'12 Monkeys': The Pandemic Thriller Turns 25... Mid-Pandemic

The 25th anniversary of Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys” would be worth noting no matter when it fell – it remains a modern sci-fi masterpiece, beautifully juggling big ideas, time-travel paradoxes, breathless action, and inspired performances. But that milestone didn’t fall during any year; it fell in 2020, a year in which the film’s prediction of a world crippled by a terrifying pandemic, of deadly airborne viruses, hazmat suits, and quarantines, so yes, you could say it lands with a bit more force.

The script, by David and Janet Peoples (the former also co-wrote “Blade Runner,” which plays in a similar key), was inspired by Chris Marker’s short film “La Jetée” – and it’s a thick, dense text, but one in which exposition and information are doled out piecemeal, on a need-to-know basis. We’re parachuted into the mid-21st century, as a prisoner named James Cole (Bruce Willis) is pulled from his cell and “volunteered” on a fact-finding mission; covered in plastic from head to toe, and then placed in a thick plastic suit, he’s sent to the snowy and abandoned surface of the earth, which is now overrun with bugs and wild animals.

It seems that in 1997, a deadly virus was unleashed on the earth, wiping out five billion people and sending the survivors underground. Cole was merely sent up to collect samples, but he does well enough that once he’s “cleared from quarantine” (a phrase that sends up an unintended prescient shiver), he’s brought before a team of scientists with a new assignment. He’ll go to 1996, to “gather information” about the source of the virus, though his discoveries “won’t change anything.” Or will they?

“Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns,” he’s told by a fellow traveler. One of the cleverest touches of Peoples’ script is its vision of time travel as possible but easily screwed up; Cole is first sent not to 1996 but 1990, before he gathers more confused looks than evidence of a deadly virus. (At least he lands in the right decade; a later attempt sends him to 1917). His insistence that he’s in 1996, and that a plague is imminent, lands him in the Baltimore County Hospital, where he meets two key players: Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), who is first skeptical and then convinced by Cole’s story, and Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), a fellow patient who seems to have gone around the bend quite some time ago.

The fall of ’95 was an important one for Pitt. He had shorn the flowing locks that made him a heartthrob in “Legends of the Fall” to play the lead in David Fincher’s dark and disturbing “Seven”; here, within the comparative freedom of a showy supporting role, he was free (for perhaps the first time) to truly indulge his wild side. It’s a go-for-broke performance, indulging in tics and stammers (“Teeny tiny invisible, whaddaya call it, GERMS?”) as he rants and rails and theorizes and plots and throws midnight tantrums with his bare ass hanging out (“You dumbasses know I’m a mental patient, how do you think I’m supposed to act?” he demands of the orderlies). It’s a performance that seems inspired by Dennis Hopper in “Apocalypse Now,” though the conspicuous background appearance of “Monkey Business” playing on a ward television set draws an explicit connection to Groucho’s nonsense speeches in early Marx Brothers comedies.

Pitt landed an Oscar nomination for his work here, which is unsurprising – Academy voters love a pretty actor ugly-ing up and bugging out – but the best performance in the movie is Willis’, the kind of thing that’s worth remembering now that he’s in the business of sleepwalking through any D-level direct-to-video action flick that will pay his daily rate. The key to Cole is that he seems capable of being either totally truthful or certifiably crazy; he is an enigma, which is something Willis has always done well. We don’t really know all that much about Cole as a character, but our natural inclination (at least at this point in Willis’ career) is to sympathize with any protagonist he plays. The look on his face when he catches a snatch of popular music (first “Blueberry Hill,” then “What a Wonderful World”) is joy bordering on ecstasy, and Gilliam holds on that face for as long as he can.

It’s some of the best nonverbal acting of Willis’s career; the childlike innocence of that moment renders the eventual appearance of Cole’s violent side all the more disturbing. He beats two men to death not long after, and has a scene where he seems to turn on Stowe’s sympathetic doctor – a scene where we have to believe, at least for a time, that he might have harmed or killed her. To Willis’ credit (and Gilliam’s), it seems plausible. It takes a great actor to pull off those extremes, and, at least in 1995, that’s what Bruce Willis was.

He has to carry us through a knotted, loopy narrative, full of mind-bending paradoxes and mind-blowing scenarios, without getting bogged down in the specifics and contradictions. He does so, because the performance is so finely tuned and the screenplay is so firmly rooted in characterization. We’re also propelled by Gilliam’s direction, which (true to form) is thick and rich and deeply, wonderfully weird. It’s said a lot these days, but it’s worth noting that 1995 really wasn’t all that long ago, and yet once upon a time, a movie this gleefully bizarre was a major studio’s big holiday offering.

And much of that weirdness is trademark Gilliam. His style is fully established and buck wild here, presenting a dystopian future not far removed from his “Brazil” (in both films, contrary to most science fiction, things have gone back to analog rather than digital, clunky rather than sleek). The filmmaking is actively aggressive, full of Dutch angles, cockeyed compositions, wide-angle lenses, herky-jerky camerawork, and blown-out lighting, and if that frenetic, over-the-top lensing was basically de rigeur for the filmmaker, it was also a good match for the material – he’s capturing a fractured mental state, a scrambled reality as seen by a man from outside it.

Perhaps that’s why “12 Monkeys” now seems not only visionary but prophetic. The dates and specifics of its pandemic may not match up with ours, but the emotions and psychology do. – Gilliam captures not just a dystopian future, but an unstable present that seems (in ways large and small) to be careering towards inevitable, and perhaps irreparable, insanity.