A Life Less Ordinary Movie Trailer. The third and most ordinary film from the triumvirate behind ”Shallow Grave” and ”Trainspotting” is a madcap romance, complete with spoiled heiress, guardian angels and hapless nice-guy hero. It melds the buoyant energy of Danny Boyle’s previous direction with a plot that is pure, vintage fluff. And if that sounds too good to be true, it is: Mr. Boyle’s brand of heaven-sent love story comes with a strange and whimsical mean streak. Tender thoughts and ha-ha shootings don’t automatically mix.
”A Life Less Ordinary” certainly shows off Mr. Boyle’s flamboyant visual cleverness, along with the unmistakable appeal of Ewan McGregor, who has starred in all three of his films. Charming and sheepishly funny here, Mr. McGregor plays a janitor named Robert, who is the film’s most demure invention. Certainly he’s a gentler soul than Celine (Cameron Diaz), who is beautiful and bored even before she accidentally shoots her husband, a rich dentist (Stanley Tucci). Celine is also in rebellion against her father (Ian Holm), who also gets comically shot.
Since Celine’s father happens to be Robert’s boss, one thing leads to another. The two meet cute during an impromptu kidnapping, as Robert takes Celine hostage and quickly realizes he’s gotten more than he’d bargained for. It turns out that she’s the one better suited to a life of crime. ”Live a little!” Celine exclaims later in the story, when she is about to rob a bank at (ha ha) gunpoint.
Cut to heaven: angel police officers Jackson (Delroy Lindo) and O’Reilly (Holly Hunter, cavorting playfully as a screwball-style siren) have Robert and Celine in their sights. The angels have been sent to earth on a mission to fling these two together and make them fall in love, and woe betide them if they fail at this.
Actually, woe betide them if they succeed, too: the angels become punching bags, banged up badly and also shot during the story. There’s a truly shocking moment when Ms. Hunter attaches herself to the hood of a speeding vehicle, then bounces off a hill and is crushed by a truck.
Intermingled with these nasty moments are some equally antic sweet ones. There’s a beguiling fantasy episode, for instance, in which Robert and Celine find themselves a soigne song-and-dance team doing a karaoke ”Beyond the Sea.” There is ”It Happened One Night”-style hitchhiking against a backdrop of Utah scenery, which the film often invests with a look of magical enchantment.
That Capra classic is as consciously invoked as ”Stairway to Heaven,” made by the legendary team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; Mr. Pressburger’s grandson, Andrew MacDonald, is Mr. Boyle’s producing partner. The third team member is John Hodge, who wrote this screenplay just after the pitch-black humor of ”Shallow Grave” without entirely switching gears.
As in ”Trainspotting,” Mr. Boyle makes lively use of unexpectedly surreal touches, like a big red beating heart and an image of Mr. McGregor in a kilt. (The actors even show up as stop-motion animated figures during the closing credits.) These diversions add fizz that the love story itself often lacks. Ms. Diaz, beautiful and willowy yet also abrasive here, berates Robert through much of the film, and even a honeymoon-like idyll between them is played as something of a joke.
For lack of central heat, the film leans heavily on amusing supporting characters, like Dan Hedaya as chief of angel police or Maury Chaykin as a backwoods neighbor who drops in on the wonderfully picturesque mountain cabin that Robert and Celine commandeer.
”A Life Less Ordinary” shows off the obvious talents of all concerned without seeming entirely at ease in its lighthearted milieu. There are dark edges to Mr. Boyle’s work even when he shoots scenes in a pure white heaven.
A Life Less Ordinary (1997)
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Cameron Diaz, Holly Hunter, Delroy Lindo, Ian Holm, Maury Chaykin, Dan Hedaya, Ian McNeice, Tony Shalhoub, Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub
Screenplay by: John Hodge
Production Design by: Kave Quinn
Cinematography by: Brian Tufano
Film Editing by: Masahiro Hirakubo
Costume Design by: Rachael Fleming
Set Decoration by: Marcia Calosio
Art Direction by: Tracey Gallacher
Music by: David Arnold
MPAA Rating: R for violence and language.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: October 24, 1997
Hits: 183
