City of Angels (1998)
October 28th, 2006
Based on Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, this Hollywood version moves the story to Los Angeles and casts Nicolas Cage as the angel and Meg Ryan as the girl he falls for.
Let me say right off that I like this movie a lot. It’s a real tear-jerker. I think it tends to be underrated just because of what it is: A Hollywood remake of a smaller, more subtle, more intellectual European film. I recommend watching them both on the same evening, having fun with the comparisons, and enjoying them both for what they are.
Cage and Ryan are fine in their roles. Ryan buries a lot of her usual perkiness in a smart performance as Maggie Rice, a surgeon who can’t stop beating herself up when a patient dies on the operating table. Cage, with his doe eyes and hangdog expression, is likeable mooning around after Maggie.
Canadian Colm Feore is good in a supporting role as Maggie’s fiance, as is TV’s Andre Braugher as an angel. The role of the fallen angel, Peter Falk (Columbo) in the German film, here is played by Dennis Franz - Andy Sipowicz from TV’s NYPD Blue - in a juicy, lip-smacking performance.
The differences between this film and its German model are all of the same sort: It jumps faster, shows us more of everything in brighter colours, and does it all for too long.
This film leads with its heaviest guns: the death of a child. The angel Seth is shown walking down a hospital corridor hand-in-hand with a little girl in pyjamas. He is leading her to the next stage of her existence, whatever that might be. Nothing so explicit could possibly occur in Wings of Desire.
In the German film the smitten angel only gives up eternity near the end; most of the film is given over to a slow meditation on life and death, the temporal and the eternal. Here the angel quickly reveals himself to Maggie Rice, the doctor, and even spills the beans by informing her that his profession is “Messenger of God.” (But she doesn’t really get it.)
The angel stalks Maggie in the corridors of the hospital where she works, follows her home, gives her presents, and even kisses her, long before he has even begun to consider making the leap into humanity.
Upon being kissed by an angel, Maggie walks away looking bitterly disillusioned, as if she has just realized that she is the victim of a hoax. I’m not sure what the director meant to convey here; I don’t think the angel should have kissed the girl at all, because as a creature of pure spirit he doesn’t even know what a kiss is. But since he was so foolish as to do it, it must have been a very poor kiss.
In the German film the fall from angel to human is metaphoric, achieved just by willing it; here the fall is literal, a swan dive off a high building.
All of this makes the film sound worse than it is. It’s hard to talk about this movie without making it sound crass, especially when mentioning Wings of Desire in the same breath, but in fact the experience of watching it is highly enjoyable. The director has an impressive knack of aiming his sentimental sledge-hammer blows straight at your heart.
The film goes on for about five minutes too long as everything that has been hinted at must be shown, acted out in full colour, and half of it underwater at that. Afterwards I felt over-sugared and more than a little manipulated.
And yet! And yet! I like this movie a lot. I’ve seen it at least twice. It’s true that I like all movies, but I don’t always want to see them again. Highly recommended, especially as a double bill with Wings of Desire. (Also works as a double bill with Heaven Can Wait, if only for the interesting homage of the bike crash.)
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