 |
| As the Spillane Series of posts veered into the intersection between his and Frank Miller's work, I thought I'd post a partial review of the much-reviled SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR (2014). Note also another overlap: TV's Mike Hammer appears as the Jabba-the-Hut-like crime boss whose monstrous bulk gets temporarily wooed by Eva Green. |
[NOTE:
This is the ninth in a series of reviews that will focus on
genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. This is also the fifth in a cluster of Mickey Spillane-related posts (see here for the intro). As with all posts on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]
[No. 5 in Reverie Series: Spillane]
I spent a fair amount of time, growing up, reading comic books, and a fair amount of time working my way through Frank Miller's various projects**. One thing that it brought home to me, as a reader, as a fan of the form, was that my appreciation of seemingly too many comics came lopsidedly weighted toward my appreciation of the art *in spite of* the writing. For me, the enjoyment / art-effectiveness / indelibility of something like ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN is 80% down to Bill Sienkiewicz's imported-from-another-world art, and only 20% to Miller's writing (despite how batsh*t the plotting gets by the end, and how intricately he works dream-flashback structures into the whole thing).
(One of the few exceptions to this art / story formula would be Moore and Campbell's FROM HELL.)
This was sometimes true even when the work was written and illustrated by the same person (as was often the case with Miller; the sublime and never-more-horror-infused line work [not to mention the over-sized full-page compositions] that he did in ELEKTRA LIVES AGAIN will probably always be the high-water mark of his work for me).
And I remember being excited about SIN CITY when I first read it:The startling use of negative space, the uncorking of violence, the sleazier-than-sleaze story lines ... but I also remember cringing a little at the actual writing, the dialogue, and (most of all) that clunky narration. I knew enough about noir and hard-boiled detective fiction to know that Miller was attempting to do a riff on that style—or, maybe more accurately, a riff on our *perception* of that style at the time he was writing the comic ... part pastiche, part hyper-self-aware, part I-don't-know-what.
But I also knew that, if you read any of it out loud (the old writing teacher standby: If you don't know how to revise it, read it out loud and figure out the rhythm that's missing), it often induced at least a minor eye roll. Even in Spillane, this tenuous execution of a voice that varies between real "noir poetry" (as Max Allan Collins calls it) and real "riddled with cliche," at least sometimes stumbles. When he pulls it off, it becomes one more part of the irresistible momentum of his prose. When he doesn't, it's all bum stutter.
(I feel the same about the way the "noir" writing of 100 BULLETS comes off, another series that I stuck with for as long as I did almost only because of the Eduardo Risso art.)
This came back to me while watching the first SIN CITY in the theater, right at the moment when poor Michael Madsen tries to deliver his "You've got a bum ticker" speech with a straight face. I cringed a little, and tried to pay more attention to the then-novel visual style that Robert Rodriguez and Miller had translated from the comics. It came back to me again while watching this sequel.
From the bulk of reviews I'd read, I'd been prepared to actively dislike it, or feel pretty strongly that it was a pointless sequel showing up several years too late. (This the main reason I didn't spend the money to go see it in a theater.) I wouldn't argue with that assessment, but I do have to say that I was surprised by how much I *didn't* actively dislike it. Instead it felt like half of a good movie, with a bunch of slapdash, refired kitchen-sink stuff thrown in to fill out a feature-length running time.
And the arrested, adolescent nature of much of Miller's dialogue was all the more distracting now that the visual style here had become at least a little "old hat." (When Brolin intones through gritted teeth "Never lose control. Never let the monster out" it was, in microcosm, everything that's been hard to overlook in Miller's writing for years.)
The various, competing chunks of story—from the gratuitous and silly prologue with Rourke's character hunting and killing a pack of bored, Richie-Rich college kids who are, themselves, hunting and killing homeless people—to the subplot with cops Christopher Meloni and Jeremy Piven (perhaps the most thinly drawn and cliche-ridden section of the story)—these chunks hang together even less well than in the first film. And mostly leave you wishing that the movie had spent more time developing the "Dame to Kill For" scenes, and less time jam-packing in every last SIN CITY Easter Egg it could think of.
 |
| Mickey Spillane would've been proud ... that link takes you to my review the 1982 adaptation of Spillane's I, THE JURY, a film whose insistence on onscreen sex and violence points directly toward the SIN CITY series. Another echo: In that film, the shadowy government villains are intent on "pointing Hammer like a gun" at the enemy they want liquidated. I.e., they're happy to use Hammer's considerable killer's energy to accomplish their plans, whether he knows it or not. Not unlike the way Brolin's Dwight exploits the murderous tendencies of Mickey Rourke's Marv. In his narration, Dwight says, sure, I'm using him to kill the people *I* want killed. But so what? He'd be killing somebody anyway. |
And yet there are moments that take me right back to seeing those shockingly composed panels for the first time, and approximately half of the cast infuse this adaptation with some of the life that's still to be found in the first. Easily the standout is the DAME of the title, played with a snarling, wholly uninhibited, wholly manipulative verve by Eva Green. It's a performance that represents perhaps the best example of the intersection between the worlds of Miller and Spillane. Green's templated femme fatale could easily double as Spillane's original try at the trope, I, THE JURY's Dr. Charlotte Manning (interestingly enough, Googling femme fatale brings this image up as the first result).
The movie's (and Eva's) choice to appear so often fully nude—nude in slow-mo, nude in her "goddess" swimming pool, nude in multiple sexual positions—also feels like a choice Spillane would have made. A natural evolution of his willingness to write sex and violence that tracked more authentically with the worldview of soldiers whose personal universes had been so altered, so deformed, by the realities of the Second World War.
Watching Green attempt to seduce Josh Brolin's character with nothing but her brazen, uncovered female form—though he's in full possession of the knowledge of how corrupt, how self-serving, how utterly untrustworthy she is—can't help but recall the palpable sexuality of the striptease done by Dr. Manning, in one last attempt to sway Mike Hammer, to erase her past treachery from his mind for as long as it takes her to commit the next (i.e., to reach the gun hidden behind his head so she can use it on him). Green's "performance," which begins once Brolin walks into his apartment and finds here there, undressed and smoking on his bed, is just the sort of convention that Spillane's writing helped force into the genre.
When Green's character delivers the line "Sex always made you stupid," it's no different than what Charlotte Manning is repeatedly saying with her body, at the end of JURY:
"(The sorrow drifted from her eyes, and there was something else in its stead. It was coming now. I couldn't tell what it was, but it was coming. She stood tall and straight as a martyr, exuding beauty and trust and belief. Her head turned slightly and I saw a sob catch in her throat. Like a soldier. Her stomach was so flat against the belt of her skirt. She let her arms drop simply at her sides, her hands asking to be held, and her lips wanting to silence mine with a kiss. It was coming, but I dared not stop now. I couldn't let her speak or I would never be able to keep my promise.)
...
(Her fingers were sliding the zipper of her skirt. The zipper and a button. Then the skirt fell in a heap around her legs. Before she stepped out of it she pushed the half slip down. Slowly, so I could get the entire exotic effect. Then together, she pushed them away with a toe. Long, graceful, tanned legs. Gorgeous legs. Legs that were all curves and strength and made me see pictures that I shouldn't see any more...)"
The other obvious through line is the "punctuating" violence of both Spillane and SIN CITY, the uncorked and "psychotic edge" given to all angles of the proceedings—the "berserk glory" of Spillane's depiction of wanton violence, depictions that still hold the potential to drop jaws when read today.
...
So plenty of pluses and cons in this one. An overstuffed, recycled, by-the-numbers pulpiness that gets set in opposition to the considerable shadows cast by Powers Boothe and Eva Green. I guess, for me, the very definition of uneven.
Leonard Jacobs
May, 2015
**And, you know, I won't begin to get into the dubious and offensive stuff that's been attributed to Miller in the past however many years. Sometimes it's showed up in his work in surprisingly unvarnished ways (I'm thinking of his version of the war on terror as presented in HOLY TERROR), or comes out in quotes about things like Occupy Wall Street. I don't know the guy, never will know the guy, and so in the space of an off-the-cuff movie review feel it 100% pointless to speculate about any reprehensible personal or political views he might currently hold.
 |
| Scrolling through the plethora of "character variants" for the film poster give you an immediate idea of just how overstuffed the film is going to feel. |
No comments:
Post a Comment