Movie opinions: Me against the world
About a month ago I offered up a couple of my unconventional movie opinions and as a consequence received a few e-mails and comments questioning my sanity. I'm veering off of my usual topic of marriage today to clear up my reasons for saying such weird things.
Batman
First, I offered the opinion that Batman Returns was a better movie than Batman. I said this mainly because the villains in the sequel—Christopher Walken as Max Shreck, Danny Devito as Penguin, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman—were far more compelling than Jack Nicholson's Joker. Walken is creepier and scarier than Nicholson has ever been, and Nicholson did not understand his character at all. The Joker should be one of the most terrifying characters in the history of cinema. The Joker of the Batman comics is psychotic beyond anyone's understanding. Normal psychos are detached from reality. That makes them frightening and difficult to deal with because no one can discern their motivations or predict their actions (Hannibal Lecter is a good example). The Joker is so detached from reality that he observes it from an elevated place, in the same way that the sphere in Flatland could view the two-dimensional world in a way that the poor flat circles and squares could not comprehend. He is bizarrely inventive even in his own plane of existence, which makes him completely incomprehensible in ours. His every move is precisely calculated, but calculated using a system of logic known only to him. He is terrifying because you don't know his goal until it is accomplished, and you don't understand his motives until they are irrelevant. This is the Joker.
Nicholson didn't get that. His Jack Napier became the Joker out of anger, bitterness, and lust for vengeance. What should have been a character larger and more expansive than life became a petty thug who killed his boss for setting him up to die in a police shootout and who wreaked havoc on a city so that everyone would suffer the way he did. As a movie villain, this is run-of-the-mill stuff and unworthy of the character. Not even as scary as Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men. But Nicholson wanted to play Nicholson and did not raise the Joker even to the level of Harry Connick Jr. as Daryll Lee Cullum in Copycat. I can think of only one character in movies that exhibited the kinds of qualities the Joker should have—a character that played by rules no one else could understand, that was a little scary even when he was being nice, that displayed a sort of genius that left all observers gaping in astonishment—and that is Willy Wonka played by Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Replace Mr. Wonka's benevolence with wild, freewheeling evil, and you have the perfect Joker. The difference between a Nicholson Joker and a Wilder Joker is that people would look at the first and say, "There is a man who will do anything to anyone in order to appease his twisted desires," while they would look at the other and say, "There is a creature who will do absolutely anything."
I saw a Jack Nicholson biography program on TV the other day, and one of the interviewees commended Jack Nicholson and his amazing accomplishment of infusing the Joker with humanity. I would say exactly the same thing, but in accusation rather than praise.
The Usual Suspects
WARNING: The ending is key to this movie, and it is with the ending that I have a problem, so that is what I will discuss. If you haven't seen the movie, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. Rent the movie. However flawed I think it is, it's still entertaining and worth watching.
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When you watch a movie, you have to have suspend a certain amount of disbelief. Each movie has its own rules and conventions that you must accept if you are to enjoy it on its own terms. Some movies play with that and challenge your imagination and intellect—The Sting, The Game, and The Sixth Sense, for example—but they stick to the rules they lay down at the beginning. Their endings make perfect sense within their own stories' conexts. The Usual Suspects, on the other hand, pulls the rug out from under you and gives you an ending that's not foreseeable even in hindsight.
Some stories have unreliable narrators, which can be an effective storytelling device. Memento was awesome, and it had perhaps the most unreliable narrator in history. My objection is that TUS was supposed to be telling a story, and instead it relinquished all its responsibility to the character of Verbal. It doesn't leave me wondering what was real and what was made up. It leaves me wondering why I wasted two hours caring about characters that may not have even existed in the movie's universe.
It's fine that Spacey lies to the police for the entire movie. It's inexcusable that he lies to the audience for the entire movie since his story is the movie. The ending is not a twist, not a turn, not a surprise that can happen within the rules laid down at the beginning. It's a copout ending, and it ruins the story.
Everyone I know (including my own wife) disagrees with me on this. They say that repeated viewings yield clues about the real truth. That may be true. The story is compelling and skillful enough that I could probably watch it again and enjoy it. Maybe seeing it with a director's commentary would help. The first time I saw it, I was a little enamored with the ending, but that feeling quickly gave way to disillusionment. To be fair, I saw it on video shortly after seeing The Sixth Sense in the theater, so maybe my standards for surprise endings were a little too high at the time. Still, I believe it's okay for characters to contradict themselves and each other, but not for the movie itself to do that—especially when it presents itself as cohesive.
