 |
| Innocent,
in a sweetly slutty fashion: Jessica Alba in Sin City. |
By
the Book
By
John Rodat
Sin
City
Directed by Robert Rodridguez and Frank Miller
Any book loyalist can con-firm that the excitement of hearing
that a favorite work is slated for cinematic interpretation
is always undercut with the suspicion that they’re just going
to screw it up. And if there’s tension for the fan, imagine
the dilemma of the author, tempted by the promise of a larger
market and Hollywood lucre, but wary of tarnish. It’s a reasonable
fear that Sin City creator Frank Miller learned the
hard way.
Miller’s
influence, as the author- illustrator of the milestone 1986
graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, is all
over Tim Burton’s Batman, though he’s totally uncredited;
and his screenplay for Robocop 2 resulted in a movie
so atrocious that he vowed never to allow his stuff to be
filmed again. Sin City, based on Miller’s comic series
of the same name, got made only through the perseverance of
codirector Robert Rodriguez, who courted Miller with a self-funded
short film faithful enough to the original that Miller relented
and gave the go-ahead. Rodriguez was so dedicated to honoring
Miller’s vision that in order to share credit he resigned
from the Director’s Guild of America to circumvent the guild’s
one-director rule. So, it’s clear that, from the point of
view of an author, Rodriguez had the best of intentions. The
question is, how far do good intentions get you?
Pretty far, it turns out.
First and foremost, Sin City is a great-looking movie.
Filmed entirely with high-definition cameras against a green
screen, it’s being touted as one of the first “fully digital”
live-action movies; and the techniques go a long way in translating
the thuggish noir elements of Miller’s presentation of the
underworld of Basin City and its prostitute-run precinct of
Oldtown. Better use of black-and-white than Miller’s would
be hard to come by in the comic-book world, and Sin City
faithfully captures the stark muscular feel of the series,
using color sparingly and to great effect—the child- molesting
villian Yellow Bastard (a fantastically creepy Nick Stahl)
pops out of the screen so well you feel fouled by his slime.
Fans of the comic will note that much of the mise-en-scène
is lifted directly from its pages: Shots are composed—character
for character, prop for prop—exactly as Miller drew them.
Usually, this is a good idea, but there are moments where
the fidelity is problematic. So, here’s a tip, filmakers:
No matter what the storyboard says, when you give Mickey Rourke
a bloodlustily speechifying moment, don’t keep the naked Carla
Gugino in the frame—’cause all we’re gonna see is the naked.
Which is too bad, because Rourke does a fine job. Of the three
male leads, Rourke best nails the John Garfield-esque noble,
doomed loser vibe—a vibe nicely tricked up with superhuman
and ultraviolent elements. Nearly unrecognizeable under a
mound of prosthetics, Rourke handily outperforms the serviceable
Bruce Willis and the strangely unengaging Clive Owen (who
seems too ready for his Bondian martini). Fortunately, secondary
characters balance these performances: Benicio Del Toro is
wonderfully sleazy as a bullying boyfriend; Powers Boothe
and Rutger Hauer are effective as a corrupt politician and
cardinal, repectively; and Elijah Wood turns in a nightmare-inducing
performance as a preternaturally placid serial whore-killer—all
the more remarkable in that he never speaks a word. (Take
that, Frodo.)
Dialog, too, suffers from overreliance on the comic. Characters
repeat exposition unnecessarily, and bits of wiseguy jargon
fall flat (“Ya got a bum ticker . . .”; “Kill ’em for me,
Marv. Kill ’em for me good.”). And some of the actors seem
cast solely on style: A shootout scene in which Oldtown’s
prostitutes protect their turf is unintentionally funny due
to the hotties’ stiffness (“I’m shooting, I’m shooting,” you
can almost hear them chirping to themselves). Most damning
is the less-than-perfect integration of the three major storylines.
There’s a toll on narrative momentum that could be the death
of an action flick.
But the respectful animation of Miller’s artwork provides
sufficient visual dazzle to redeem these mostly minor faults,
and the highly enjoyable performances of Rourke and the other
lowlifes make Sin City a gritty hoot in its own right.
Snarky
Gone Soft
The
Upside of Anger
Directed by Mike Binder
Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen) is really, really pissed off.
And hurt. And scared. And who could blame her? Her husband
ran off with his secretary, to Sweden (and didn’t leave a
forwarding address for the bills). Terry has four daughters
to contend with, all heading toward adulthood and in various
stages of rebellion against their mother. And she has to sell
off the backyard to their suburban Detroit home, at a time
when she can barely get out of bed. So she consoles herself
with copious amounts of gin and tonic, along with the beery,
cheery companionship of her neighbor, Denny Davies (Kevin
Costner), who is negotiating the yard sale. Terry’s infrared
rage and Denny’s woozy bonhomie are the best things going
in The Upside of Anger, a pithy but puffed-up melodrama
on middle-age angst.
Written and directed by Mike Binder (auteur of HBO’s Mind
of the Married Man), who has a great ear for dialogue,
Upside is elevated by its many moments of over-40 clarity.
Terry’s daughters—Hadley (Alicia Witt), Emily (Keri Russell),
Andy (Erika Christensen) and Popeye (Evan Rachel Wood) are
confused about their father’s abandonment, and so Terry explains
it thus: “He’s a vile, horrible pig, but I’m not going to
trash him in front of you girls.” Fortified by Budweiser,
the good-natured Denny just rolls along with her rage. A former
baseball star, he’s made his peace with being a has-been who
makes cheesy celebrity appearances for money while pulling
a salary as do-nothing disc jockey. But Denny likes everybody,
and therefore everybody likes him, even Terry’s haughty, resentful
daughters.
Without too much ado, Terry succumbs to Denny’s amusement
value and their rueful, funny relationship more than compensates
for all the gauzy conflicts and tiny reconciliations that
Terry goes through with her daughters. In one extended sequence
of magnificent bitchiness, Allen sweeps through Terry’s bedroom
suite in a white silk bathrobe like the evil queen of scorned
fury. We’re just waiting for her to freeze Denny like a statue
with a single stare (in fact, in one misconceived flash of
fantasy, Terry’s anger causes the head of an offending dinner
guest to explode). As any ex-jock would, Denny finds Terry’s
family to be very female, but that’s what he likes about it,
and he wisely realizes that becoming part of this stress-filled
but warmly domestic household is his best chance at a second
act. This is Costner’s best acting in many years; freed from
the demands of ego by his slightly-going-to-seed character,
he gets to the heart of Denny’s emotional truths even while
letting him slide on his trademark easygoing charm.
The third person in this character-driven ensemble of midlife
muddle is Shep (played by the director), Denny’s producer
at the radio station. An aging womanizer with a preference
for women half his age, Shep is too openly pathetic and funny
to truly loathe. And that’s one of the reasons Upside of
Anger falls down during the home stretch. As if needing
a villain, Shep is turned into the bad guy, diminishing his
previous role as the sharply comic antithesis to Terry’s bitterness.
And as do many films with a light touch for universally familial
topics, Upside has nowhere to go once the protagonists
regain their emotional footing—and so Binder pulls out a plot
twist that negates almost everything that’s gone before. Even
worse, he tries to explain it all with narration from Popeye’s
video project, stating “all the fury is real . . . even when
it isn’t.” Which is sort of like how this movie feels good
even when it isn’t.
—Ann
Morrow
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