Sliding Doors (1998)

Clever, interesting, and a bit unusual, "Sliding Doors" still might be unwatchable without John Hannah. He's a real charmer and we enjoy every moment of screen times he gets here - even if the script treats one of his storylines poorly in the end.

I say one of his storylines because "Sliding Doors" has a hook. It takes a time line and splits it in two so that we see two stories that might happen to the same person. To clarify suffice it to say that the film is about what happens to Gwyneth Paltrow if she makes a certain subway train on time. It also shows us what happens if she doesn't make it on time, and has to find an alternate route of transportation. Her life, professional and romantic, take dramatic turns based on the outcome of this single moment. These two "parallel" stories are the body of "Sliding Doors." But instead of showing us one story, than it's seeming doppleganger, Writer/Director Peter Howitt, making his debut behind the typewriter and the camera here, intertwines the alternate realities. So, watching the film, we constantly switch back and forth between the two tangents to see what is going on in each. Howitt is so adept at this that it rarely becomes confusing. And he soon gives Paltrow a new hair color and cut in one storyline so that the distinguishing is even easier.

The odd thing about this is, if you stop to think about the two stories, they are both rather typical and drab. This didn't occur to me though, as Hannah makes one of them sparkle so intensely that he even makes Paltrow seem interesting. Plus everyone is talking with the most wondrous British accents and it just makes Anglophiles swoon.

Hannah, who is probably best known for his role in "4 Weddings and a Funeral," gets some cool dialogue and he makes rip-roaring fun with it. He also charms the pants off of us and Paltrow so that we desperately want to see the two together. He's the romantic male lead of the year, in my book.

Howitt does a no-no though. He puts a "yeah right" smack dab at the end of Hannah's segment of the stories so that his character James does something that we know he would never do with the lamest justification I've ever seen in film. And then Howitt has something happen to Paltrow that is even more stunningly unbelievable. He screws up his movie by trying to be too cleaver. In the end, the film seems to suggest that fate will lead us to the same conclusion no matter what. But this is negated when one thinks of what Howitt does to Paltrow in the other segment of the story. Confusing. You bet. It's tough to describe it without ruining the plot for you and I refuse to do that. Suffice it to say that "Sliding Doors" is a charming little film with some problems. But the whole damn thing is easy to enjoy if one just let's it be. It's gonna end the same no matter what we do anyway. Right?

Note: Also with John Lynch, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Zara Turner.

Music by David Hirschfelder. Pop songs by Elton John, Aimee Mann, Blair, Space Monkeys, Aqua, Jamiroquai, Abra Moore and Gary Glitter. A female singer covers Warren Zevon's "Tenderness on the Block." Barbra Striesand, Donny Osmond and David Cassidy are mentioned.

Monty Python is qouted.

One of the Producers is Sydney Pollack.

Review written in 1998

Report Card

Script: B-

Acting: B-

Cinematography\Lighting: A

Special Effects\Make Up: A+

Music: A

Final Grade: B-