Review of The Passenger

THE PASSENGER (1975) ** Filmmaker Michaelangelo Antoniono's existential journey into the human psyche explores the great What If with a fascinating yet ultimately dull excursion with What If You Had The Chance To Change Your Life With Someone Else's? An American journalist (played with low-key cool by Jack Nicholson, in an intriguing turn) abroad in Africa covering a documentary for the Brits about a guerilla force winds up instead exchanging his identity with a fellow traveler whose death proves to be the ultimate irony: life can change just like that. Taking the dead man's persona Nicholson discovers he may have bargained for something he unwittingly decides to follow thru involving political imbroglio in the form of an amoral gunrunner and a sense of escape in the female form of Maria Schneider. What has the beginnings of a bare bones plot and a fine idea is ultimately eschewed for visual overbearing and metaphor to spare in man's navel gazing and worth of identity in a desperate attempt to escape who we are. I get it! But Nicholson barely registering an ounce of frustration proves a true enigma (a compliment by the way) and just the right amount of mercurial precision not unlike his turn in the similar Who Am I fundamentals of "Five Easy Pieces".