Sliding Doors a Look at the Butterfly Effect

 

 

 

SLIDING DOORS (1998)

Directed by Peter Howitt

Miramax, 99 minutes, PG-13 (adult situations)

★★★

 

Movie themes often run in cycles. In 1981, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski made Blind Chance, a film about the famed butterfly theory. It holds that changing the smallest thing from the past, even the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, could alter the future significantly. My favorite butterfly effect movie is Run, Lola, Run (1998). It was part of a mini-trend of similarly themed films: Me, Myself, I (1999), Happenstance (2000), Donnie Darko (2001), Mr. Nobody (2009) …. Some, like Donnie Darko, confused audiences; others ranged from intriguing to middling.

 

Place Sliding Doors in that last category, which is better than its official designation as a Rom-Com. It’s only a romantic comedy in one of its two timelines; one would be better labeled a tragedy. Its focal point is Helen Quilley (Gwyneth Paltrow), who has been fired by her public relations firm in London. On the elevator she drops an earring, which is picked up and returned by a stranger. She heads for the Tube, and misses her train by a split second. These things alone qualify as a bad day on its own, but she returns to her London apartment to find her slacker boyfriend Gerry Flannigan (John Lynch) climaxing with Lydia (Jeanne Triplehorn), his ex-American girlfriend. Helen walks out.

 

In a rewind, Helen makes the train and finds herself in conversation with James Hammersmith (John Hannah), the stranger who picked up her earring on the elevator. Helen finds James funny, daft, and kind. On her trip home she is mugged, allowing Gerry to dodge discovery by minutes, though he leaves clues requiring awkward movements to conceal. By then, we already hate Gerry as a lazy sponge who is being kept by Helen while he’s not writing the book that is supposed to assure their financial futures.

 

In each scenario, Helen ends up seeing through Gerry’s shallow veneer and staying with her best friend Anna (Zara Turner) as she tries to sort out her life. To help keep the timelines straight, script writer/director Peter Hewitt has one Helen coifed in long, straight hair and looking classically “cute.” In the alt-timeline Anna convinces Helen to move on from Gerry. Helen marks the shift by getting her hair cut short in a stylish manner and assumes an air of glamor, despite being exhaustive from working several jobs. In each timeline, Helen comes to prefer James, while Gerry pours out his tribulations to his mate Russell (Douglas McFerren). As opposed to Anna’s sympathy for Helen, Russell laughs hysterically at Gerry and tells him what an idiot he is. In each timeline, Helen discovers she’s pregnant, but in one Gerry’s the father and the other it’s James. (Even Lydia gets into the act!)

 

Things happen that disrupt rom-com formulae. Neither Helen will deliver a baby. In one she falls down stairs and miscarries; in another she is struck by a van. Whatever her fate, though–even one in which she thinks James has been playing her for a fool–it is James who is steadfast in a good way, not the obsequious Gerry.

 

As in most butterfly effect tales, viewers need to be alert; hairstyles alone won’t tip off essential details less obvious than Helen never should have been in a relationship with Gerry in the first place. The title Sliding Doors is clever in its dual meaning–the subway door opening or failure to do so is our metaphorical “butterfly”–but it also references the way the film cuts between the two Helens and, less obviously, the way James’ mind slides between light-hearted and serious. Although Sliding Doors is not likely to be thought of as a significant film, Gwyneth Paltrow is pretty good in it. Because of her career in fashion and her parentage (actress Blythe Danner and director/producer Bruce Paltrow) we expect her to do sophistication well, but she was also convincing as a more earthy and naïve young professional. In addition, her English accent is very convincing. John Hanna is amusing, but would have been more endearing with his manic side tempered a bit. John Lynch is supposed to disgust us and does, though he too could have dialed it back to help us understand why Helen was so blind to his quintessential jerkiness. For me Zara Turner struck the right balance between comedy and seriousness.

 

Sliding Doors is no Run, Lola, Run, but it’s diverting.

 

Rob Weir