In a sentenceAn angel gives up eternity for Meg Ryan, and for about an hour you can see his point
Los Angeles. Seth (Nicolas Cage) is an angel: he wears a long black coat, hears what strangers are thinking, and goes unseen. He and his fellow angel Cassiel (Andre Braugher) spend their days in the downtown library reading over shoulders, and their dawns on the beach, listening to the sun rise. Seth is at the bedside when a small girl, Susan (Sarah Dampf), dies, and at the operating table when Maggie (Meg Ryan), a heart surgeon, loses a patient she was sure she had saved. Maggie cannot forgive herself; Seth cannot stop watching her. Her colleague Jordan (Colm Feore) is more than a colleague, and one of her patients, Messinger (Dennis Franz), a loud bypass case with no interest in his diet sheet, seems to notice things nobody else does.
Brad Silberling’s remake of Wings of Desire is hushed, handsome and oddly moving for an hour, with Nicolas Cage staring and John Seale’s gold light on the beach. Then it remembers it is a studio romance and goes soft.
Brad Silberling has remade Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, the 1987 film in which angels in overcoats drift through Berlin listening to what people think, and he has moved it to Los Angeles and given it a love story with a proper ending. Dana Stevens’s screenplay keeps the premise and loses the politics. Seth (Nicolas Cage) watches over the city, Maggie (Meg Ryan) cuts open hearts for a living, and the question is whether an angel would give up forever to be with her. For about an hour the film is stranger and quieter than its tagline suggests. Then it becomes the film the tagline promised, and we liked it a good deal less.
The first hour is the case for it. John Seale shoots the city in a gold haze, wide and still, and puts the angels where nobody looks: on the Hollywood sign, on freeway gantries, on a steel beam over a building site. At dawn and dusk they gather on the beach in a long dark row to listen to the sun, and Shay Cunliffe’s black overcoats make them look like a convention of undertakers who have wandered onto the sand. Lilly Kilvert gives them a downtown library to loiter in, reading over shoulders. These scenes are patient and nearly silent, and Lynzee Klingman cuts them at the angels’ pace rather than ours.
Cage plays Seth without blinking. He tilts his head, half smiles, and stares at people the way you might stare at a painting, and the effect sits somewhere between tenderness and the man outside your window at night. The film knows this and gets some mileage out of it. He is at his best early, at the bedside of a small girl, Susan (Sarah Dampf), who is dying; he asks her what she liked best, and she says pyjamas. That exchange got to us, and we had not planned on letting it, because Cage does nothing at all and Silberling holds the shot and trusts the line.
Ryan is good in a part that asks less of her than it should. Her Maggie is tired and competent and furious with herself after losing a man on the table she was sure she had saved, and Ryan plays the fury without any of the dimples she is usually asked for. Dennis Franz, as her patient Messinger, is the best thing in the film: a bypass case who treats his diet sheet as a rumour, talks with his mouth full and is the only person on screen who seems glad to be alive. Every scene he walks into gets louder and better. Andre Braugher’s Cassiel, the colleague who watches Seth drift, has a stillness the film could have used more of, and Colm Feore’s Jordan is there to be the man Maggie should not end up with.
Then there is the second half, and the second half is where most of the complaints belong. Once Seth has made his choice the film stops being about the city and becomes a romance of the kind that comes with a soundtrack album. Gabriel Yared’s score swells on cue; the pop songs arrive on cue; the camera slows down whenever anyone is happy. A late turn, which we will not describe, is staged with every tool in the box, and by then we felt we were being worked on and resented it. The last half hour asks us to feel what the first hour had already made us feel, and asks loudly.
Wenders’s angel fell for the whole of life, cold hands and coffee included. Seth falls for Maggie, and the film treats the two as the same thing, which they are not. That is not a crime; a studio romance has every right to exist, and this one is better made than most. But it means the strangeness that makes the first hour worth watching is exactly what the film is in a hurry to be rid of.
See it for Franz, for the beach at dawn, and for the little girl and her pyjamas. If you find yourself reaching for a tissue in the last ten minutes, the film is doing precisely what it set out to do, and you may or may not thank it. At 114 minutes it does not overstay; it simply stops being the film we wanted somewhere around the hour mark.
The reviews split almost down the middle, and the consensus settles on a mixed verdict. Where critics agree is on the look of the thing: nearly everyone admires the camerawork and Silberling’s visual style, which several describe as graceful or otherworldly. The leads draw consistent praise too, Nicolas Cage’s nuanced performance in particular, with Meg Ryan singled out even by critics who dislike the film around her.
The reservations cluster on sentiment and on the source. Several critics find the second half schematic and the ending too sweet, and the comparison with Wings of Desire rarely flatters the remake, which more than one reviewer calls hollow beside the original. The spread is wide. Variety stands alone in recommending it outright, while Eye for Film and The AV Club dismiss it as schmaltzy and conventional. Notably, the harshest reviews arrive years after release, once the comparison has had time to settle.
The critic finds it a lyrical, thoughtfully crafted romance, though its ending becomes excessively sentimental. He especially praises Nicolas Cage’s nuanced performance and the film’s graceful visual style.
Read the full review →Turan finds the film a fascinating but conflicted hybrid, whose appeal depends on viewers’ willingness to embrace its romantic fantasy. He praises the leads’ performances and the film’s otherworldly visual style, while faulting its schematic second half.
Read the full review →The page could not be read, so the critic’s verdict is unavailable. No specific praise or complaint can be verified from the accessible text.
Read the full review →Berry finds the Hollywood remake largely avoids becoming overly sentimental. She praises its soundtrack and describes the film as winning and moving.
Read the full review →The review appears mixed but appreciative of the film’s craft. It singles out the elegant direction and luscious camerawork, while its opening questions the premise of remaking Wings of Desire.
Read the full review →The review finds the romance affecting but weighed down by melodrama and philosophical digressions. It praises the lead performances and Silberling’s fresh eye, while noting the story’s slow stretches.
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Wings of DesireThe original: Berlin, black and white, and angels who want the whole world, not one woman.
A Matter of Life and DeathPowell and Pressburger argue a pilot’s case before heaven, with wit this film could have borrowed.
Truly Madly DeeplyAnthony Minghella’s dead-lover romance, funnier and sadder because it stays in a damp London flat.
After LifeKore-eda’s quiet Japanese fable about choosing one memory to keep; no strings, no slow motion.
Heaven Can WaitWarren Beatty’s quarterback is taken too early and sent back; the afterlife played for comedy.
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