Film review by Kevin Patterson
8MM Rating: **1/2 (out of four) R, 1999 Director: Joel Schumacher Screenplay: Andrew Kevin Walker Starring Cast: Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare
8MM ventures about as far into the sleazy underbelly of America as any film I can remember. The plot, if you haven't heard, revolves around a private detective named Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) who is hired by a wealthy widow who discovers what appears to be a snuff film in her husband's private safe after his death. Understandably disturbed, she hopes that Welles can prove that it's a fake and that the woman apparently murdered in the film is actually still alive. Welles's investigation inevitably leads him into the world of underground pornography, where anonymous dealers congregate in back alleys and abandoned buildings to sell illegal hardcore videos that depict pedophilia, bestiality, rape, and other forms of depravity.
Some will undoubtedly be outraged over the film's graphic content. While director Joel Schumacher thankfully spares us the most disturbing images (he mostly keeps his camera on Welles's horrified reaction during his screening of the snuff film, for example), we certainly see enough brief clips of the hardcore films that even the most seasoned viewer will feel genuinely shocked, if not downright repulsed, at least a few times during 8MM. The film was reportedly trimmed down after initially receiving an NC-17 rating, and all I have to say about that is this is one case in which the distributor should probably pass on a "director's cut." Still, I can comfortably acquit Schumacher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker of any charges of exploitation. The film's content is never sensationalized, and most of it is shot in a murky gloom that lends an appropriately ugly feel to the kind of human behavior on display here.
Unfortunately, I can't acquit them of the charge of telling a pretty mediocre story: it certainly isn't boring, but there isn't much in the way of real substance. What 8MM should have done, I think, was to explore the psychology that leads people down these dark paths in the first place. Instead, it mostly proceeds according to typical Hollywood thriller conventions and without much character insight. Take, for example, Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), the adult bookstore clerk that Welles enlists to point him in the right directions as he tries to trace the snuff film's origin. Max is smarter than the people he works for (apparently the porn clerk position was the best job he could get in L.A.), which is why Welles latches onto him: at heart, he's a regular guy who recognizes this perversity for what it is. Obviously, I don't know a whole lot about Max's line of work, but it seems unlikely that someone like him would make a lot of connections in the illegal porn business. I think he'd probably come to work in the morning, take his paycheck, and go home. Of course, if that were the case, then Welles wouldn't be able to have a Trustworthy Wisecracking Sidekick (TM). Later, they meet a fringe S&M pornographer named Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare), who is frightening, but in an overly stylized way (he transfers his hardcore movies from film to video and is therefore considered the "Jim Jarmusch of S&M") that prevents the audience from taking him, or what he represents, too seriously. Yes, he's twisted and sadistic, but like Max, he only makes sense as a movie character and not as a real person.
The filmmakers flirt with the dark psychology a little bit, but in a way that's just marginally effective. At one point, Max warns Welles, "You dance with the devil, and the devil don't change: the devil changes you." Those of us who have seen screenwriter Walker's SE7EN can see where this is going: eventually, Welles gets to the stage where he feels he is justified in taking the law into his own hands against the people who made the snuff movie. But since most of the film is occupied with the details of the investigation rather than Welles's reactions to what he is discovering, we don't really identify with his character, and his transformation into a vigilante seems to happen only because the screenplay says so. What we end up with is a final half-hour that seems only loosely related to everything that preceded it. I could rationalize Welles's behavior, but I didn't find him sympathetic, unlike Brad Pitt's character in SE7EN, whose fall from grace I could understand even as I hated the fateful choice that he made.
Granted, some unsettling but worthwhile insights can actually be found in the final half-hour, as the callous disrespect for human life that led to the girl's murder is finally verbalized by those responsible for it. Perhaps the most chilling moment, at least for me, is a pornographer's description of how they slapped her around and pumped her full of drugs to get her to calm down as they prepared to kill her. Unfortunately, these confessions occur within the setup of yet another annoying Hollywood formula, where the bad guy is held at gunpoint and arrogantly proclaims his evil-ness and lack of remorse, even daring the good guy to pull the trigger. I've never understood why someone would behave like this. I mean, no matter how vile and depraved these people may be, wouldn't simple self-preservationism kick in at some point and make them shut their mouths?
Sitting on the bus on the way back from the movie theater, I looked out the window at an apartment building. Briefly, the thought crossed my mind: what if, in some back room of that building or in an alley behind it, a band of perverts were selling illegal child porn, or making a hardcore S&M torture movie, or even a snuff film? At that moment, I felt more disturbed than I did at any time during 8MM. How is it, after all, that most of us lead fairly "normal," everyday lives, yet we inhabit the same world with the twisted individuals who view the brutalization and murder of other human beings as entertaining and even sexually arousing? This, I think, is why these things are so horrifying, and this is also the point which 8MM explores only fleetingly. There are moments when I honestly empathized with Welles, such as when he can't bring himself to explain to his wife what he's been doing for the past few weeks and why he seems so sad and withdrawn, and I wish there had been more of them. The filmmakers could have crafted a compelling human drama about a man who journeys into the darkest corners of the psyche and becomes alienated from the life he had previously taken for granted, but instead they send Welles back out the door to play vigilante.
In the absence of much legitimate emotion or psychological commentary, 8MM is little more than a serviceable but unexceptional thriller that, along the way, takes something that most of us were probably aware of at some level and shows it to us in all its repellent sickness. The problem is not the content per se as the fact that the filmmakers seem don't seem to have anything interesting to say about it. What exactly are we supposed to take away from this film? That people who like the most extreme forms of porn are more than a little messed up in the head and that snuff films, if they do really exist, are a horrifyingly evil thing? Thanks guys, but I kinda knew that already.
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