This week has been my return to cinema in theaters. Very slowly, but surely I’m taking my baby steps back into that magical womb of Hollywood’s.
I don’t think I could pick a better week to do it. Press screenings of THE LAST CASTLE, THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE and MONSTERS INC! FROM HELL and MULHOLLAND DRIVE opening in theaters! Finally, we are seeing interesting films back in theaters, and as if on command my body decided it was time to venture forth.
Today was a damn fine day of flicks! First, in the morning with MONSTERS INC, then the evening with FROM HELL. Since FROM HELL is out there in a theater near you right now, I am hitting it first.
As many of you may recall, I visited the sets for FROM HELL back when I was in Prague last year for A KNIGHT’S TALE. While there I took a side trip to their White Chapel, built in its entirety with real cobblestone streets and all. Without a doubt this was one of the most complete sets I’ve ever visited. No seams. Once you entered the set, you were never outside of the illusion that you were in Victorian London. I met the lovely Heather Graham in full Mary Kelly gear and even examined all of the Ripper’s victims… The most ghastly makeup that I’ve ever seen. The bodies were hideously mutilated and even felt like real cadavers. (I once apprenticed at a mortuary in a small Texas town to learn what the dead looked like, as I wanted to be a Makeup Effects Artist at the time.)
At the time Albert Hughes told me that there was no way the MPAA would allow them to get away with showing any of this in the film, but promised you’d get the grisly worst on a special DVD at some point.
Nearly a year and a half later I’m just now seeing the film at the Alamo Drafthouse North, and frankly the film feels like it is holding back. You can almost feel the bit cutting the mouths of the directors. Flashing glimpses instead of clear horror. I, well, let’s get into it.
The Hughes Brothers’ style is very old school classic cinema. You can feel Scorsese and Hitchcock whispering in the ears of the brothers, you can feel the delight at the faces hidden in deep rich black shadows, the beaming pride of a London with Hell red skies. At the same time you can feel that enthusiasm for letting it all hang out being held back by the mores of conventional studio cinema. This movie wants to have the reins off. It wants to be wild and shocking. It wants to be the greatest JACK THE RIPPER movie of all time. Instead it settles for being the prettiest, the most lush and the most detailed, but unfortunately it suffers greatly from the editing involved in taming the beast.
The opium den feels like a tea party with a couple of nude tattooed chicks. The murders feel rushed and sanitized. The medical scenes feel useless and pointless. The problem with appeasing a hive of scum like the MPAA is that now the film feels wildly divergent and inconsistent.
Large pieces of the film have that assured direction that the Hughes Brothers showed us with MENACE 2 SOCIETY, which caused many to draw comparisons to Scorsese. Then at times it feels like the editing team on ARMAGEDDON took over whenever violence, drugs or sex comes into play. Stylistically, for me, it doesn’t work.
The mixture of styles is just jarringly disruptive to the flow of the film for me.
As usual, Johnny Depp is wonderful. He may very well be my favorite actor in his generation, and here he’s playing an interesting mixture of his Hunter S Thompson and Ichabod Crane. His Inspector Frederick Abberline is played as a lost soul amidst a world of trash and snobbery. To say he has no rainbows in his life is an understatement. Depp handles the accent quite well, but his ineffective ‘visions’ render his character less than what he is portraying. We don’t get a sense that he’s haunted by these things, that he uses opium in its various forms to escape or to kick start the visions.
Heather Graham’s Mary Kelly is well, never really a whore. She is a whore in name, but apparently she is always going this way or that way. However, we never see evidence of her being a Bang Tail. Julia Roberts’ character in PRETTY WOMAN was more of a prostitute, at least we see her get paid for sex. As a result her character has been turned into a standard slasher heroine. To us, the viewer, she is the pure virginal whore for our eyes, while the others, they are all taken or have scenes where they accept the proposition. We all know what that leads to in a horror slasher flick.
To read this next paragraph, HIGHLIGHT TO READ AS IT CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!
Ian Holm’s Sir William Gull is rendered impotent as a character throughout the vast majority of the film. By playing him as an innocent, by playing the film like a mystery suspense, the Hughes Brothers have caused his character to be unevenly divided between seemingly feeble royal surgeon and then, for the last 20 minutes or so, Jack The Ripper. Imagine if you played Hannibal Lecter as the butler from REMAINS OF THE DAY for 85% of the movie and as Hannibal for the remaining 15%. I would have preferred to have had him closer to Ian Holm’s ASH from ALIEN. That attentive medical practitioner to the crew, but with a knowing underlying sense of evil and wit just below the surface, where lies a horrifying psychopath. His contacts for those last twenty minutes are very very disconcerting. A missed stroke of brilliance here. This could have been one of Ian’s great character portrayals, instead it is an afterthought.
