The first time you know things are going to go horribly wrong with Heaven, director Tom Tykwer’s realization of a screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski and his longtime writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicv, comes when Cate Blanchett cries. The actress is playing a young Italian woman who has used a bomb to murder a drug dealer in his high-rise office. But a typical series of Kieslowskian mishaps has ended with four innocents dead and the drug dealer unharmed. Now arrested and under interrogation by the police, Blanchett’s character, Philippa, hears for the first time what she has done. And so she breaks down in a flood of tears.

     Very actorish, very ostentatious, very phony tears.

     If there was ever any question as to why, when Kieslowski worked outside of Poland, he worked with the cold actress Juliette Binoche or the mannequin Irene Jacob, Blanchett answers it here, at least in the negative. In the course of spiritual drama, silence, and its capacity for outlining the invisible, is always preferable to noise, which is mere distraction. By the time Tykwer decides to invoke silence, near the end of the film, it’s only to discover that Blanchett and her costar, Giovanni Ribisi, can’t overcome their routine egotism to be genuinely quiet.

     Tykwer has achieved the dubious honor of having made a film with Kieslowski’s name on it that can be quickly dismissed. The first half or so of Heaven is halfway compelling in that, despite the cheap theatrical performances, the set-up suggests the possibility of a complex resolution. The public prosecutor interrogating Philippa is convinced that she must be part of a terrorist organization, a belief encouraged by a crooked cop who is on the drug dealer’s payroll. Likewise, Philippa’s story, that as a teacher she had become frustrated by official indifference to the addiction and deaths of her students, is both too unbelievable and too inconvenient to be believed.

     While this interrogation continues, the translator and stenographer, Filippo (Ribisi), a policeman himself, becomes infatuated with Philippa. He facilitates her escape, helps her finally bring off her self-imposed mission, and heads off with her into the Italian countryside.

     Naturally, as this is a Kieslowski project, as the plot thins, the spiritual drama emerges. This is where the movie completely disintegrates. Tykwer reworked the screenplay along with Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, who are also listed as two of the movie’s many producers (as is Harvey Weinstein). Apparently the three of them thought this was merely the story of two lovers on the run who achieve some sort of transcendence through the strength of their feelings for one another. This manifests itself when they get their hair shaved off, dress in identical blue jeans and white T-shirts, and sit around a rural town square squinting with their mouths agape.

     Kieslowski and Piesiewicz may have thought up the little look-alike gimmick, though one is dismayed at the thought of the authors of the Decalogue descending to that level (incidentally, no one seems to have asked Piesiewicz, who is alive and healthy, to contribute his thoughts to the rewrites). But the transfer of Heaven’s focus from Philippa alone to the couple feels like an evasion. Certainly they are linked somehow; the similarities of their names, and a certain action undertaken by Filippo suggest the Kieslowski wanted to investigate how worldly romance is sometimes predicated on a shared sin. If that’s what this great cinematic master was thinking of, than you would also expect him to go on to travel the road of shared suffering, willed penance and ultimate grace.

     But the love story in Tykwer’s Heaven is only a way of escaping the messy questions surrounding Philippa's original sin: The death of the four innocents that began the movie. Oh, she and Filippo are burdened by a general sense of guilt, but under Tykwer’s hand, it’s a picturesque and shallow guilt. Nor does the pair undergo any of the complexities of spiritual pain and renewal that we expect Kieslowski. They just hold hands and make a giant leap above it all, away from a world full of corrupt people who just don’t understand. Just what they don’t understand seems to be something Tykwer and his cohort don’t understand either, though they have a name for it – love – that they’ve corrupted themselves.

     When a genius dies, he takes everything that made him (or her) a genius with him. You can’t bring him back to life, though you can desecrate his memory with all kinds of cheap monuments.