By Kent M. Beeson
By now, we're pretty used to movies and TV shows coming attached with an endless stream of peripheral media - promotional web pages, novelizations, viral marketing campaigns, those crazy Internet games where corporations send you "mysterious" text and phone messages so you can pretend like you're Michael Douglas in
The Game or some stupid thing. As entertaining as some of this stuff can be, it's all about advertising, getting those eyeballs and separating us from our money. But lately, something interesting has happened - filmmakers are turning to comics, not just to adapt, not just as another way to shill, but to use the medium in order to expand on their own creations.
Darren Aronofsky, by all rights, should be one of my favorite directors. He's got a distinctive style, like David Fincher's snotpunk little brother, and as anyone who saw
Requiem for a Dream knows, he's uncompromising. His films are full of unforgettable images and moments. Yet, that's also the problem - I've never felt there was anything really there underneath it all.
Pi is all black and white, high-contrast scuzz, a downtown hipster's
Eraserhead, but for a movie that's presumably idea-based science fiction, it quickly turns anti-intellectual.
Requiem for a Dream is about as dark as mainstream cinema gets, but there, all Aronofsky has to offer is darkness - the anti-drug message is pounded into our skulls relentlessly until all we can do is sit around waiting for these junkies to get their final comeuppance.
Not surprisingly for a director with such a strong visual sense, Aronofsky was once attached to two comic book movies,
Batman: Year One and
Watchmen, which eventually went to Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder respectively. As amazing as those adaptations would've looked, I was kind of glad he didn't do them - I was never convinced that he really cared much about his characters other than how they made the plot move.
But then came
The Fountain, and not only did Aronofsky prove me wrong, he also, in a weird, roundabout kind of way, got to make his first comic book movie. When Brad Pitt's departure scuttled the original $70 million production, Aronofsky, needing to get this story out into the world in whatever way possible, sent the script to artist Kent Williams to adapt into a graphic novel. Williams spent two years illustrating it, and by the time it was done, Aronofsky was shooting a slimmed-down version with Hugh Jackman - resulting in a comic adaptation that appeared before the actual movie.
The Fountain, both comic book and film, is about Tom, who seems to exist in three different time periods: one as a Spanish conquistador searching for the fountain of youth in Guatemala, one as a modern-day cancer researcher trying to cure his dying wife, and one as some kind of Buddhist Starchild, towing a tree through space in a bubble. The connections between the three stories are never quite explained -- the conquistador segment is shown to be a novel written by Tom's dying wife, Izzy, but at times it feels like any two stories might be dreams occurring in the third. It's a poetic, trust-the-audience conceit, and combined with Jackman's committed performance and the crazy,
2001-esque starscapes, it's Aronofsky's best movie by far.
Unfortunately, it's still not the great movie I know he has in him. While it's clear that this love story of sacrifice and redemption means the world to Aronofsky, the woman who inspires this quest across space and time is, well, annoying. The modern-day Izzy is a New Age drip, full of snowball-throwing preciousness, who thinks her pulpy conquistador saga is high art, while Queen Isadora is literally on a pedestal. It's an adolescent conception of women - the uber-emotional, highly irrational, long-suffering yet cheerful accessory who "completes" the man, and frankly, it needs to go.
And yet, I prefer the movie to the graphic novel. Even though Aronofsky rewrote the script for a smaller budget, from what I can tell, very little changed - a few battles and some exposition were removed, but that's it. It comes down to whether one prefers comics or movies, really, and I know where I stand. But it's more than that, too. Williams is a superb artist, operating in that Francis Bacon/Ralph Steadman/Bill Sienkiewicz realm, and he illustrates each story segment differently. The conquistador and starchild segments are wonderful, the former all sweaty, mildewy yellows and greens, the latter cool blues and blacks. But in the modern-day part, Williams attempts a quicker, smoother line, but it ends up looking cartoony and out of place with the rest of the book. So if I'm going to have to put up with Izzy's prattling about Mayan creation myths, I may as well do it while looking at Rachel Weisz.
Richard Kelly made a splash with his debut feature,
Donnie Darko in 2001 and - wait, that's wrong.
Darko was in and out of theaters so fast it may as well have fallen through a wormhole and crushed a teenage boy. It didn't pick up a cult following until the DVD, but its stature has only grown since. I'm not a
Darko partisan - I found it slightly overrated when I finally got to it - but as a demonstration of writer/director Kelly's singular vision - the creepy rabbit, the conflation of adolescent turmoil and genuine apocalypse, a terrific performance from
Patrick Swayze, fer cryin' out loud - it signaled the debut of an important new talent.
Or did it? Kelly's follow-up,
Southland Tales, was treated like an elevator fart at Cannes in 2006, and lost fifteen minutes on its way to general release in 2007. Cinephiles like myself wondered if the dark reception was a harbinger of the past repeating -- that maybe
Tales would reveal itself as another cult film that would grow into critical acceptance.
Um, no. The movie is a complete mess.
Darko showed that Kelly had ambition and skill to match, but here it is as if his skill has disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving the ambition to swell like an out-of-control chicken heart. The plot is indecipherable and there's no reason to give a damn about any of the (seemingly hundreds of) characters. References are made to both poetry and real-world political events, as if that alone were enough to give the film depth. The carefully composed images and brooding atmosphere of
Darko have been replaced with such flat, TV-movie aesthetics that it may as well have been directed by Mick Garris. The actors (running the gamut from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to Sarah Michelle Gellar to Jon Lovitz) look stranded and left to their own devices. I'm a fan of The Rock - he's like Schwarzenegger, only human - but it pained me to watch him give his worst performance ever, whiplashing between stony-faced intensity and bug-eyed mugging (sometimes in the same scene), desperately trying to find a matching tone and coming up with bupkis.
Finishing
Southland Tales, I was pretty much convinced that Kelly was, if not an utter fraud, then a one-trick pony. So really, the last thing I wanted to do was read the
Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga, a comic book penned by Kelly detailing the previous three "chapters" of his convoluted and inconsequential story. So I was shocked to find it, well,
enjoyable.
Everything that made the movie nearly unwatchable is still there - the plot elements stacked perilously on top of each other like a Dagwood sandwich, the infuriatingly shallow characters, the multiple conspiracies that conspire to snuff out interest. Yet, it's the very fact that the story is presented in comic form that saves it. Being able to control the pace of the story by reading it (and narrate it in my head with a non-Justin Timberlake voice) makes the conspiracies easier to follow, while Brett Weldele's art has a chicken-scratch quality that complements Kelly's ridiculous world by deflating it, making it seem less serious than the actors do in the film. Essentially, the comic makes it all tolerable, and while that sounds like damning with faint praise... seriously, if you've seen the movie, it's a compliment. It's a shame Kelly didn't scrap the movie and just finish the comic -- it would have saved everyone a lot of grief.
Amusingly, though, the best part of the comic doesn't have any artwork at all. The story (as such) revolves around a screenplay written by one of the characters, called "The Power", that predicts the end of the world. Kelly provides 40 pages of the script, and my only thought was, Why not make this? Don't get me wrong -- it's stupid as hell (I think it's supposed to be), but it's as clear as
Tales is opaque, and there are moments (particularly a time-traveling bathroom scene) that I can still recall clearly -- and it's just text. Kelly isn't a fraud, I was happy to discover, just a victim of bad judgment. Really, really bad judgment. And that made all the difference.
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He Ain't Heavy, He's Racer X (Speed Racer)Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.
The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008
