8MM * * * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
WARNING: Contains spoilers.
Towards the end of "8MM", a detective named Tom Welles (Nicholas Cage) comes face-to-face with a small group of men who have produced a snuff film -- the filmed record of the murder of a girl, for money. "Why?" he asks them, which is all any sane man would say. To which they answer: "Because we could."
Unlike so many other movies about human depravity, "8MM" confronts unflinchingly the possibility of absolute evil in the world. Instead of being one of those by-the-numbers jobs about a Nice Guy who gets pushed into being a one-man army of vengeance while the audience cheers, it makes the "hero" into a figure almost as tragic as the men he's trying to convince himself to punish.
In the abstract, "8MM" is a thriller. Welles is a highly-pedigreed PI who is hired by a wealthy widower. He's a family man; the work that he does hardly seems to touch his real life, and his biggest vice is that he smokes and tries to lie about it to his wife. When he takes the case, all he thinks about is how it'll pay for his daughter's college tuition.
The case doesn't even seem all that disturbing to begin with. The widower presents Welles with a reel of 8mm film that was among her late husband's possessions -- the aforementioned snuff reel. Welles isn't convinced it's authentic; he recites the police litany about snuff films being urban legends. But she's paying, and he needs the dough, so off he goes.
The first half-hour of the film is dogged detective work, which we see in detail. Welles fixates on the girl in the film and decides to treat this as a missing-persons case. He eventually identifies the girl -- she'd been reported missing quite a while back -- and poses as a government agent to speak to her mother (Amy Morton). The scenes between Welles and the mother are some of the best moments in the movie. She has been saving birthday gifts for her daughter, stacked up on the endtable, in the event she comes home, but Welles cannot tell her what he fears to be the truth.
Welles eventually finds himself in Hollywood, tracking the girl through any number of sleazy dives. He hooks up with a porno-store salesman named Max California (Joaquim Phoenix), who becomes his Virgil to Welles's Dante in the hell of underground porn. The film observes with cold-eyed horror as they push their way into ugly, dank clubs littered with people who seem only human by volition, and spend appalling amounts of money for what are allegedly films of Filipino women being raped, tortured and slaughtered. But in one of the story's best reversals, they find the same girl in several of the "murder" movies. More fakery. Another dead end.
Welles keeps digging. He finds a low-rent porno-movie producer, Eddie Poole (the greasy James Gandolfini), who apparently knows more than he's letting on, and from him Welles learns about Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare), a director of high-art S&M porn productions. Welles theorizes that a regular of Velvet's movies, Machine (Chris Bauer), a leather-masked slab of muscle, may be the murderer in the snuff film, and tries to set up a trap for all of them.
What happens next I will not reveal, of course, but the movie knows better than to simply roll the credits when the last bad guy has been shot dead. Instead, we are pushed closer and closer to the real horror -- the understanding that there are people who are simply evil. Not "sick", not insane, but evil by choice, because they know nothing stands in their way. Welles, confronted with all this, collapses. There is a scene where he has the chance to take revenge, but cannot, and instead picks up the phone and tries to get someone to talk him into doing it.
Many critics hated "8MM" for WHAT it showed -- the fact that it was about sleazy, ugly subjects. I think to criticize a film like "8MM" for what it shows, and to ignore the fact that HOW it shows it is enlightening and revealing, is to completely miss the point. If there are in fact people like Dino Velvet, and Machine -- and Tom Welles -- then perhaps we only fool ourselves by blaming the bearer of the bad news.
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