8MM (Columbia - 1999) Cast: Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare Screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker Produced by Gavin Polone, Judy Hofflund and Joel Schumacher Directed by Joel Schumacher Running time: 119 minutes
Note: Some may consider portions of the following text to be spoilers. Be forewarned.
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A film revolving around subject matter as morally repugnant as the mythic snuff movie is not one which will exactly inspire a lot of affection; not only will many find the material so thoroughly distasteful that a typical knee-jerk reaction is to reject the entire project outright, but even the more tolerant will find themselves immersed in a harrowing world of debauchery. Equally contentious is that the vague undercurrent of hypocrisy involved in condemning sadistic voyeurs while neglecting to indict the audience's own complicity in partaking this inherently voyeuristic tale. In short, this is the sort of edgy, unpalatable material which one would expect to find tackled in a more daring independent film, not addressed in a big-budget studio production starring Nicolas Cage. However, despite giddy overtures to the contrary, it eventually becomes clear that 8MM, a picture which finds detective Tom Welles (Cage) and newfound sidekick Max California (Joaquin Phoenix) in search of a teenage girl seemingly murdered in an old 8mm reel, is unwilling to explore the iniquitous subject head-on and instead uses it as a basis for rote thriller sequences.
8MM is the newest entry in an oeuvre of mostly unfortunate vigilante pictures by the Internet's most-maligned director, Joel Schumacher, whose effectively provocative FALLING DOWN was more than offset by A TIME TO KILL and his notorious BATMAN films. (There's some irony in that 8MM, with Cage's grim, obsessive leather-clad hero and Phoenix's brash, wisecracking sidekick, captures the ethos of the Dark Knight legend far better than either of his two pictures in the Warner Bros. franchise.) While it's difficult to defend his recent track record, it should be accounted for that Schumacher was working from screenplays by longtime collaborator Akiva Goldsman -- not the most promising of starting points. (I'm not sure that even the greatest director alive could've made anything worthwhile out of the insipid BATMAN AND ROBIN screenplay.)
In this picture, Schumacher instead works from a script from SE7EN scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, and while many comparisons can be drawn between the David Fincher picture and this one (in particular, Walker's morbid fascination with the grotesque), from a narrative standpoint 8MM is largely indebted to Paul Schrader's HARDCORE, which followed George C. Scott in a father's dogged search of his daughter into the depths of the underground sex world; similarly, in the Schumacher film Welles finds himself delving into the seedy underground pornography scene in order to track down the elusive girl in the dated film footage. There's less of a personal tie here -- Welles is essentially a mercenary figure -- but the story is given a paternal angle through an affecting performance by Amy Morton as the missing girl's mother, and imbued with emotional shadings through Welles' transformation into an avenging angel.
The film's early sequences depicting Welles as an adoring family man with wife Amy (Catherine Keener) and a baby daughter carry immediate significance -- 8MM is less interested in establishing a background of normalcy than it is setting up his downfall, hence the cuddling, kissing and I-love-yous give way to uncomfortable silences and increasingly infrequent phone calls from the road as the film progresses. With Amy as his metaphoric lifeline, Welles' deepening disaffection and hardening is revealed by his cold and distant manner as he spirals into the nightmarish abyss. It's not very profound nor particularly subtle -- there are even overly explicit lines of dialogue like "There are things that you're gonna see that you can't unsee: they get in your head and stay there" and "If you dance with the devil, the devil don't change, the devil changes you" -- but it's nonetheless effective to contrast the stony-faced Welles blankly staring at lurid acts of sexual torture with the one whose loathing of violence is so pronounced that his screening of the girl's filmed slaughter prompts exaggerated cringing and horrified shudders.
Curiously, Welles' screening of the snuff film, clearly one of 8MM's most crucial sequences, is far less effective than it ought to be, largely due to the failure to build an ominous mood of dread leading into the scene. It's also not helped by Mychael Danna's percussive predilection -- if ever there was a picture which cried out for a moody Howard Shore score, it would be this.
While the procedural vignettes which follow are competent if unconvincing -- Welles doesn't come off as nearly resourceful enough to trace the girl's path so handily, though clues and breaks in the case clearly pop up in order to expedite the storyline -- the picture hits its stride when it shifts locales to Hollywood and links Welles up with Max, a punky adult store clerk who guides him through the Los Angeles underground sex scene. The film's strength is in its seedy, revulsive depiction of this shadowy world, in no small part due to the sets and lighting; in stark contrast to the almost wholesome, cheerful version of the mainstream pornographic world drawn out in bright colors in BOOGIE NIGHTS, 8MM uncovers the flip aspect of its hidden, seamier side, taking the film into damp, dark basements bathed in cold, clinical neon light. There's a palatable sense of danger in these gritty scenes, and the frequent glimpses of miscellaneous S&M footage (surprisingly graphic for a studio picture, though no moreso than in, say, David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME) in conjunction with the bombardment of disturbing perversions help to create a thoroughly unsettling ambiance fraught with tension. While Schumacher does not capture the same atmosphere of helplessness and despair as Fincher in SE7EN, this film is even more consistently gloomy -- it may not be perpetually overcast, but it's not nearly as jokey and only sporadically dabbles in humour. During its exploration of this depraved underworld, the relentlessly bleak imagery of 8MM is effectively disquieting.
Unfortunately, the picture slips gears shortly thereafter as it seems to lose its nerve and transforms into a fairly routine thriller, employing standard chase and fight scenes in a disappointing move which feels like a commercial concession. Aside from an overbroad performance by Peter Stormare as "the Jim Jarmusch of porn" and the Scooby Doo-like revelation of a surprise villain, it's mostly solidly staged -- there's a sequence which momentarily rivals Clarice Starling's breach into Buffalo Bill's lair in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS for tension, and another which momentously hinges upon a decision, similar to the climax of SE7EN -- but it squanders the sordid tone in favour of familiar cathartic slam-bam heroics and vengeance. The inclusion of self-psychoanalysis by the villains was also an unwelcome choice; while occasionally gripping (the villain's rant in the Fincher picture worked on sheer acting prowess), it's usually just goofy, and in 8MM's case, unintentionally laughable -- when one unmasked villain meaningfully readjusted his appearance and launched into a speech about the banality of evil, I almost groaned aloud. When Welles screamed "Why?" at his tormentors, I wasn't counting on such an elaborate and detailed explanation.
Though 8MM's conventional latter half is substantially less enthralling than the scenes leading into it, the strong visual work of the picture is still reasonably successful in evoking a creepy and foreboding atmosphere. Ultimately, the most disturbing thing about the film is how close it comes to becoming something truly memorable before veering back into safer territory.
[ *** (out of four stars) | Alternate Rating: B ]
- Alex Fung, February 27, 1999
email: aw220@freenet.carleton.ca
web : http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aw220/
-- Alex Fung (aw220@freenet.carleton.ca) | http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aw220/ "X-FILES fans come up to me in malls expecting me to be able to fill them in on the whole conspiracy. Half the time I have no idea what they're talking about." - Martin Landau
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