8MM (1999)
a review by Christian Pyle
After 1993's "Falling Down," I hoped that Joel Schumacher would mature into a great director. Since then he has offered us two so-so adaptations of John Grisham novels ("The Client" and "A Time to Kill") and two Batman movies that lowered the standards of that franchise. Although these disappointments dampened my enthusiasm for Schumacher's potential, the publicity for his latest release, "8MM," raised new hope. It promised to be something unusual. It wasn't.
The plot goes like this: Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is a private eye who is hired by a wealthy woman, allegorically named Mrs. Christian (Myra Carter), to investigate an 8mm movie found among her late husband's belongings. The movie appears to be a snuff film in which a teenage girl is raped and murdered by a man in a leather mask (who reminds me of Bane in Schumacher's "Batman & Robin"). Because murders can be realistically simulated in movies, Mrs. Christian wants Tom to discover if the girl is alive or dead. By combing through missing persons reports, Tom finds the girl's name and tracks her to Los Angeles. With the aid of Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), a video store clerk (and another symbolic name), Tom wanders through the underworld of pornography in search of snuff.
The plot bears an obvious resemblance to Paul Schrader's "Hardcore," in which a father goes deeper and deeper into the industries of porn and sex to find his missing daughter. Both films are modeled on Dante's "The Inferno," of course; "8MM" makes that connection overly obvious by casting Max as Virgil and having him constantly tell Tom that they were heading toward a meeting with the devil. "Hardcore" is a much more subtle and meaningful film.
"8MM" had a lot of promise. In its better moments it's an examination of violence as entertainment and of the beast within even a nice guy like Tom. One moment of the first sort: when we first meet Max he's reading Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" underneath the cover of a porn novel. "In Cold Blood" was the father of the true-crime genre, which is the literary equivalent of snuff films.
Max promises that we will see examples of the second theme when he tells Tom, "Dance with the devil and the devil don't change; the devil changes you." Tom does change-I'll let you discover the specifics for yourself-but not permanently. Schumacher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker didn't have the guts to take Tom so far down the dark tunnel that he couldn't come back. (Walker's "Seven" did a much better job on that theme by refusing to compromise).
Cage tries hard to pull it off, but the script doesn't give him enough to work with. Phoenix walks away with the movie-he's smart, charming, and funny. Other cast members include "Fargo"'s Peter Stormare camping it up as porn auteur Dino Velvet and "The Sopranos"'s James Gandolfini as a soulless porn merchant who pushes Tom too far.
In the last analysis, since "8MM" falls short of its pretensions and its promise, its just another private eye story in the Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald tradition of having the detective uncover the depravity behind the glossy facade of wealth and privilege. However, unlike other predictable fare in the genre-last year's "Twilight," for example-"8MM" is especially disappointing because it could have been much more than it is.
Grade: D+
© 1999 Christian L. Pyle
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