About Face

Travolta and Cage take Off

by Peter Keough

Directed by John Woo. Written by Mike Werb & Michael Colleary. With John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen, Gina Gershon, Alessandro Nivola, Dominique Swain, Nick Cassavetes, Harve Presnell, and Colm Fiore. A Paramount Pictures release. At the Holiday, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges writes that meeting one's double portends one's imminent death, or the attainment of divine knowledge. Okay, so it may be a little hifalutin to refer to Borges in a review of a noisy summer movie. But if Con Air can quote Dostoyevsky, why not? Especially since John Woo's third Hollywood feature, despite or because of its explosions, its chases, and a body count well into triple digits, remains true to its ingenious central conceit and the director's vision and obsessions. With its canny if preposterous plot, sly and compelling acting, outrageously poetic and corny imagery, and the balletic and meticulously logical mechanics of its action sequences (a pas de deux with two motorboats demonstrates everything that's wrong with Speed 2: Cruise Control), Face/Off may well be Woo's finest film; it's certainly the best film of the summer season and one of the best of the year.

At the heart of every good-guy/bad-guy movie scenario is the recognition that the latter embodies the former's repressed desires. They are mirror images of each other, and the destruction of the bad double by the good represents both the victory of the socially acceptable and the hypocritical indulgence in the forbidden. In Face/Off the good guy is Sean Archer (John Travolta), an FBI agent who, like most good guys, hates his job, is fed up with his family, and is whiny, cringing and impotent.

The bad guy is Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), a terrorist for hire who killed Sean's young son in an attempt to assassinate the agent. Sean has dedicated himself to bringing in his son's murderer, and he gets his chance when he uncovers a plot on the part of Castor and his nerdy brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola) -- Hercules isn't the only movie this summer to have fun with classical mythology -- to blow up Los Angeles. In just of the first of several over-the-top, exuberantly inventive chase sequences, the two brothers are captured, with Castor rendered comatose.

The feds still have to find the location of the bomb, however, and to do so Archer agrees to have Castor's face sewn onto his own head so he can assume his antagonist's identity, enter the secret, ultimate-security prison ("Amnesty International doesn't know we exist," notes a sadistic guard) where Pollux is being held, and wheedle the information out of him. Once you get over that vast implausibility, the rest is easy to swallow. Aroused from his coma by the surgery, the faceless Castor calls in his cronies, forces the surgeon to sew Sean's face onto him, and torches the hospital, its records, and everyone who knows about the operation.

He assumes Sean's identity, and for the better. As he drives through the oppressive suburb the agent lives in, "Sean" -- played now by a Travolta joyously liberated by pure id and sassy insouciance -- mutters, "I'll never get it up again." No fear of that, as his sexy, laid-back, anarchic "Sean" quickly bedazzles "his" frustrated wife Eve (Joan Allen, unnervingly reminiscent of her role as Dick's wife Pat in Nixon) and nymphet daughter Jamie (Dominique Swain, someday to be seen in the remake of Lolita). His subversion of all the real Sean's uptight middle-class tastes, attitudes, and values is one of the most refreshing elements of the film.

Even as "Sean" transcends the prison of suburbia, "Castor," in an electrifying scene that recalls Natural Born Killers, only better, breaks out of his literal jail and hunts down his nemesis. As "Castor" ingratiates himself in his enemy's underworld, he has a hard time not succumbing to its charms -- Cage's uneasy pact between the groveling Sean and the Dionysiac Castor is one of the film's few disappointments.

Woo doesn't resist the temptation of cathartic violence, though. His faceoffs between his warring doubles assume a wacky, brutal grandeur that rivals Sam Peckinpah's dances of death. Even as he steals from other films (Welles's The Lady from Shanghai in a hall-of-mirrors shootout that is ultra-violence as metaphysical poetry, his own The Killer in a climactic church fusillade that is the apotheosis of absurd sublimity), he vindicates the principle of good -- few directors in this or any genre are so unabashedly sentimental -- implicit in his finely wrought central metaphor. Brutally unmasking good and evil, he faces their inextricable kinship and in it finds redemption for both.