Here's what The Tiger's Tail wants to be: a pensive meditation on the malleability of identity, and the complex journey to accepting and eventually embracing one's life choices in middle age. Here's what it actually is: hopelessly, excruciatingly, incorrigibly dull.
The initial premise -- that of a man randomly encountering his doppelganger -- has all the potential to provide for an interesting character study or an original, paranormal mystery tale. The themes such a plotline opens up for exploration are sundry: living life myopically versus seeing the big picture, gaining appreciation through another's envy for what is yours, hell, even natural human duality. Unfortunately, The Tiger's Tail decides not to go any of these routes, and instead paves its own horribly awkward and tedious way. Throwing in a bunch of unrelated theories and mythologies as an afterthought doesn't help much in terms of giving a convoluted, unexplained, nonsensical plot line any depth or even reason. If anything, it proves just how muddled the film's intentions are.
It isn't that the film is completely awful. Its teetering silliness is actually anchored and even somewhat diluted by Brendan Gleeson's solid performance; he convincingly plays two completely different roles, even though he doesn't have much to work with. Kim Cattrall plays his wife, Jane, and she's only okay, but she would have probably done better if she hadn't had to force that horribly unconvincing Irish accent.
Again, it isn't terrible. It's just really, really unremarkable. For instance: Liam's (Brendan Gleeson) doppelganger's existence has the most tepid, lackluster explanation possible. Seriously, imagine the most uninventive justification for this character, and you'll probably be right in guessing which option Boorman decided to opt for. But don't worry, this isn't a spoiler or anything, (not that you're going to bother to watch this anyway) because half an hour into it, the film's most ostensibly intriguing mystery has already been resolved! But, okay, fine, I can deal with that; this isn't that kind of movie. But, the thing is, this movie has no idea what kind of movie it actually wants to be.
Case in point -- and this is something I was entirely unaware of until I looked it up on iMDB -- The Tiger's Tail is supposed to be a comedy. I can sort of see that, I guess, but it doesn't seem to make much sense. The film tries to be all atmosphere and tense moodiness accompanied by musical crescendos of the low-rent-faux-Phillip-Glass variety, and then out of nowhere we're expected to abandon whatever semblance of mood that we've managed to scrape up and laugh uproariously at a passing moment of cheesy acting? It's hard to tell if the comedy's even intentional sometimes. Other times it's simply not funny. There are approximately a handful of genuinely clever, amusing moments -- such as that of a frightened Jane holding the doppelganger's hand and recounting to a police officer how she could never mistake the fake Liam for her husband -- but the film is anything but laugh-out-loud funny, and to call it a comedy is simply a falsity.
The cinematography isn't particularly enticing, either. Boorman even manages to make a car chase look boring, following every textbook example of what to do and when to do it, layering Phillip Glass-esque music over the whole thing to give it a heightened sense of melodrama and it just...doesn't work. Also, we're never really given any solid reasons for the evil double's motivation to ruin his counterpart's life. Okay, I can buy the fact that he's destitute and down on his luck and generally having a shitty life while the significantly luckier Liam is loaded, powerful, and getting it on with Kim Cattrall. But the unabashed hostility the double shows towards Liam during their first few encounters goes beyond all those material things -- it's downright personal.
[SPOILER ALERT!!!]
Surely he can't blame his brother for the way things worked out; in fact Liam didn't even know he had a brother until he met the aforementioned double. So then what the hell is his problem? Instead of unraveling the intricacies behind this potentially complex relationship, Boorman glosses over it all and seems to leave it to the audience to deduce that the double is simply enraged at the injustice of it all...I think. Again, so much to work with, and most of it just goes to waste. On top of it all, the ending is so goddamn ludicrous that I refuse to even dignify it with a response.
[SPOILER END]
DVD Bonus Features
The DVD has English subtitles, as well as the option of 5.1 or Dolby Surround sound.
"The Tiger's Tail" is on sale August 11, 2009 and is rated R. Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller. Written and directed by John Boorman. Starring Brendan Gleeson, Ciaran Hinds, Kim Cattrall, Sean McGinley, Sinead Cusack.
