Jack and Michelangelo
Jack Nicholson is at his charismatic best in The Passenger (1975), which was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (L'avventura, Blowup). This is the only time these two giants of cinema worked together, and the result is a superb film. Antonioni was a genius at presenting images suggesting emptiness and alienation, and in this movie Nicholson brilliantly captures the alienated protagonist, much as he had done earlier in Five Easy Pieces. What I like best about The Passenger is its combination of visual beauty, moodiness and mystery.
"I used to be somebody else, but I traded him in."
The Passenger's central character is David Locke (Nicholson), a journalist deeply mired in feelings of rootlessness and futility. Soon after he has a casual conversation with a stranger—a man named Robertson—Locke comes upon his new acquaintance's dead body. Wanting desperately to escape his own life, the journalist makes a snap decision to assume the deceased's identity.
Posing as Robertson, Locke travels from Saharan Africa to London to Munich to Spain. Along the way, he meets a sexy young woman (Maria Schneider) and gets into an affair with her, giving the movie an element of existential romance. But it turns out that Robertson is expected to supply arms to African insurgents, and Locke ends up in grave danger.
Search for Meaning
It's not easy to interpret The Passenger, but it seems to me the film is at least partly about the search for meaning in life. Locke feels trapped in a meaningless and purposeless existence, so he takes on the identity of another person on the chance that this will somehow lead to something better. For a while, it almost looks as though Locke's idea might work out for him since Robertson was involved in a meaningful endeavor, namely helping insurgents overthrow a repressive dictator. Also, Locke falls for a woman he encounters in Barcelona, and he can dream that he may be able to make a new life for himself with her. But as the movie winds down, he realizes his search for meaning has turned up nothing. In a sleepy, dusty town he lies down to await his fate in the Hotel de la Gloria.
Mystery of the Girl
In cast lists for The Passenger, the character played by Maria Schneider is identified as "Girl." At only one point in the film is this character referred to by any name, and that is about 15 minutes from the end when a hotel keeper calls her "Mrs. Robertson." The hotel keeper's subsequent statements imply he has examined her passport, and I think this sequence is the filmmakers' way of suggesting that the Girl might very well be the widow of the man whose identity Locke assumed. It's an intriguing notion that she may have been the wife of the dead arms dealer, but the movie is cryptic, and I see it as open to more than just a single interpretation.
Commentary by Jack Nicholson
The DVD contains a feature-length audio commentary by lead actor Jack Nicholson, and I found it worthwhile. The Passenger was shot in 1973, so Nicholson is looking back on it from three decades later. He says that making this movie was "probably the biggest adventure in filming that I ever had," and he declares that Antonioni is "obviously one of my heroes." Nicholson claims that Antonioni once gave him the direction, "Jack, less twitches." Also, Nicholson says he asked the director why Locke was keeping Robertson's appointments, and Antonioni answered, "It's very hard to move without a path."
Nicholson seems unwilling to offer much enlightenment about the story, but he occasionally makes tantalizing remarks that may be clues. When the hotel keeper uses the name Mrs. Robertson, Nicholson says, "Now who's that going to be?" And when there's a sound that could be a car backfiring, he asks, "Was that a gunshot?"
Commentary by Screenwriter
The DVD also provides a feature-length audio commentary by one of the screenwriters, Mark Peploe. He's accompanied by journalist Aurora Irvine, who doesn't make much of a contribution to my way of thinking. Peploe has trouble organizing his thoughts and falls into silences, but I have to admit that he nonetheless supplies some interesting production details. He says that the title refers to Jack Nicholson's character because he is a passenger on somebody else's life. Peploe also claims that the movie's title was always intended to be The Passenger, but there were copyright problems in Europe over a Polish film, and that's why the movie is often listed (for example, on the Internet Movie Database) as Professione: reporter. Another factoid that's helpful to know is that the filmmakers were thinking that the unnamed African country was Chad (although the scenes set there were shot in Algeria). And he also says that the horrifying execution sequence was real-life footage that he believes came from Nigeria.
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