In Praise of Great Films - The Fractured Timeline and Great Nonlinear Movies

Second in an ongoing series.

A recent edition of Entertainment Weekly listed the top films of the past 25 years, and the classic Pulp Fiction (1994) landed at the top. If you haven't seen this flick, check it out. It's a prime example of what we call the "fractured timeline" (aka nonlinear) type of storytelling. Watching a film that unspools in a manner other than a straightforward, linear timeline isn't for everyone. But for those who marvel at how a movie can reveal itself in unorthodox ways, Pulp Fiction is great fun.

But it got us to thinking about other movies with nonlinear stories. Obviously, you can look to other films by Pulp's Quentin Tarantino, such as Jackie Brown (1997) and Reservoir Dogs (1992). Both of these films jump around in time, although in each case the fractured storyline is easy to follow and serves to energize the movie.

Tarantino is certainly not the first filmmaker to break up the timeline of a movie to tell a story in a unique way. Another director to repeatedly utilize the technique is Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who has three great films with the nonlinear theme:

• Amores Perros (2000), a Mexican film about several lives interconnected to a horrific car accident.
• 21 Grams (2003), also about several lives linked by an awful car accident, although this one is in English with Oscar-nominated performances by Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts (not to mention one of Sean Penn's best turns ever as a dying heart patient).
• Babel (2006), which interlocks four different storylines (in this author's opinion, that was one too many) in as many languages, and features fine acting chops by Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Gael Garcia Bernal, and a host of unknown Japanese and Arab performers.

Another cool example of a movie that tells a great story without a straightforward timeline is the innovative Memento (2000), by Christopher Nolan, who has since made some other classics, including Insomnia (2002), Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and the upcoming The Dark Knight, opening July 18th. Actually, Memento doesn't qualify as a fractured timeline flick because the story is told exactly backwards. Very inventive and positively gripping storytelling.

But if you think nonlinear movies are limited to the past decade-and-a-half or so, you can go back in time for prime examples such as Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Citizen Kane (1941), the classic by Orson Welles. Rashomon uses a ruptured timeline by necessity, as it presents an act which is seen by a number of different witnesses (and thus shown to the audience as many times). The latter film is thought by many to be the greatest film of them all, and it does indeed jump around in time, though not as frenetically as, say, Inarritu or Tarantino's examples.

Perhaps the best case in point with respect to fractured storylines is one of the great Stanley Kubrick's first features, The Killing (1956). A friend of mine, writer/director/artist Dana Augustine, lent me a copy of this movie years ago, and I was amazed by how the story played out. Decades before Pulp Fiction was made (and in fact seven years before Quentin Tarantino was even born), this film utilized the fractured timeline to great effect. Sterling Hayden and Coleen Gray headed a fine cast in this story about an elaborate heist attempt at a horse race venue. It's worth seeking out here.

For those who just don't like their movies told in a nonlinear way, that's fine. But for anyone who digs an occasional fractured storyline, every one of the films described in this post is worth a look.