2001's Angel Eyes Confusingly Casts Jim Caviezel as the Male Version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I love it when readers who pay me between seventy-five to a hundred dollars to watch and see a movie for this site’s Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 column choose something that they think I’ll either love or love tearing apart with words. Heck, I’m just grateful for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledges, as they are few are far between these days.
But I’m also fascinated by the seemingly random selections of kindly patrons. I’m talking about movies like the 2001 melodrama Angel Eyes, which stars Mel Gibson’s Jesus and the wife of the guy from the Dunkin’ Donuts commercials.
I’m referring, of course, to Jim Caviezel and Jennifer Lopez. Incidentally, the devout Christian recently launched a podcast with Pauly Shore called Caviezel and the Weasel that is NOT good. Just because something rhymes doesn’t mean that you should do it.
I had very fuzzy memories of seeing and possibly even reviewing Angel Eyes during its theatrical release.
All that I remembered about Angel Eyes is that it was somber and Jennifer Lopez fucks a sexy ghost in it.
Alternately, I thought that Angel Eyes was the movie where Lopez fucked a sexy angel.
For possibly the first time in my life, I was wrong. Angel Eyes is NOT a movie where Jennifer Lopez fucks a sexy ghost, nor is it a movie where she fucks a sexy angel. To be fair, Angel Eyes goes out of its way to suggest that the haunted mystery man who teaches a repressed police officer how to live and love is a supernatural being.
Angel is even in the film’s title! How is it possible that I could forget or misremember a mediocre film I’d seen twenty-three years earlier? I’m usually infallible, like the Pope or God.
I spent the first hour of Angel Eyes being confidently incorrect about what I wrongly thought was the film’s big twist. Oh, but it was all so obvious! If you went in knowing that Caviezel was a g-g-g-g-ghost or seraph then it was all so clear! At one point our heroine’s partner Robby (Terrence Howard, wasted in a thankless supportive friend role) even says of the male lead, “He’s a ghost.”
A man ridiculously known as “Catch” (Caviezel) might act exactly like a ghost or angel, but he’s all human, baby!
Caviezel is known these days more for his far-right-wing politics and intense Catholicism. He refuses to whip out his dong and have sex onscreen out of consideration for his wife and shame over his tiny penis.
The male Jezebel/harlot nevertheless celebrates and promotes pre-marital sex in scenes where his soulful cipher gets it on with our heroine. Sure, Caviezel insisted on being clothed during the filming of the scenes, but that won’t matter to impressionable children who only know that Jim Caviezel, their favorite actor due to his role in The Thin Red Line, is having sex outside of marriage onscreen and consequently they should become indiscriminate fuck-beasts as well. I don’t want to call Caviezel a phony and a hypocrite, but he’s a phony and a hypocrite.
What I find fascinating about Angel Eyes is that while Catch isn’t an angel of a ghost he is an equally mythical creature: a male Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Manic Pixie Dream Girl, incidentally, is a pop culture archetype coined by me, Nathan Rabin. How do you like them apples, huh? Not bad, eh?
Incidentally, for decades people have said that I should get paid every time someone uses the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I don’t think that’s true but if someone wanted to set up some manner of Manic Pixie Dream Girl fund on Gofundme I would not object.
Given his politics, religion, conspiracy theorizing and brutal intensity, Caviezel makes for an unlikely Manic Pixie Dream Dude but his character fits the parameters of the archetype snugly.
For starters, his name is Catch. I bet Angel Eyes hoped that the character would really catch on and there’d be other characters with the same name in movies and TV and real life.
Apparently, the filmmakers are still at it. All I can say is Angel Eyes, stop trying to make Catch happen.
Catch floats through Chicago like a spirit unencumbered by the responsibilities and stress of everyday life. He doesn’t have a job or any friends.
He’s a quirky man-child who acts like a ghost or an angel (as we have already established) but like a space alien as well. I half expected Catch to ask Lopez’s excessively sensitive cop about the curious ways of humans.
In this gender-swapped variation, it’s Jennifer Lopez’s Sharon Pogue who inhabits the role of the depressed, lost soul whose lost lust for life is restored when she meets a quirky mystery man utterly unlike anyone she has ever met.
The police officer has trouble trusting men because she grew up in an abusive household where her father terrorized her mother. She’s just about given up on love when Catch fearlessly and selflessly risks his own life to save hers when she’s shot in the chest twice during a drive-by shooting at a diner.
Thankfully, she was wearing a bulletproof vest, although it’s such a massacre that I wondered if the twist was that she’s an angel/ghost as well.
Sharon’s brush with violent death proves traumatic, but she begins to heal when she begins dating Catch. He’s like no man she has ever been with. He’s passionate and awkward and childlike and excessively literal in a way that made me wonder, again, if maybe he was an Autistic Angel and that’s just what Sharon needs in her life.
Catch’s identity and background seem to be a mystery to himself as well as everyone else. He doesn’t seem to even have a past until someone recognizes him at a jazz club and calls him by a name he does not recognize.
STOP READING IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THE TWIST IN ANGEL’S EYES, but it turns out that Catch is not an angel, a ghost, or autistic. Instead, he’s a man who lost his wife and his baby boy in a fatal car accident that he has completely blocked out, along with seemingly all information about his past.
It’s narratively convenient amnesia that explains everything in a gimmicky, unsatisfying manner. Angel Eyes is a grim, joyless melodrama about trauma that lacks even a single moment of humor or levity.
The only time Angel Eyes is funny is during what should be its heaviest and most powerful moment: the fatal car crash that killed Catch’s wife and son and destroyed his life and his psyche.
The family is deliriously happy to a comic extent. They all have colossal grins on their faces as they exult in the final moments of the whole family being alive. The son ecstatically shouts “Catch!” at his dad before tossing him something that will take his eyes off the road, leading to tragedy.
To borrow Dorothy Parker’s quip about Little Women, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Catch’s son and wife.
Catch comes out of his spell and comes to terms with the death of his family in an earnest, sentimental graveyard speech that feels like the reason Caviezel took the role in the first place.
Is the version of Angel Eyes that exists only in my mind preferable to the actual film? I don’t know. If you’re going to make a grim, dour romantic melodrama, you might as well make it as spectacularly, entertainingly awful, and over the top as possible.
In a deeply meaningless coincidence, the next big piece that will run on this website will be A Score to Settle, a Nicolas Cage movie where the big twist is that a main character is actually a ghost.
My career is full of meaningless coincidences like that as well as deep dives into movies like Angel Eyes that are fundamentally meaningless.
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