Dark And Disturbing
(03/25/01)
I’ll
come right out and admit it: I don’t like feel-good movies.
I mean it. If you look at my top 10 movies of all time you’ll find that a fair percentage of them end up with the protagonists miserable, dead, or worse. I’m a total sucker for tragedy, heartbreak, existential grief, and all that good stuff. And if I can feel creeped out and even disturbed at the same time, hey, the more the merrier. Why is this? Maybe it’s because in life, truly interesting situations are rarely pretty. It’s a character flaw (or merit?), I guess. Anyway, major studios don’t often go for “depressing” endings, and it’s not always easy to find the kind of delightfully tragic tales I crave. Still, a few recent films have taken a walk on the “dark and disturbing” side of things, featuring equally unsavory heroes and villains and situations that aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Let’s see how they measure up.
Most recently, director Gore Verbinski gave us “The Mexican,” a breezy crime story that mixes comedy and drama just the way I like it. The way the story goes, bumbling small-time criminal Jerry Welbach (Brad Pitt) is being sent on one last job to prove himself. He needs to go to Mexico and retrieve a legendary pistol which is said to be cursed. (Its story is interwoven with the main plot in a series of elegant, fascinating flashbacks.) Of course, Jerry manages to screw up in a variety of comical ways and begins a desperate (and occasionally hilarious) search for the gun. Meanwhile, Jerry’s boss gets suspicious and sends a hit man (James Gandolfini) to “watch over” Jerry’s long-suffering girlfriend, Sam (Julia Roberts). From then on, things get dreadfully complicated, but hey, it all works out in the end (although a few major plot points, such as the hit man’s real identity and purpose, are annoyingly left unexplained).
“The Mexican” feels like a Quentin Tarantino film: moderately
repulsive characters, a convoluted plot, snappy dialogue with a gloss of pop
culture references, plenty of violence played for laughs. However, this flick has been sanitized for use
by the general public. In Tarantino’s
movies, the characters use not-so-polite names for homosexuals and make rape
jokes; here, the characters use not-so-polite names for homosexuals and make
rape jokes, then apologize for it immediately.
Not only is it out of character, it makes the offensive elements seem
even worse, as though even the characters are repulsed by their own
behavior. For what’s billed as a
comedy, “The Mexican” takes itself far too seriously sometimes. I kept wishing it would ditch the political
correctness and go even further. Sadly,
this major studio seems to have intervened, cleaned things up, and diminished
the film’s impact because of it. Still,
“The Mexican” has some very funny moments and might be a good one to rent, if
nothing else. The Verdict: Worth
matinee prices if you’re looking for a decent diversion. 3 out of 5.
Going back in time a bit, I finally got around to seeing “Nurse Betty,” a truly bizarre black comedy built around a weirdly fascinating central conceit. Betty (Renee Zellweger, doing quite well) is a waitress obsessed with the main character (Greg Kinnear) in her favorite soap opera, “A Reason To Love.” She’s married to a sleazy, cheating car salesman who gets mixed up in a drug deal and botches it badly enough to get two hit men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) sent after him. After witnessing her husband’s gruesome death at their hands, Betty enters a state of fugue and becomes convinced that she is her soap opera love interest’s ex-fiance, and goes to Los Angeles to track him down. Thanks to a series of outrageous coincidences, she befriends George (the soap actor who plays her beloved) and seems to stand a good chance of reaching her goal...that is, unless the hit men (one of whom has fallen in love with her) get to her first.
“Nurse Betty” is a delight, a twisted little fairy tale
for the modern day. The acting and
directing are overall quite good, and the writing superb—that is, if you can
overlook the fact that the plot is built around sheer chance and coincidence
and, from a logical perspective, is totally unbelievable. I didn’t see this as a fault of the movie,
though. It’s a movie about soap operas
that’s meant to feel like a soap opera, in all its ludicrous glory. If you can set aside your logical mind long
enough to just have fun in the goofy plot and strange situations, you’ll find a
lot to like here. The Verdict:
Suspend your disbelief and have a good time.
3.5 out of 5.
Let’s
wrap things up with the big one, why don’t we?
It doesn’t get much darker or more disturbing than Ridley Scott’s
latest, the much-anticipated “Hannibal.” I know, I know; despite my earlier high-minded admonitions to
boycott “Hannibal” out of loyalty to “The Silence Of The
Lambs,” I caved in and ponied up my $7, out of morbid curiosity as much as
anything else to see a movie that critics have called one of the goriest
ever. (I think most of their problem isn’t
that “Hannibal” is gore-drenched, but that it’s high-profile, since it really
has nothing on the direct-to-video “Hellraiser” movie I saw last week (just please,
please don’t ask why I was watching a “Hellraiser” movie in the first place...). I wonder if said critics have ever seen the
“Evil Dead” series or anything released by Troma Films, because I’m quite
certain I’ve laughed myself silly at B-movies which contained equally or even
more egregious bloodshed, but I digress.)
It
seems that in the ten years since “Silence,” Dr. Hannibal Lecter (the wonderful
Anthony Hopkins, still making the hair stand up on the back of my neck by
imubing even the word “okeydokey” with the same delightful ookiness that
permeated the infamous “fava beans and a nice chianti” exchange from his last
turn as the good doctor) has been holed up in Florence posing as an
academic. In a subplot which seems to
exist only to provide a few extra peripheral characters to slaughter in nasty
ways, a detective named Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini) is tracking him down in
search of the promised reward.
Hannibal’s only surviving victim, the millionaire Mason Verger (Gary
Oldman—you’d think the 12 pounds of sideshow freak makeup he seems to be
wearing would muffle his characteristic overacting, but he’s back and
melodramatic as ever, and am I the only one who kept flashing back to Sloth
from “The Goonies” during every scene he was in?), is also after him with a
truly horrific revenge in mind. The
plot is riddled with gaping holes and logical fallacies, and I still haven’t
quite figured out how Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore, not sucking as much as
I thought she would but still not even touching Jodie Foster’s earlier
performance) enters into the whole thing, but she shows up eventually, and from
there on in everything speeds toward a characteristically creepy, astonishingly
bloody denouement.
The
gore factor definitely sets a new benchmark for what an A-list movie can get
away with. You’ll get buckets of fake
blood, attacks by giant flesh-eating boars (I’ve always wanted to say that!),
and (most notably) Hannibal cracking open a fully conscious victim’s head and
serving him tasty morsels of sautéed cerebellum on the half-skull. (I really, really want to know how any of
the actors involved managed to keep straight faces during the brain-eating bit,
because I certainly couldn’t...) But
what bothered me the most was that there wasn’t a compelling reason for any of
it (as in the almost-as-gory and vastly superior “Seven” ). I keep imagining this conversation between
the the makeup effects guy and Ridley Scott: “Hey, guess what, Ridley? We figured out a way to make an incredibly
realistic large intestine!” “Cool
beans, as long as we can do it let’s throw it in there!” Half of it is no more than a schlock horror
B-movie gone mainstream. There’s
nothing wrong with a cheesy horror movie that knows what it is, but “Hannibal”
has a serious case of mistaken identity.
Where “Silence” was suspenseful and disturbing, “Hannibal” is just gross
and excessive. It poses as a serious
discussion of evil but fails extravagantly to live up to its purebred pedigree.
The
other half of “Hannibal,” however, is a deliciously twisted Hannibal
Lecter-Clarice Starling love story.
These are the scenes that make it all pay off. Hannibal and Clarice spend the better part of the film on
separate continents, but the few scenes they share are superbly crafted and
weirdly touching. Here the screenplay,
the acting, and Ridley Scott’s characteristically deft direction converge to
produce a quiet little romance that astonishes you with its beauty while it
disgusts you at the same time, and ultimately tricks you into having sympathy
for the devil. I’m thinking, in
particular, of the absolutely sublime ending, which involves the protagonists, a
pair of handcuffs, a hatchet, and a single tear. I won’t ruin it for you by saying more, but this moment alone
made “Hannibal” more than worth the price of admission. Like the title character, “Hannibal” is a
complex and imperfect entity which will mean and be different things to different
people, and must be experienced to be understood. For that alone, I grudgingly admit that it is well worth seeing. The Verdict: (insert bad cannibalism joke
here) 3.5 out of 5.
Copyright (c) 2001 by Beth Kinderman. This is my original work, so please respect it.