Review: The Fifth Element
Luc Besson, director of spectacle - not actors.
I love the way Luc Besson views the universe. Besson sees the universe in bright bold colors. It’s the way I would like to view the universe. While my mind is often clouded by the often sad and tragic state of humanity, and especially man’s inhumanity to man, Besson manages to look beyond and see the beauty beyond our planet and into the stars.
The best example of how Luc Besson sees the universe, aside from his dazzling yet somewhat empty new film Valerian and the Planet of A Thousand Cities, is the 1997 film The Fifth Element, this week’s classic on the I Hate Critics movie review podcast.
The Fifth Element was well ahead of its time, a sci-fi movie filled with vibrant color, extraordinary costumes, and remarkable, often mind-blowing, special effects and production design.
If only that same vibrancy extended to the characters. You see, for as much as I am dazzled by the spectacle, the visual dynamism of Luc Besson and The Fifth Element, he’s not a director who is particularly interested in characters. Besson, though thoroughly detailed in costumes and set design and special effects, is not a director of actors.
Admittedly, I can’t point to evidence of Besson ever admitting his difficulty in directing actors but The Fifth Element contains more than enough evidence in what each member of this odd coterie of actors brings to their performance.
First, the plot: Bruce Willis portrays Korben Dallas, a former military Major who now drives a flying cab for a living, and quite poorly. Though a romantic at heart, Dallas lives a lonely life with a cat and Chinese food delivery man as his only pseudo-friends and a henpecking mother who is merely a series angry rants over a futuristic phone. Korben’s lust for life however, is reignited when he is united with a woman who literally falls out of the sky and into his cab.
The woman is Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) and while she’s an alien, she’s somehow given spectacular human form. When Leeloo falls through the roof of Korben’s cab, escaping from the same military men Dallas used to reside among, its love at first sight for him while she remains focused on her mission to save the world.
To do this, she needs the aid of a Priest portrayed by the wonderful Ian Holm as part of an order of Priests who’ve protected the secret of an ancient weapon that Leeloo must use to destroy an all-consuming evil.
Along for the ride are Gary Oldman as a futuristic arms dealer on the trail of the same valuable McGuffin that Dallas, the Priest and Leeloo are after, and Chris Tucker as Ruby Rhod, a radio host whose contest, a trip to a beautiful place called Phloston Paradise, becomes the cover for Willis’s Dallas to go after our McGuffin, a valuable group of stones. There is also the ancient evil which is portrayed as a ball of black, fiery malevolence, as well as yet another angry voice over a futuristic phone, and a group of dog –like alien scavengers hired by Oldman’s bad guy.
That’s enough plot, let’s get back to Besson and how we can see where characters come second to production design and costume. Please first understand that I like this movie. I find The Fifth Element delightful and I find the character choices in the film to be quite fun and often quite funny. That said, much of the characteristics of these characters don’t come from Luc Besson but rather his troupe of actors each seemingly left alone to create their character based on the needs of the plot.
Take Bruce Willis for instance. While I like Bruce Willis’ performance in The Fifth Element and I appreciate that his star-power is what got the film made and has kept it in the public conscience, but it’s not hard to see that he’s not fully on board. Willis is a utilitarian actor, he delivers what’s asked of him and when he gets what he wants, which seems, from an outsider perspective, to do as little work as possible, he comes off as engaged, if not fully invested.
The character of Korben Dallas is a romantic at heart. The character laments early in the film that he’s not interested in bedding multiple women, he just wants one. Later, when he meets Leeloo his fascination with her can be interpreted as love at first sight. But, there is a lack of energy to Willis in the character scenes, the dialogue moments. He’s not on board for the romantic soul-searching part of Korben Dallas, he’s waiting for the quippy, ass-kicking part of the movie and there he becomes fully engaged as a movie star.
Milla Jovovich was a model when she was hired to play Leeloo. Luc Besson was besotted with his newly discovered star and the two were married not long after the film was completed. For all her talent, beauty and graceful physicality, Besson treats Leeloo more like part of the set than as an actress creating a character.
Minor characters praise her as a perfect specimen as she lies nude and newly reconstructed from alien DNA. Each of Leeloo’s costumes are intended for the purpose of ogling and while Jovovich does seem to love spouting her otherworldly language, there isn’t much depth to Leeloo as we watch her rushed arc from heroic alien action hero to plot contrived despairing and discontented heroine to female Jesus savior.
Jovovich is a function of the plot of The Fifth Element far more than she is a character. The rushed arc comes to a head, spoiler alert, when she quite conveniently searches the word War after narrowly escaping a deadly fight with Gary Oldman, we’ll get to him, and very quickly gives in to despair about humanity and man’s inhumanity to man. Suddenly the warrior becomes a worrier and can’t act until she knows love is a greater weapon than any war. This scene is another strong example of Besson’s inability or unwillingness to engage his actors as suddenly, and only for the need of contrived suspense, Korben Dallas, having been a heartbroken romantic smitten with Leeloo, suddenly struggles to tell Leeloo that he loves her.
Why then? Why in this moment does Korben Dallas begin to get cold feet? Why is he suddenly willing to risk the destruction of the planet over his fear of commitment? It’s arguable that he doesn’t want Leeloo to think he’s just saying I love you to convince her to save the world but this certainly isn’t a moment for subtlety or nuance, especially since we in the audience already know how Korben feels. Willis may not be invested in the romantic soul of Korben Dallas but Besson was when he wrote the script and because by this point he’d fallen in love with Jovovich. But he was also in love with his opulent production design and the chance to let his friend Jean Paul Gaultier loose on futuristic fashion.
Perhaps the strongest evidence I have of Besson allowing his actors to create their characters rather than directing them comes from the performances of Gary Oldman and Chris Tucker, arguably the most divisive aspect of The Fifth Element. Oldman portrays the face of villainy in The Fifth Element and, much as he enjoyed the freedom to emote he received in Besson’s Leon: The Professional, he truly loves his freedom to emote as Jean Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.
With no real direction from Besson, Oldman indulges in crafting Zorg as some sort of Southern gentleman gone bad. Putting on a Foghorn Leghorn accent in futuristic New York, Oldman charismatically chews the scenery bringing style and humor to Zorg that is not on the scripted page, even as many of his character choices are broad and hammy they still kind of work. Oldman, because he is such a fine, highly charismatic actor, doesn’t mine the villainy of Zorg but rather finds humor in Zorg’s self-centeredness and greed. While some of the words of Oldman’s performance were in the script, the best parts of the performance all came from Oldman.
Chris Tucker, as I mentioned, has always been the most divisive character in the film. The Ruby Rhod of the script was, in my interpretation, yet another plot functionary character whose defining characteristics likely came from Tucker who indulges deeply in a broad comic depiction that combines stand-up comedy and a send up of legendary pop star Prince as a futuristic radio DJ.
While most people talk about Tucker’s whining and screeching as Ruby Rhod, I can’t help but notice his sexuality as both a play on Prince’s feminine masculinity and Prince’s undeniable sexual charisma. A scene where Tucker seduces a flight attendant with his breathy wordplay echoes Prince’s on-stage debauchery of the 80’s that used to make the teenage girls faint in the aisles.
Though Tucker’s ticks and screeches do wear out their welcome at the film’s climax, Ruby Rhod is not a bad character and Tucker gives him remarkable life and humor before the performance devolves into little more than whimpering and screeching. A director with more care for his actors performances might have helped Tucker tone down the uglier elements of Ruby Rhod but Besson is not interested in his characters and barely interested in his story. Besson strands Tucker in the role and Tucker becomes Ruby Rhod until he’s forced into the finale of the film and has to overact to maintain the tone of the character in the much more action oriented finale. Besson, meanwhile is only interested in costumes and effects and the elements of grand spectacle.
Recently I wrote about the movie Dunkirk,by Christopher Nolan, as an empty spectacle of a war movie with all of the pomp and circumstance that comes with noble sacrifice minus the characters to fully embody that sacrifice. Nolan and Besson share this characteristic of becoming more and more enamored of sets and designs at the expense of characters and storytelling.
Dunkirk has been released the same week as Besson’s latest empty spectacle, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets which strands actors Dane Dehaaan and Cara Delavingne amidst beautifully crafted backdrops with little more to do than exist and fail miserably at recreating the Hepburn and Tracy style of bickering partners becoming lovers.
For both Nolan and Besson, the visual is far more important than the characters and the story is reduced to modest moral conflicts usually resolved by violence with the heroes each learning a valuable lesson against the most eye-catching visual landscapes in film history. Even as Nolan and Besson, each of whom is a feature of the next I Hate Critics podcast, began their careers empty spectacle and visual experimentation were more important than the stories and characters that people like me gravitate toward.
It’s the reason why both directors have gravitated toward projects that require little nuance of character and allow for as much visual flourish as possible. Yes, both have been drawn to some challenging moral questions but the answer always seems to be love conquers all through time and space and plenty of bullets and high-speed action. The moral questions are often quite large but they are almost always resolved by our hero holding fast to the moral high ground, almost always remaining virtuous because there is no time for nuance in the drastic moral decisions that must be made.
I say all this as criticism of Luc Besson and Christopher Nolan but I do remain a fan of both men’s work. They are artists and I am not here to dictate their art. I find their spectacles to be among the best spectacles out there. Each is remarkable at crafting and honing spectacle to an exhaustive degree. You can’t help but admire the intense amount of work, the craftsmanship that goes into both directors’ creation. It’s no wonder they have no time for their actors, they are quite busy creating entire worlds for the actors to inhabit. I may prefer a more emotional connection to characters than what Besson and Nolan give me but I can get that from other directors.
The Fifth Element is a fun movie. It’s also a tremendous work of visual art. While I can lament my desire to connect more emotionally, that is just me bringing my own preference to this review rather than simply watching the movie for what it is. It’s spectacle of the best kind with a troupe of actors who, left to their own devices, create moments in characters that are memorable, funny and occasionally moving even as the director has no time for them.
About the Creator
Sean Patrick
Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.
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