Christopher Nolan's Following (1998)

“I’d been on my own for a while and been getting kind of lonely…and bored…How can I explain?...”

-“The Young Man”

Following was written by Christopher Nolan and I cannot deny that, here, the man has a curiosity about human behavior that is no doubt sophisticated and that has inspired him to contrive a compact little thriller of singular inventiveness and unpretentious cynicism.

The film is aesthetically interesting, but mostly because it was shot in suitably grainy black and white, which gives it a gritty, bleak noir quality. Nolan continues to confirm that he is sloppy in framing his shots, generally paying little to no attention to composition. When I have said in my past two reviews of Nolan films that his direction is merely functional I mean that he is concerned more with telling a story through dialogue than through images. Films like Memento and this are compelling because of the story, and not so much the images, though he does show evidence of an artistic eye here and there. I’d recommend that if he wishes to achieve the sort of painterly craftsmanship of peers like Guillermo Del Toro or Darren Aronofsky, that he should try storyboarding before just going in and roughly shooting.

Perhaps I am being overly critical in expecting him to do more than tell an interesting story, which he usually does, especially here, but if he simply wished to do that, he could work in a different field, perhaps as a novelist or screenwriter. A filmmaker must provide indelible images, strong, layered images precisely framed and calibrated. There are only a few images in Following that could be paused to admire for purposes of mise-en-scène study. I would say I found this film to be very promising except I know that five films and ten years later he has hardly delivered on it. Nonetheless, he is a clever and skilled scenarist.

Following tells the brief but ingenious story of a young man (Jeremy Theobald), credited simply as “The Young Man,” who has aspirations of being a writer. He has time to kill, and begins indulging in the peculiar habit of following strangers he notices on the street:

“You ever, um, been to a football match, just let your eyes, um, go over, drift across a crowd of people and then they slowly stop and fix on one person and…all of a sudden that person isn’t part of the crowd anymore. They’ve become an individual, just like that.”

He explains this to an older man who is insinuated to be a therapist (if this was intentionally insinuated, then Nolan must be commended for having his uncle, John Nolan, play the part, as he looks and sounds like a therapist).

That sample of dialogue offers a tantalizing peek into a mind that is not morbidly curious so much as lonesome and hungry for a connection. The tragedy of his story is that this very poignant yearning is taken advantage of and cruelly manipulated to quietly devastating results. One of the people he eventually starts to “shadow” is a tall young man with deep-set eyes and a cunning demeanor. The man is Cobb, and the actor who plays him, Alex Haw, has the height and commanding presence of Vince Vaughn with the suave handsomeness of Jude Law and the cold malice of Arno Frisch. The man is fascinating, but also very likely trouble of an uncertain nature.

The scenes with Cobb are involving – his motives are unknown, his past is unknown, and he is prodigiously capable not only in his chosen profession (as a burglar and con artist) but also in navigating sticky situations to extricate himself. One of the best scenes finds the young man caught by his latest pursuit in a coffee shop. The stranger abruptly confronts him and asks if he knows him, what he wants, if he’s “a faggot” and upon receiving the bizarre but innocent explanation, reveals his name to be Cobb, and invites our protagonist to tag along for one of his break-ins. Things become considerably more sinister here, as the young man, once content merely to observe strangers coming to and from, now is inside their homes, examining their personal belongings.

While also compelling on a purely superficial level, there is interest within deeper levels: a normal, law-abiding young man who does not do wicked things but whose curiosity about them leads him into dark circles that threaten his character; out of the frying pan of loneliness and boredom and into the fire of crime and sociopathy. The premise is ingenious in its simplicity, and in that simplicity, Nolan finds a very novel idea. The film does expand into a crime thriller with intricate set-ups and double-crosses, as the story cleverly folds back in on itself, sort of like Memento, only without the logic holes.

Nolan has shrewdly produced a tragic little noir that might have very well been a minor masterpiece if he were a more gifted director, but I must admire him for seeing such vast potential in such a curious little premise and mining a sturdy foothold for himself out of it upon which to advance a career.




Grade: B+