John Cusack Checks Into a Motel Where the Guests Keep Dying

James Mangold’s Identity strands ten strangers at a Nevada motel in a rainstorm and kills them one at a time. It runs 90 minutes, and for most of them it works.

Sony Pictures Releasing put the film in theaters on April 25, 2003. Michael Cooney wrote the screenplay, drawing on Agatha Christie’s 1939 whodunit And Then There Were None. Mangold shot most of it on studio sets in Culver City, California, in 2002, with location work in Palmdale. The budget was $28 million. It grossed $90.3 million.

Trailer, via Arrow Video.

Ten Strangers at the Nevada Motel

The setup is a locked room with a parking lot. Ed Dakota, a limousine driver and former police officer played by John Cusack, is transporting Caroline Suzanne, a washed-up actress played by Rebecca De Mornay, when the storm forces him off the highway. He accidentally strikes Alice York, the wife of George York and stepmother to nine-year-old Timmy. The injured woman becomes the group’s first burden.

The motel is run by Larry Washington, played by John Hawkes. The other guests arrive in pieces: Paris Nevada, a prostitute played by Amanda Peet; Samuel Rhodes, a correctional officer played by Ray Liotta, transporting convicted murderer Robert Maine, played by Jake Busey; and newlyweds Lou and Ginny Isiana, played by William Lee Scott and Clea DuVall.

Then Suzanne is murdered. Ed finds her severed head in a dryer, along with her motel key, numbered 10.

The countdown has started.

A Killer Counting Down by Room Key

Cooney’s mechanic is the best thing in the film. Each victim is found with a key, and the numbers descend: 10 for Suzanne, 9 in Lou’s hand after Ginny locks herself in the bathroom during a fight and someone kills him in their room, 8 under Larry’s supervision when Maine turns up dead. Ed works out that the killer is counting down and targeting the guests by room order.

That is a clean, cruel engine, and Mangold runs it without sentiment. The travelers turn on each other as their numbers thin. Ed and Rhodes accuse Larry, who panics, flees in his truck, and fatally strikes George. Rhodes ties Larry to a chair. Maine escapes and is recaptured.

The cast is deep in exactly the way a body-count movie needs. John C. McGinley plays George. Pruitt Taylor Vince plays Malcolm Rivers, the serial killer at the center of the film’s parallel story. Carmen Argenziano plays the defense lawyer. Alfred Molina plays the doctor.

The Trial That Runs Beside the Storm

Identity is not only a motel movie. In early May 2002, a last-minute midnight hearing is held before Malcolm Rivers’ scheduled execution the next day. A tape of Malcolm reciting the poem “Antigonish” is played. Journals belonging to Malcolm are discovered to have been misfiled in the case evidence and were never introduced at his trial. His psychiatrist, Dr. Malick, and his defense attorney argue for a stay, saying the journals prove his insanity.

The film cuts between the hearing and the motel using reverse chronology, introducing events from the hours before the characters arrived at key moments. That structure is the film’s biggest gamble, and it is the part that has aged worst. The parallel story pays off, but the road there is bumpy, and the reverse chronology calls attention to itself in a way the motel material never does.

Why Cusack Was the Right Lead

Mangold and producer Cathy Konrad pursued Cusack for the lead. Mangold explained the appeal by pointing to The Grifters. “When you think of movies like The Grifters, you don’t feel like it’s such a stretch,” Mangold said. “I’d met John a few times and there’s this great ‘Everyman’ sense to him. And while there’s this great warmth to him, especially as he’s grown older, there’s also a simplicity, a gravity to him. There’s something very solid about John.”

Cusack read the script and kept getting it wrong, which is the point. “I started reading and I thought ‘alright well, we’ll see how this thing goes’, then on page 30 I thought I had it pegged and I didn’t,” he said. “And then on page 50 I thought I had figured it out, but I didn’t … and then I kept going this way, and then by the end of it I really hadn’t seen any of those things coming. So I thought ‘man, that’s pretty seamless’ because you know I should have figured this out.”

On CBS’s The Early Show, Cusack put it shorter: “It was one of the most clever scripts I’ve read in a long time.”

Mangold offered Pruitt Taylor Vince the role of Malcolm Rivers. Vince had played the lead in Mangold’s feature debut, Heavy, in 1995. Clea DuVall had worked with Mangold too, playing a psychiatric patient in Girl, Interrupted in 1999. The director cast people he trusted, and it shows in the small roles.

Identity’s Running Order

What Identity Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t

The screenplay is the film’s spine, and it holds. Cusack’s account of reading it is not marketing. The reveals land because Cooney planted them early. At 90 minutes, Identity has no room to dawdle, and it doesn’t.

The problems are real. The reverse chronology is a device that announces itself, and the trial scenes carry a different temperature than the motel scenes. My impression is that Molina and Taylor Vince are doing serious work in a movie that mostly wants to be a ride. The source describes Identity as a psychological slasher film, and the genre label fits the motel half better than the courtroom half.

Still, the mechanic is elegant. A killer counting down by room key is a better idea than most thrillers of this era managed, and the film commits to it without apology. The sustained atmosphere of the rain and the isolation holds the whole thing together.

Identity is a 90-minute machine that mostly runs. It is not Mangold’s best film, and it is not trying to be. It is trying to keep you off balance for an hour and a half, and it does that. The Christie debt is explicit: Cooney built the premise on And Then There Were None, and the film pays it. In my reading, the cast is better than the material in places, which is a compliment to the casting and a note about the script’s back half. The reverse chronology is the one element worth arguing about, and it keeps Identity from being a cleaner, meaner film.

Agatha Christie · Identity 2003 · James Mangold · John Cusack · movie review · Thriller