The Rapture, written and directed by Michael Tolkin, and starring Mimi Rogers in a stunning (and unprecedented, for her) performance, is a harrowing experience which seems to come from out of a clear blue sky. It is noticeably low-budget (there are no extras, it is mostly interiors, and the special effects are often fudged), but that adds to its gritty brutal (and also dreamlike) atmosphere. If there were more money, perhaps the special effects would be more elaborate, but something essential would be lost. The End Days are here, in The Rapture, and the Book of Revelations gives us many frightening and beautiful images of what that will be like. A CGI-fanatic would have a field day with some of those passages. In The Rapture the end of the world and the second coming is merely suggested (and quite effectively), and it keeps the focus where it should be: on the story at hand and the philosophical and moral implications at stake, as well as the raw relentless fearless performance by Mimi Rogers at the center of it. It?s one of the best pieces of acting I have ever seen.
[snip]
Sharon [Rogers' character] is a woman who negotiates her empty life with an almost agonizing buzz of unacknowledged pain at the heart of every moment. Her life is about narcotizing that pain through random sex, cigarettes, booze, pushing herself further and further into experiences - orgies, swinging, anything goes � because she is unable to feel anything. Something in her has been cauterized. Perhaps she was always this way, or perhaps the years have done a number on her, deadening her to joy and beauty. The reasons for why she is the way she is are left out. It?s part of the film?s power. Knowing that Mimi Rogers is not actually like Sharon, in real life, makes her performance even more astonishing. There are hard edges to Sharon, a coldness, a detached amusement at the foibles and follies of her fellow man. She has no compassion.
[snip]
I don?t want to say too much about the film, because watching it unfold is part of its horror and power. Sharon is a telephone operator, who spends her nights cruising the streets of Los Angeles with her corrupt ?boyfriend?, looking for couples to seduce. In this way she meets an aimless yet kind of sweet guy named Randy (played by David Duchovny, in one of his first major roles). The sex is graphic in The Rapture, graphic and yet totally un-erotic. Sharon can?t get ?lost? in sex, because there?s nothing really in her that COULD get lost. She is a shell of a person. So the orgy goes on, and at the heart of it is Sharons? barely-hidden contempt for everyone and everything. Interspersed with these lush disturbing sex scenes, are scenes that take place in the cold clinical bank of cubicles, where Sharon sits, redirecting calls, monotonously. The juxtaposition fills the screen with emptiness.
Sharon?s apartment is all beige, with nothing in it besides furniture. No pictures on the wall, the kitchen looks unused, it?s not a lived-in space. All of the spaces in this film have an eerie unearthly look to them - and perhaps that was partly due to the lack of money for big-time set decoration and production design - but it ends up working. Sharon is not IN this world. She is connected to nothing.
Tolkin and I were colleagues at the Village Voice--he did a memorable piece on the swingers' club Plato's Retreat, then appeared on a local TV talkshow (back when they had local TV talkshows), where some of the swingers in the studio audience yelled at him for misrepresenting their "scene." When I saw The Rapture, I thought, It's as if he plucked some lost soul from Plato's Retreat and placed her on the Biblical plain of final judgement.
Some of the sex scenes in The Rapture reminded me of the porn director John Leslie in their compositions and air of cult initiation (before Leslie went gonzo, that is, dispensing with sets,scripts, and atmospheric lighting), and Mimi Rogers has something of the brave, poignant abandon of older porn actresses in the 70's and 80's, such as Kay Parker.
O'Malley:
Mimi Rogers gives one of the all-time great performances, as far as I?m concerned. I?d put her on a level with Gena Rowlands here - and I don?t put anyone on a level with Gena Rowlands. No director has come along and made Mimi Rogers his muse, in the way John Cassavetes made Gena Rowlands his muse � and so Rogers? career has stagnated (although it was wonderful to see her in the nearly wordless and totally nude scene in Door in the Floor: I watched her stand there, with full frontal nudity, at her age, with Jeff Bridges staring at her critically, there?s no soft light, it?s an unforgiving shot: not sexual, but objectifying, and awful � and when I saw her there, and realized it was her, I thought again of The Rapture, and her boundless courage, and thought: ?Damn. That woman is fearless. Why isn?t she, to coin a phrase, more of a ?player?? She?s not on the list of ?great actresses? when people talk about the greats of today � but she damn well should be.?)
The Rapture is a tough movie to take at times, but Tolkin's next one--The New Age--was even an even more astringent endurance test, its narcissistic characters having none of the sympathetic pull of Mimi Rogers in the elemental flesh (vulnerability not being something in Judy Davis's formidable skill set). Audiences bailed on it and Tolkin hasn't directed a feature film since, while watered-down versions of his vision of LA and the amoral vacuum of untethered lives micturated into the "edgy" entertainment of series like Californication, where everyone seems to be cool with their inner desolation. Cyncism's always an easier sell.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/03/-tolkin-and-i-were.html
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