Frank Miller really only has one story to tell, and he tells it over
and over again. He starts with a hero. Not a young and cocksure,
lantern-jawed paragon of truth and justice who vanquishes evil without
mussing his hair, you understand; but rather a middle-aged, broken-down
dray horse of a hero long past his sell-by date, so scarred in body and
mind from his endless war against the forces of darkness that he's
indistinguishable from his foes. He deposits this hero into a
nightmarish urban wasteland rotten with corruption and villainy, devoid
of hope, ruled by impotent authority figures and inhabited by innocents
too terrified to fight back. The ideals to which the hero clings are
usually embodied by the traditional woman in peril- but the woman is
as dangerous as a python, has an agenda of her own and is usually
packing heat.
If you look back at Miller's unparalleled body of comic book work,
you'll see these themes reappear in endless variation. In his
legendary latter-day Batman saga "The Dark Knight Returns," Bruce Wayne
is a 60-year old retired crime fighter forced into action when the
Gotham City government proves unable to stop the forces of chaos
threatening to plunge the city into the Abyss. In his outstanding
Daredevil series "Love and War," the mob boss Kingpin systematically
destroys Matt Murdock's life, forcing the blind superhero back to the
blasted streets of Hell's Kitchen to be reforged. Both heroes are
driven far beyond the limits of human endurance and pushed to the very
brink of death and psychic despair, only to emerge triumphant in a
world too morally compromised to acknowledge their pyrrhic victory.
Like all great storytellers, however, Miller is able to compose so many
interesting variations of his proto-story that we never notice that the
melody is essentially the same. In the 1990s, he created the ultimate
platform for his themes in "Sin City," his collection of hardboiled
short stories told in comic book form. The collected tales of "Sin
City" form Miller's Magnum Opus, the definitive statement of his
artistic ideals.
The genius of Robert Rodriguez, the maverick Texas auteur who shoots
his films on digital video, edits them, adds the special effects and
scores them on a bank of red-hot Power Mac G4s in his garage, lies in
his acknowledging that Miller is already a filmmaker. Every
black-and-white frame of the "Sin City" series, which Miller
illustrates as well as writes, is already a perfectly composed shot.
Rodriguez understood that the only way to do justice to Miller's work
was to simply bring the frames to life.
To adapt Miller for the screen, Rodriguez took three separate "Sin
City" tales, hammered them together anthology-style and centered them
on three variations of Miller's anti-hero. Bruce Willis plays
Hartigan, a broken cop with a bad ticker who uncovers the maggot-ridden
heart of the city while saving a young stripper (Jessica Alba) from a
depraved pedophile named Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl); Mickey Rourke is
Marv, a shovel-faced brute who embarks on a roaring rampage of revenge
after a hooker winds up murdered in his bed; and Clive Owen is Dwight,
a would-be paladin who vows to protect his lover Gail (Rosario Dawson)
and the prostitutes of Olde Town from the machinations of dirty cop
Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro).
Every review you read of this film will mention its visual impact, and
all the superlatives you'll encounter are accurate. For a sheer
visceral, orgasmic eye fuck, you'll never have better. The images are
beautiful, dreadful, repulsive and haunting- sometimes all at once.
As in the new STAR WARS pictures and the gee-whiz fakery of SKY CAPTAIN
AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, all the actors were filmed in front of green
screens and placed into virtual sets. But unlike George Lucas'
digital hand jobs, SIN CITY goes all the way. It's a living,
breathing organic piece of work, all the more impressive for existing
mostly on a hard drive.
The result is indisputably the best cinematic adaptation of "Sin City"
that could have been made. But does the film hold its own as a work of
art? It's a very close call.
If SIN CITY is Rodriguez's PULP FICTION, then in some ways he's
surpassed his buddy and guest director Quentin Tarantino. Remember how
shocked and jazzed we all were way back in 1994 with all of the butt
sex, heroin use and exploding heads on display in Tarantino's retro
masterpiece? Child's play. The violence and moral turpitude on
display in this picture makes KILL BILL look like BAMBI. Guys get their
dicks blown off in this picture. Guys get shot, stabbed, disemboweled,
beheaded, tortured, electrocuted, pierced with arrows and chopped up
with axes. Women are beaten with whips and eaten alive by cannibals.
Their heads stuffed and mounted as trophies. Sound like your cup of
tea?
Unlike PULP FICTION, which had as its heart a simple tale of
redemption, SIN CITY is relentlessly bleak. PULP FICTION stands up to
endless repeat viewings because we like hanging out with Tarantino's
gang of reprobates. Even though they're ruthless gangsters, we'd
still like to have a beer with Vincent and Jules. But we don't like
anybody in SIN CITY. The characters are archetypes and ciphers; none
exhibit any identifiable human characteristics. Only Mickey Rourke
creates a character that seems to leap beyond the two dimensions of the
comic panel. He's nearly unrecognizable beneath the layers of latex
that make up Marv's bony and scarred exoskeleton, but Rourke's
essence shines through. It's as if Rourke lived his entire life-
the acting, the boxing, the girlfriend-beating, the drinking and the
years as a Hollywood train wreck- just to prepare for playing Marv.
He's got my vote for Best Supporting Actor.
But the heroes of SIN CITY win only by becoming more homicidal and
depraved than the villains they fight. Within the context of the world
they inhabit, their choices indeed seem justified; codes of honor are
duly established and followed to their logical extremes. But in a world
where the heroes are indistinguishable in every way from the villains,
does it ultimately matter who wins? In "The Dark Knight Returns,"
Miller refashions the Joker as a homicidal maniac who's not above
killing off an entire Boy Scout troop just for kicks. But even at the
bitter end, with the Joker's life in his hands, Batman can't bring
himself to commit murder. If Batman lived in SIN CITY, he'd go to
work on the Joker with, to borrow a line, a blowtorch and a pair of
pliers.
So depending on your point of view, SIN CITY is either a new high or a
new low in the burgeoning genre of comic book adaptations. I happen to
think it's both. Some will hail it as a geek masterpiece, while
others will decry it is a sign of the Apocalypse. Both sides are right.
As for me, I enjoyed nearly all of it. And afterwards, I went home and
took a bath.
***
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