When a Ride Becomes a Journey

Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. On the 18th of April in '75, hardly a man is now alive, who remembers that famous day and year.

Sandra Bullock's career has taken off like a runaway bus. Last year she had two hit movies and her face adorned just about every magazine cover in the free world. Critics reviewed her work favorably often commenting on her screen charm and likability. But fame has a way of catching up to you and running over you like a runaway bus. Your past work is never good enough and your future work is constantly compared to your past work.

In Bullock's newest movie, Two If By Sea, she costars with Denis Leary (who also directed and wrote the script) in a quiet little comedy, the type of movie where you sit through it passively and when you leave you don't really remember all that much about it. It doesn't contain any big laughs, the story is barely dramatic, and the plot of the picture hardly aims for higher meaning. But like all good comedy, Leary's script is based on actual human emotions and responses to situations, and seeing that the movie's competition includes fare such as Biodome and Black Sheep, Two If By Sea is a welcome exercise in the art of subtlety.

He said to his friend, "as the British march, by land or sea by the town tonight, hang a lantern aloft the Belfry arch of the North Church tower of the signal like; one if by land and two if by sea. And I at the opposite shore will be ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm, for the country and folk to be up in arm."

Two If By Sea has Bullock and Leary as a couple of nickel and dime robbers who get involved in a theft that is way over their heads just as they are trying to leave the business. Bullock is forced to decide where she wants to go in life as she reflects on what she has and what she wants and the space in between. Leary is forced to decide if he wants to change at all. The movie places them squarely at the proverbial fork in the road, in a story about trying to make choices in the time of change.

Bullock again plays a lost likable character, whose choices are the key part of what the movie is about. She and Leary have stolen a two million dollar painting, have both the law and the unlawful trying to find out where they and the loot are. They hide out in a mansion on the coast where Bullock meets a rich and sophisticated neighbor- Leary's opposite. Having been told by Leary that this was his last heist and that he would settle down into a legitimate job, she begins to doubt that he can ever really change and that she wants more from life than forever being on the run, and a cashier's job at the local Barnes and Noble.

And so through the night Lord Paul Revere; and so through the night rode his cry of alarm, through every Middlesex village and farm. A cry of defiance and not of fear, a voice in the darkness, a knock on the door, a word that shall echo forever more. For born of the nightwind of the past through all our history to the last in the hour of darkness of peril and need, the people will awaken and listen to hear, the hurtling hoofbeats of the stead and the midnight message of Paul Revere.

One of the problems with the movie is that Bullock again plays the same character she played in While You Are Sleeping, The Net, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, and even Speed. Compare the opening of Two If By Sea with her performance in a similar opening in 1993's The Vanishing. Both movies open with a couple arguing while driving through the country. In Two If By Sea the scene depends on liking Leary's writing, his observations and wit. It thus comes off as a written scene, formatted for us to be impressed by the hipness- "...so a guy that dresses as a bat is cool but one that dresses as a cat is a fag?" Whereas in The Vanishing the argument and scene play out like life, full of anger, mixed emotion, misunderstanding and love. The former uses Bullock's past reputation and personality to make the scene work, the latter utilizes her instant believability to pull the viewer into the movie. In The Vanishing her role is small as she vanishes a third of the way into the story, thus the opening scene is key as we immediately care for the person and care about the premise of her disappearing. In Two If By Sea it's not as though we don't care about the character Bullock is playing, it's just that the emotional investment is in the movie itself, not the relationship of the story with its viewer. In other words, it's been done before and it's been done better. Suddenly charm and wit aren't enough, it's what have you done for me lately?