Just the Ticket #136: Identity (List Lookback)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster Who Wasn't There.

Beware the Ides Of March, Ticketholders!

This is one of my better planned review schedulings, and one of my more cringeworthy puns to stretch it into existence, because the movie up for consideration as March's Just the Ticket List Lookback is the 2003 crime thriller/psychological horror film, Identity. "Identity" starts with I-d-e, it's March, and the Ides Of March fall on today's date, so there you go.

Also please go remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Now, let's check in and get this Lookback going to see if this movie's unique identity holds up twenty-one years later, or if it's become disassociated with age.

Also, huge SPOILERS ahead, so go watch Identity before you read any further.

Identity was directed by James Mangold, who brought us such absolute bangers as Cop Land, Girl, Interrupted, Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, and the best (until Deadpool 3 comes out) and second-worst Wolverine movies, and is loosely based on the best-selling (and most controversially titled) Agatha Christie novel of all time, which will get its own coverage later in the review.

It starts with the opening lines of "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns, as read by Malcolm Rivers (Leaves Of Grass' Pruitt Taylor Vince, giving a diverse and disturbing performance as the condemned mass killer). As the opening credits fade away a name at a time, leaving single letters behind that spell out the film's title (with the exception of the second I and the Y), Rivers is being interviewed in voice over by his psychiatrist (Alfred Molina, Spider-Man 2), and we see a stereotypical evidence-dump backdrop for this kind of movie, including flashes of pages from Rivers' diary and his case file, wherein it is revealed that Rivers killed his mother (who had a history of prostitution) and a double-handful of other victims in a massacre at a Nevada motel.
If you've seen Identity before, the twist is kind of spoiled in the final moments of the opening credits, but there's also some rewatch value here because (like some of the better M. Night Shyamalan movies) it's a little bit fun to pick out the foreshadowing elements and figure out for yourself which ones work and which ones don't (or if the twist itself even works).

The Molina and PTV exchange, and the associated legal proceedings surrounding Rivers' pre-execution psychological deposition (featuring such recognizable character actors as Marshall Bell, Matt Letscher, Holmes Osborne, and Fredrick Coffin--don't worry if you don't know their names; you'll recognize their faces when you see them), are secondary to the main plot: a tense but kind of slow-moving whodunnit slasher wherein ten unwitting guests and one employee of a secluded Nevada motel are picked off one by one by an unseen killer.

The circumstances that bring these characters to the motel are extremely contrived (a storm flooding the road, a discarded shoe that leads to a flat tire that leads to a woman vs. car collision, the woman who discarded her shoe backing into a utility pole and knocking out the phone lines, etc.), but the cast of this little bottle episode of a main plot is stacked. We have Rebecca DeMornay as an aged-out actress (and possible Jacqueline Susann reference), John Cusack as her ex-cop-turned-limo driver (and default main character), John C. McGinley (the best Scrubs character), Leila McKenzie (Fran on Mad About You), and Bret Loehr (who should have been in a Children Of the Corn movie, but this was his only big screen role, alongside a small number of TV guest appearances) as the York family, Amanda Peet as a prostitute named Paris Nevada, John Hawkes (Winter's Bone) as the motel manager--or is he?--who hates prostitutes, William Lee Scott (The Butterfly Effect) and Clea DuVall (The Grudge) as a newly married and expecting--or are they?--couple, and Ray Liotta (Wanderlust, Breathless, and Goodfellas) and Jake Busey (Gary Busey's younger brother, who may be better at playing crazy than the master himself?) as a correctional officer--or is he?--and his unhinged prisoner--or is he?--respectively.

We're almost led to believe at first that this is a flashback to the events of the Rivers killings, but as things progress and the body count rises (with each victim being found with a numbered room key on or near their person, having been killed in reverse order of their assigned rooms, except for Lou Isianna, who got killed out of order because the six wasn't screwed into the door properly--6 to 9, nice!--and also because he was written to be too stupid to say, "open the door; someone's trying to kill me!" to his terrified wife instead of pounding on the door and repeating "open the [insert optional expletive here] door!" like he was when she went to hide from him in the bathroom to begin with), gimmicks come and go (like the room key countdown to the killing order, the idea that ghosts from a nearby Native burial ground are responsible because someone wanted this movie to be Poltergeist for five seconds, and the looping nature of the surroundings and the literally disappearing victims hinting at the motel as some kind of purgatory realm).

Before I go any further, as mentioned above, Identity is loosely based on the Agatha Christie crime novel, And Then There Were None, an I Still Know What You Did Last Summer-esque revenge tale from the late 1930s. I say "loosely based" because it shares the "ten supposed strangers get killed off one-by-one" structure, contrived plot progression, and late game twist qualities of the Christie novel, which is referenced by the Paris character as a movie. And Then There Were None was only the book's American release title from 1940 to 1964, when it was changed to the problematic (but not as problematic as the original UK release title), Ten Little Indians until 1986. From its original release in 1939 until 1985, the UK editions went by the title Ten Little N-----s. Yeah; the "N-word" (or "Hard R" to the Gen-Z crowd) is in the title of the best selling mystery novel of all time. Take it as an "it was a different era" thing--a problematic artifact of history; it's important to know, but shouldn't have an effect on your enjoyment of Identity.

As for Peet's Paris Nevada character referring to it as a movie, there are at least four from the mid-1940s onward that go by the title And Then There Were None or Ten Little Indians, a 1980s porn parody (because of course there is), multiple international adaptations with socially insensitive titles (including a Russian version that translates to Ten Little Negroes), radio dramas, made-for-TV movies, and a BBC miniseries from 2015, among many others. Paris is possibly referring to one of the 40s or 60s films, and her allegory leads to the remaining characters discovering that they all have similar birthplaces, the same birthdate, and are all named after US states.

In the end, Peet's, Cusack's, and Liotta's characters are locked in a struggle for survival (with me having no idea how they didn't all get electrocuted when there's a live wire lashing around in the middle of a rainstorm), and the first big twist hits (if you don't count the room key gimmick, the characters' connections to one another, Paris having stolen money from one of her johns, the motel owner not being the owner, Mrs. Isianna not being pregnant, and Ray Liotta's character not being a cop). If the York kid looking like a young Rivers, the motel setting, Rivers having DID, everyone having the same birthday, and the slut-shaming not-a-motel-proprietor haven't clued you in by now--oh, and the movie is called Identity--the twist is that everyone at the motel is one of Rivers' disassociative personalities, and they're being killed off as part of his psychiatrist's plan to reintegrate Rivers as one of his ten benign personalities (choosing Cusack's "Edward Dakota" as the personality to let in on the twist in-continuity so he can be the survivor/hero). This twist pretty much works despite the many dropped directions the movie takes to get us there (like it's detouring through ten different states or something...). But then we get to the twist; the one that doesn't quite work even if you wave your hands that it's all happening in one man's mind. The limo driver who used to be a cop and the criminal who pretended to be a cop shoot each other, leaving "Paris" (who, again, somehow didn't get electrocuted to death despite being on her knees in ankle-deep water with a live wire thrashing around in the rain) as the survivor and sole personality--or is she?--tending to her citrus grove inside Rivers' mind in "Florida." I feel like there's a "state of mind" pun in there somewhere....

But anyway, if you've paid attention to the one person who leaves the group (or steps out of the way of death) before someone gets killed, and I gave it away with my "so-and-so looks like a young so-and-so" clue earlier, the little boy was the real killer all along, meaning that he was somehow strong enough to behead a grown woman and stuff her body into a dryer, bludgeon a man to death unopposed, and shove a baseball bat down a grown man's throat. That stuff can be hand-waved away by psychological thriller bullshit, as can the teleportation that would have had to take place for "Timmy York" to do the first kill on Rebecca DeMornay's character when he was in a motel room, within eyesight of at least half a dozen other characters. Then there's the whole "Rivers has ten personalities, but more people came to the motel and got killed before 'Timmy' and the rest of the cast showed up" discrepancy that played into the purgatory angle and can sort of get waved away by "it's all happening in his head and this is a movie." Things like offscreen death and psychological thriller tropes can also explain away the "we 'saw' this character die, but it was all fake" twist that Identity ultimately hangs on. But the ending, while appropriately bleak and emotionally manipulative (dangling "Paris'" and Rivers' happy endings before our eyes for a substantial period of time), doesn't work because "Paris" doesn't know what she really is, or who "Timmy" really is. To her, the motel and Florida are totally real. So it makes no sense that she would just accept that she's the last victim and let a single creepy child garden claw her to death.

Unfortunately, I procrastinated and turned this into a "I have to watch this movie" scenario, so I can't really do an enjoyment component to reviewing Identity like I did with Pulp Fiction and One Night At McCool's in previous months. The writing is contrived and hand-wavy, the plot can be unfocused and slowly paced, some of the twists and foreshadowing don't hold up to scrutiny, and I'm not entirely sure the psychological condition was portrayed or handled that well (but I'm not a pee-see-kee-atrist). However, the cast is loaded with top-notch character acting talent and multi-generational star power that I can't find anything worth criticizing their performances about. Maybe Cusack was a poor choice for a bait lead character, but he delivers on his dramatic moments when it counts. Maybe Liotta is phoning in his stock character type a bit. And maybe Alfred Molina was too big a name for the size of his part. But I think this was the first movie where I took notice of Clea DuVall, Amanda Peet shows she isn't just a pretty face as the stealth main character, John C. McGinley plays a decent neurotic step-dad, and Pruitt Taylor Vince really shows off his versatility when he has to switch between Rivers' personalities. He's like if an off-brand Vincent D'Onofrio got the lead in Split instead of James McAvoy, and it works. So, yeah; even though the effort put into hiding and hinting at the various twists hurt the final product, I procrastinated the joy out of my viewing experience, and the pacing was a little off, the performances made it worth watching. Plus, to pull off this kind of twist in the midst of Shyamalan's prime (not to mention in the same year as High Tension and a year before Godsend and Secret Window ruined it for the rest of us) is impressive all by itself.

Not as good as Pulp Fiction, but subjectively better than One Night At McCool's despite not being as fun.

B

Please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Looking Back,

Checking Out.