8MM (Columbia) Starring: Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare, Anthony Heald, Catherine Keener. Screenplay: Andrew Kevin Walker. Producers: Judy Hofflund, Gavin Polone and Joel Schumacher. Director: Joel Schumacher. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, sexual situations, violence, nudity) Running Time: 121 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I don't think I want to know what Andrew Kevin Walker dreams about. As to Joel Schumacher's dreams, I think I can venture a pretty good guess. Walker is the scribe responsible for the monumentally disturbing SEVEN, a writer who seems far too fascinated with the horrifying outer limits of human depravity; Schumacher is a pop filmmaker who has served up glossy pseudo-character studies on vigilantism (FALLING DOWN, A TIME TO KILL) and fetishized beefcake (the two most recent BATMAN extravaganzas). It would seem that the creative sensibilities of these two men couldn't be farther apart, which is one of the reasons 8MM feels like an edgy, intriguing missed opportunity. Every time Walker tries to drive the narrative into the realm of the unnerving, Schumacher drags it back into the merely kinky.
The premise for 8MM involves that most enduring of pornographic urban legends, the snuff film. Private investigator Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is hired by the widow of a recently deceased billionaire industrialist regarding one unpleasant item from his wall safe. It's a single reel of 8mm film, a film in which a teenage girl appears to be knifed to death by a man in a black leather hood. Charged by his employer to find out whether or not the film is authentic, Welles begins to delve into the Hollywood pornography underworld with a book store clerk named Max (Joaquin Phoenix) as his guide. Soon he discovers that there is always someone willing to cater to almost every sexual taste, and that there are people in the world capable of things he never imagined.
Cage is a great choice for a character like Tom Welles -- the capacity for lunatic action always seems to hide just behind his placid features -- but the character himself is something of a puzzle. Much is made in the opening minutes of Tom's happy marriage to his wife (Catherine Keener) and his love for his infant daughter, which makes it a bit too obvious that his quest for the snuff film's possible victim is really all about his own little girl. At times, however, it seems that Walker and Schumacher are playing with the idea that Welles is recognizing some of his own darker desires through his experience. Is 8MM a story of a man discovering the evil in society, or the evil in himself? If that question had been answered more effectively, 8MM might have struck a more resonant chord.
As it stands, it's still a pretty gripping little thriller at times. The first hour pokes along at something of a crawl, which somehow works more often than it doesn't, perhaps because it's indicative of Welles' tenacity. The supporting performances are solid, with Joaquin Phoenix making a savvy sidekick for Welles, and Peter Stormare seething sleaze as a porn film director. The deliberate pacing eventually gives way to some tense showdowns as the film builds to its climax, including a search for a killer in which the driving sound of thrash metal music suddenly becomes the eerie metronome of the runout groove. 8MM is rarely a bore, and often finds the slick energy of the most effective dark action films.
It's too bad that slickness works against 8MM nearly as often as it works for it. The bleak triumph of SEVEN came not primarily through Walker's fairly straightforward serial killer script, but through director David Fincher's brilliantly subliminal direction; the violence lurked at the edges of the frame, where our minds put gruesome pieces together. Joel Schumacher is a more grandiose sort of filmmaker, one who has no problem thrusting the details of an S&M film into the dead center of the screen. His version of the smoky basements where the hardcore deviants lurk is too literal, and indeed there's something about Tom Welles' entire journey that is too literal. The director isn't exactly trying to titillate the audience, but he's not helping the writer's study of how one man responds to the destruction of innocence. It may be enough that 8MM is just a decently constructed thriller. It's just not a gut-rattler, more the sort of thing you get when the director of BATMAN & ROBIN tries to do apocalyptic menace.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 film strips: 6.
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