The Tourist (dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2010) — Review

Download The Tourist screenplay for personal, private use.

The Tourist is one of those films which should be past the point of mockery now — too ignominious of a target to merit further attention, a decade after being hung, drawn and quartered at various awards ceremonies for the apparent benefit of none other than Ricky Gervais. Yet it is a special creation after all this time — a stunning illustration of exactly how wrong Hollywood can go when it tries. A script by the creator of Downton Abbey; direction from the acclaimed auteur of The Lives of Others; Jack Sparrow, Mrs Smith, James Bond; Venice; obnoxious Dostoevsky references. What could go wrong?

Everything.

The Tourist lives on as a delightful parable of cinematic overambition, proof that you can have too much of a good thing — or rather a riot of good things which are wildly incompatible. Less clear is its failure to become a cult film, offering as it does a wholesale rejection of such trivial concerns as plot, chemistry, and decent pacing — in favour of magnificently stupid camp.

Almost everyone involved in the film has disavowed the goal of making a good story. Director and co-writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, apparently sick of the pressure to follow up his breakout drama about Stasi-era Germany, publicly shrugged off his pivot to a ridiculous, insipid romcom —one which required him to pore over “different types of lipstick and white silk” in the name of “material beauty” — with the reasonable argument that he just wanted to make a film with two of the most charming actors in Hollywood. For her turn, his star Angelina Jolie admitted that she’d mainly fancied to a quick holiday in Venice. Screenwriter Julian Fellowes claimed that his efforts had vanished from the final product. Leaving what, exactly? Essentially an unbranded perfume advert. The Tourist leaves several beautiful, vapid Hollywood icons drifting a parched desert of marbled buildings and mild xenophobia. It’s good fun.

Onto the so-called ‘plot’: bumbling community college math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) finds himself plucked from obscurity by sentient body dysmorphia trigger Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie), who approaches him on a train to serve as a decoy for her mysterious wanted criminal ex, Alexander Pearce. Pearce having stolen a hefty chunk of taxpayer moolah from the Bri’ish government, poor Tupelo finds himself pursued across Venice by surly, incompetent copper Inspector Acheson (Paul Bettany), plus, naturally, a clutch of mixed Slavic goons under the beer-bellied command of another evil Brit, Reginald Shaw (Steven Berkoff). So far, so harmless.

The film buckles spectacularly under the Herculean demands placed on its sole plot points: Angelina Jolie’s eyes and Johnny Depp’s hair. Donnersmarck, an undeniable aesthete, prepares a visual feast which pays breathless homage to the classic Hollywood setups of To Catch A Thief and James Bond —yet Jolie’s admission that she simply didn’t watch most of the films offered up as references seems symptomatic of the ensuing slow disaster.