Deja Vu (2006)

Deja Vu: 2006, dir. Tony Scott. Seen at Gateway (preview screening).
I grew up in the New Orleans area (Metairie, to be specific), and that’s the primary reason why I decided to see Deja Vu. In addition, I am one of the five people who actually liked Tony Scott’s previous film, Domino, so I went into the movie with cautious optimism.
Deja Vu is a good thriller with a supernatural twist, and with a minimum of that Tony Scott trademark camera style that makes me feel ever so slightly nauseated from vertigo. However, I think that if you are from New Orleans, you need to be aware of at least one plot mechanism that may make the movie hard to watch.
The movie opens with a crowd of people all piling onto the Algiers ferry one morning. At first, I wondered why everyone was wearing Mardi Gras beads, and thought, “Those damn filmmakers probably thought New Orleanians always walk around with beads on.” However, a few carefully placed signs and lines of dialogue indicate that this is supposed to be Fat Tuesday itself, 2006, post-Katrina. (I am still dubious, because I feel that Mardi Gras anywhere near the Quarter should be much more crowded … no one is even wearing a costume! And why would a group of schoolchildren be on the ferry; Fat Tuesday is a school holiday in south Louisiana. But I digress.) I hadn’t seen any trailers for this movie at all, so I had no idea what would happen next — I figured this was a setup where some of the people on the ferry would turn out to be important characters later.

Then the ferry blows up. The Algiers ferry. It is one of the most realistic explosions I’ve seen on film, and to see something that you grew up with, that is a very familiar landmark, explode that realistically is like a kick in the stomach. I was entirely stunned. (I usually take very brief notes during a film I’m reviewing, and I wrote “Holy fuck they blew up the Algiers ferry!” and some other four-letter comments, which is not at all like my usual note-taking.)
Shortly thereafter, we see body bags on the New Orleans side of the pier. One thing I do not want to see these days are body bags in a very recognizable part of New Orleans. Another kick, somewhat smaller. Fortunately, right about then Denzel Washington shows up, playing the same character he does in every single other film, and reminding us that this is a movie and not real life. (I also wondered how so many emergency vehicles were able to show up in post-K New Orleans, near the Quarter on Mardi Gras Day, but whatever.)
This time, Washington is playing ATF investigator Doug Carlin, a resourceful and canny guy who is recruited by a special FBI unit to help with the investigation of the explosion. Carlin links the bombing to the death of a woman slightly earlier, and the FBI introduces him to some special surveillance equipment that allows them to invasively view scenes from this woman’s life before her death. The FBI’s explanation of how the equipment works is pretty sketchy (I thought it sounded unbelievably stupid myself) and eventually the truth comes out, and Carlin breaks lots of rules to hunt down the bomber and make the world safe for democracy, etc. etc.
I’ve heard criticism that the decision to set Deja Vu in New Orleans is somewhat exploitative; that it’s too much of a hot-button city and the movie might have worked better in Long Island or whatever the original planned location was. I have to disagree. For one thing, the movie takes a turn into the fantastic, and characters decide to try some pretty crazy stuff. I mean this in the nicest possible way, but quite frankly, I find it more believable that people who have been living in New Orleans post-Katrina would try these risky and implausible things, because living in that environment would throw anyone slightly off-kilter. After dealing with Katrina and the resulting floods, yes, you might come up with all kinds of harebrained schemes to save as many people as possible and to avoid still more tragedy and death. (Also, I appreciate the fact that the production shot in post-K New Orleans and brought in some much-needed revenue and work.)
Nor do I think the decision to set one sequence in the Lower Ninth Ward is what Mahnola Dargis called “vulgar in the extreme” in her New York Times review. I would like to think that the shots of the neighborhoods with half-destroyed houses tossed about and debris everywhere would remind audiences of what happened. However, unlike the earlier scenes with the ferry, the shots of the Lower Ninth looked unreal at this point in the film. I’ve seen the neighborhoods in person and in Spike Lee’s excellent documentary, When the Levees Broke, but in the context of a feature film, the devastation looked more like a special effect and less like a reminder.
The movie does get other details about New Orleans correct: Carlin is ankle-deep in trash when he walks through the Quarter on the day after Mardi Gras, and there are some nice shots of the streetcars. One character refers to a certain highway in the area as “the I-10,” an expression I have only ever heard in New Orleans. (I dated a guy who used to make fun of me for putting “the” in there.) Charmaine Neville appears briefly to sing at a funeral. Except for the aforementioned Ninth Ward shots and a few scenes at the bomber’s rural hideout, most of the movie is set in the part of New Orleans known as “the sliver by the river,” meaning the Quarter and Uptown.
I also appreciated the fact that Washington and other leads in Deja Vu did not attempt a New Orleans accent, or a Southern accent, or anything cringeworthy in that line. Washington is wearing a Dillard University baseball cap when we first see him, which establishes him as a longtime resident, and that’s all we need. (A local high-school cap would have been even better — it would be great fun for New Orleans residents to guess which high school the character might have attended — but not at all helpful to non-New Orleanians.) One or two characters do have very credible New Orleans accents, which is nice, but the only bad accent is Enrique Castillo as the dead woman’s father, who is trying and failing to sound generically Southern.
I’m sorry Val Kilmer doesn’t have more to do in Deja Vu; maybe I was spoiled by Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but his FBI agent seemed to be little more than part of the scenery in this film. Other members of the FBI team are a lot more fun to watch, particularly Adam Goldberg as the geek behind the surveillance technology and Elden Henson as one of his assistants. The dialogue among the team members provides the comic relief in the film.
The plot reminded me more of the 1944 film Laura than any action-adventure film; Washington replaces Dana Andrews in falling for the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating. The plot twist here is much different but generates a similar result. Still, Deja Vu has its share of action sequences, most notably an amazing chase scene involving a high-tech Humvee on the GNO bridge. (Hearing the characters refer to it as the “Crescent City Bridge” was weird — do people actually use that term?) The chase is almost videogame-ish at times but is still great fun to watch.
Deja Vu is a strange sort of thriller, but ultimately it works: I bought the storyline and the characters, and found the movie absorbing and fascinating. Tony Scott haters might even like the film. I’d love to hear what other people from New Orleans think.
[Thanks to Voices of New Orleans for the excerpt from The New York Times review.]