Head East, Young Man!
Doctor Strange / directed by Scott Derrickson
From the apparently inexhaustible archives of Marvel Comics arrives the latest transmutation from page to screen: Doctor Strange. Unlike the superheroes we’ve seen to date — Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America — Doctor Strange actually occupies a different quadrant of the vast yet often claustrophobically repetitive Marvel universe: This superhero works with the world of spirit and magic, not pseudo-scientific superpowers. So there’s that.
When we meet him, Dr. Steven Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is an actual doctor doctor, not a holder of a doctorate in dark arts (that comes later). Working as an arrogant neurosurgeon in New York, he's thoroughly convinced of his godlike powers — in other words, as much of an ancient type as the spiritual masters and diabolical creatures he will eventually encounter. His one emotional connection is with another doctor, played by Rachel McAdams; they had something once upon a time, and now their relationship basically consists of McAdams rolling her eyes and assisting Strange while he acts arrogantly.
Unfortunately for Strange, he’s as bad a driver as he is good a doctor, and before long some arrogant texting and driving leads him to carom his speeding Lamborghini off a hillside and into a river. Fate being the bitch it is, the body part that the accident most fucks up are his hands; when Strange awakens in a hospital bed, his arms hang before him in stasis, pinned and stitched like he’s become part Frankenstein. These career-threatening wounds only increase his bastard quotient, as he desperately tries to find the procedure that will let him resume his career. His final hope is a former paraplegic who’d seemed hopeless but is now completely cured; this man unexpectedly points him east — not to a hospital in Brooklyn, but farther, to the actual Orient, or, at least, Katmandu.
Once arrived, persistence, luck, and fate turn out to be on Strange’s side, for he’s soon guided to his mysterious destination, Kamar-Taj, by a mysterious stranger named Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Mordo introduces him to a woman called the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), who proceeds to blow Strange’s mind by in turn introducing him to the existence of other dimensions and previously unknown spiritual powers; in a sequence that’s alternately psychedelic, grotesque, silly, and desperately trying to stay one step ahead of derivative, Strange’s astral body is wrung through the multiversal wringer. The dominant visual motif of his voyage is a sort of kaleidoscopic, fractal distortion of the cosmos, which for good or bad is also the dominant visual of the movie as a whole whenever the mystical world is evoked.
As the bald and calm Ancient One, Swinton proves once again that she’s game for just about any role you want to throw at her, no matter how loopy or destructive to her personal appearance, so long as it’s got a sort of nutty substance on which she can feed and thrive. Just as her character teaches Strange the ways of mysticism and sorcery, Swinton’s acting is an anchor that tethers and sustains Cumberbatch. “Look,” I imagine her telepathically emoting to Cumberbatch, “I know it’s sort of strange (pun intended) that we’re both pretty good actors caught in a film that’s silly if never totally preposterous; we may ultimately regret our choice. But this is indeed a choice we both made, fully consciously. Now follow my lead as I look tortured about my role as protector of the Earth against manifold cosmic threats.” All gentle snark aside, Swinton is indeed the fulcrum on which this movie succeeds as well as it does. She’s an uncanny combination of fragility and power, and brings a natural’s gravity to the cartoon plot. After all, Cumberbatch’s neophyte Strange can get away with being a little out of depth with the oddness he’s encountering; Swinton has to convince us that all the cosmic good versus evil fighting for all eternity stuff is something she’s totally used to, and part of the natural order of things.
Human badness comes incarnated in Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), who’s an acolyte of some sort of dark lord from another universe who, not surprisingly, would like to turn Earth into a domain of evil, or something bad like that. Although Strange is assured by his new friends that they fight against evil by spiritual means, it turns out that this basically still means a lot of hitting and punching, though using fiery CGI weaponry to do it. It does also involve more of the fractal reality-spinning effects, which frequently include city landscapes being broken apart and circulating in three-dimensional impossibility like hellacious sprockets in an infernal sprocket factory.
Part of Doctor Strange's redemption is that there seems to be some awareness on the part of director and actors that the whole premise is a little ludicrous, and they acknowledge this just enough to give the whole thing air to breathe rather than suffocate within its own pretensions. There are puns on Strange’s name; there are Strange’s awkward attempts to harness the mystic arts; there is the steadying brace of Tilda Swinton. Strange’s cape is also a character in its own right, flitting, tugging, and tapping like some highly evolved effect from Fantasia’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence; an element of nearly pure silliness from a piece of attire that paradoxically lends the film an additional human touch.
And as high as the stakes are — preventing the apocalypse, for Pete’s sake! — the film has an unexpectedly restrained quality: there aren’t enormous armies of either baddies or good guys, the action is restricted to discrete locations, and a premium is given to thinking before striking. It doesn’t indulge in multiple over-the-top climaxes; in fact, the crucial battle between Strange and the creature seeking to envelope Earth in his alternate dimension darkness is won when Strange basically annoys the beast into surrender — a charming and unexpected deviation from the usual kablooey and sky split asunder of other Marvel outings.
Overall, it’s not that Dr. Strange is fatally flawed; only, ironically, it seems to lack that magic something that would push it to a level where we’d really want to see a sequel. We may be sure, though, that a sequel is on the way.