Thin "City"

By Noel Vera

Robert Rodriguez doing Frank Miller sounds like a match made in
heaven, at least on paper: Rodriguez comic-book style can provide a
speed and motion and visual depth that could enhance Miller's
images, while Miller can provide the wisecracking dialogue and plot
twists that could firm up Rodriguez's sometimes shaky storytelling
(Rodriguez, as can be seen in "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," often
doesn't know how to drive a plot forward; he needs a fairly good
writer to add structure and snap. Which is why I think "From Dusk
Till Dawn," his collaboration with longtime friend Quentin Tarantino
(a clever writer with not much of an eye), is the best work either
of them have ever done (there's "Jackie Brown"--but that's Tarantino
channeling Elmore Leonard)).

Miller's "Sin City" graphic novels (I remember when they used to be
called "comic books") are black-and-white pastiches, the
distillation of dozens of classic "noir" films, where hardboiled
detectives or borderline psychotics hold complicated codes of honor,
authority figures are absolutely powerful and absolutely corrupt,
and women are either whores or innocents endowed with a pair of
prominently displayed, pneumatically enlarged breasts. Perhaps the
most notable feature of the novels is Miller's determined manner of
turning up the volume on the sex and violence, particularly the
violence (the sex mostly happens offscreen and is often remarkably
chaste, given the milieu (one character goes on a killing spree
after just a single night with a hooker (some people will do
anything to get laid); another goes to jail for years successfully
defending the purity of a young girl)). Miller packs as many
variations on killing as he can into these pages, using all kinds of
weapons from a .45 caliber cannon to razor wire to a samurai sword;
he tries to put a spin on the violence through the use of black
comedy--a mordant comment or ironic remark as exclamation point on
someone's often blood-spattered passing. The violence and humor
plays to interesting effect against the austerely rendered
monochromatic background--it's like looking at a blood-drenched
world through armor-plated sunglasses.

Rodriguez's adaptation of Miller's work couldn't be more faithful--
may, in fact, be the most faithful adaptation of a piece of text in
film history. He gives no scriptwriter credits, lifting all his
dialogue from the novels; uses Miller's drawings as his storyboards;
consults with Miller so frequently and thoroughly in making the film
that he gives Miller a co-directing credit (giving up his Director's
Guild membership--and several juicy projects, including the
proposed "A Princess of Mars" movie--in the process). Rodriguez's
regard for Miller is so intense and absolute you'd think it almost
pointless to go back and read the graphic novels, they've been so
thoroughly realized onscreen (four stories, at least: "The Hard
Goodbye," "The Big Fat Kill," and "That Yellow Bastard," plus two
brief sequences bookending the film taken from the short story "The
Customer is Always Right"). All that's left after watching the film,
really, is deciding if it (and by extension the graphic novel) is
any good.

Not really.

Held in your hands, confined mainly to two dimensions, Miller's
graphic novels are an amusing curiosity, quickly read, quickly
disposed of. In terms of hyperbolic violence and explicit sex it
doesn't quite match his exuberantly executed earlier work entitled
(what else?) "Hard-Boiled" (eye-popping artwork by--come to think of
it Miller barely matters here--Geoff Darrow); in terms of witty
dialogue and clever reworking of classic elements it doesn't quite
equal "The Dark Knight Returns," his penultimate interpretation of
DC Comics' The Batman. "Sin City" is a minor work, albeit a fairly
well-drawn one, from a skillful and occasionally brilliant (if not
great) writer-artist, and it's hard to understand why Rodriguez
would devote so much time, money, energy and talent into bringing to
the big screen what was sufficiently engaging on paper.

And it's not as if Rodriguez does such a bang-up job, either. As
filmmaker he should have realized the difficulties of adapting from
another medium, however closely related--that what seems like a
nifty little exploitation piece sprinkled with a bit of wit and an
old-fashioned sense of morality (but don't all "noirs" have
precisely that?) would feel ponderous and pretentious, blown up on
the big screen. That the characters played by stars like Mickey
Rourke, Bruce Willis, Nick Stahl, Benicio del Toro, Jessica Alba,
Rosario Dawson, Elijah Wood, Rutger Hauer, Devon Aoki and (in a tiny
role) Josh Hartnett, would seem too thin and unconvincing to deserve
such a largely talented cast (Alba's talents are mostly pneumatic).
Worse, with not one but three major storylines (plus a short story)
to tell, that he'd rush through all three without building enough
momentum for any of them to leave much of a lasting impact. It's not
just the pacing; his very sense of editing rhythm seems off, and he
rushes through the numerous fight scenes like he's in a hurry to
cram every last frame of Miller's novels into his overcrowded
canvas. The effect is more dulling than shocking, more tedious and
confusing than provocative, much less evocative; Miller's drawings
have a better sense of timing, make better use of the dramatic
pause, all the while frozen on paper.

Ultimately, what do Rodriguez and Miller hope to achieve? Do they
think their dialogue has more wit and sexual oomph than Chandler,
Faulkner and Brackett's in Howard Hawk's "The Big Sleep?" Do they
think they have conjured up a more vivid figure of evil than John
Huston's Noah Cross in Roman Polanski's "Chinatown?" Do they think
they have created a more unsettling series of visual pyrotechnics, a
world with a stronger sense of corruption and decay than Orson
Welles' in "Lady From Shanghai" and "Touch of Evil" respectively?
Violence, stylized with cartoon colors (the characters bleed not
read but featureless white, as if they had been pumped up with
colored ink) and a cartoon sensibility, has no weight or impact if
it can't serve a correspondingly intense drama, played out by
skillfully sketched characters--and there's no characterization to
speak of to even begin to create that kind of drama. "Sin City," for
all its hyped-up brutality has as much depth, ultimately, as a sheet
of paper.

(First published in Businessworld, June 3, 2005)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)