as the sole astronaut on a space station. Source Code actually tells the same kind of story that Moon does—a man slowly waking up to reality—but this time, Jones had more money and bigger stars to play with.

Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, a helicopter pilot who is on his third deployment to Afghanistan. Only he’s not, because when he wakes up on a commuter train bound for Chicago, sitting across from a pretty woman named Christina (Monaghan), she keeps calling him Sean. Things only get worse when he goes into the bathroom and looks in the mirror: the man looking back at him isn’t him. When he checks the ID in his wallet, he sees that he’s Sean Fentress (Frédérick De Grandpré), a teacher.

Then the train blows up.

Next thing he knows, Colter wakes up in his pilot’s harness in some kind of capsule. He’s understandably discombobulated, but the woman on the computer screen in his capsule, Captain Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), slowly but calmly brings him back to reality. He remembers that he’s part of a project called Source Code, and his mission is to stop the bombing of the train he was on that morning. The bomber has also planted a nuclear weapon in Chicago, and if Colter doesn’t catch him on the train, millions of people will die. Goodwin repeats that he can’t save anyone on the train; his altar-ego, Sean Fentress, the beautiful Christina and everyone else on it is dead. But Colter will continue to be sent back until he figures out who set the bomb on the train.

So Colter gets thrown backward in time again. And again. Gyllenhaal is great at portraying what it would be like to re-live the same eight minutes over and over again. He plays fear, anger, frustration, impatience, resignation and every other emotion on the map with the same fluency we saw in Brokeback Mountain. You can see and feel everything going on in Colter as he tries to not only save a train full of people, but his own sense of self and reality. It’s almost too painful to watch at moments. As Colter slowly realizes that things aren’t as he was told, you feel his courage even as you hear his heart breaking.

As directed by Jones, the film has a tight, brisk pace. It really only falters when Goodwin’s boss, Rutledge, (Jeffrey Wright) comes on the screen to play the bad guy and explain the way Source Code works. He sucks the life and sizzle out of every scene he's in, which is surprising given what a talented actor he is. The chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Monaghan is tingly and real, and Farmiga’s face on the screen in Colter’s capsule becomes, over time, so surreally beautiful and intimate that anyone would want her as a best friend and ally.

Ironically, despite its anti-reality trappings, Source Code is a film about whether or not to change the course of your life, and the courage it takes if you decide to do so. It’s also a science fiction/action/escape movie, and what a breath of fresh air to watch something that assumes we can handle all of that at once.

Four and a half Patches out of five.

I asked some fellow audience members what they thought of the film. Here's what they had to say:

“Not bad!” – Bob, Laguna Niguel

“Very interesting. I need to go home and think about it.” – Theresa, Dana Point

“I’m still trying to figure out the ending, but I think I liked it a lot.” – Alice, Laguna Niguel