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Film Review By John Demetry
Crap was shoved down audience throats with media stamps of approval, initiating audiences into a digital dark age. This insipid politique culminated in the popular acceptance of Gladiator, Traffic, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The causal logic falls like dominos into a desperate design. It all may seem remote, but the heartbreak you experience when you see The Million Dollar Hotel on DVD (or video) makes it intimate. Critics killed it in L.A. and New York, so the rest of the country didn't even get the chance to see--to discover and make independent judgment of--Wim Wenders' latest on the big screen. Within this context, no wonder the wacky denizens of the title hotel feel so close to ourselves and the self-indulgent visions of Wenders and screenwriter Bono of U2 feel so poetically attuned to our own worldviews. When The Million Dollar Hotel preaches U2 polemics about the media and reality, the film aggravates in its simplemindedness or in its lack of rhetorical rigor. It sometimes plays like Bono's sermonizing voice overpowering an ambient background. You don't go to movies (or listen to music) for polemics and rhetoric.
A suicide fall from the roof of The Million Dollar Hotel in the film's opening sequence gives us Hopper-esque peaks into the windows and lives of the rooms on the way down to the pavement while the narrator--and suicide-- tells us: "Life is perfect. I guess you don't see it all that clearly when you're, you know, alive." It's much more graphically piquant than the Germanic zombie drone of the angels eavesdropping onto humanity in Wenders' overrated Wings of Desire. His use of cinematic Hopper homage has the same power as the narratives-within-narratives of German Expressionist silents and the perverse voyeurism of Alfred Hitchcock to convey personal (aesthetic) obsessions while keying into social tumult through the shared act of film watching. (Brian De Palma has always understood this, even if his critics haven't.) "The job of a film director is a particular one," narrates John Malkovich during the Wenders-directed conclusion of Michaelangelo Antonioni and Wenders' Beyond the Clouds. That line catapults Wenders' crane shot recording the private moments of the anonymous people at the hotel where the director is staying, summing up that film's study of voyeurism and moral imagination. That shot was scored to U2 and Brian Eno's Your Blue Room. In Wenders' latest, the band's "First Time" gets a visual lift from the opening chrome-blue aerial shots of L.A. skyscrapers with the neon sign for The Million Dollar Hotel invading the descending frame. These image-music combos have the imaginative pop vitality of the Pet Shop Boys' cover of U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" (with its brilliant bridge into "I Need You Baby"). Wenders' images temper Bono's vocals while placing the evocative ambient swirls within the context of cinema's and society's neglected. Wenders' particular job: to brand onto our imaginations the existence and social circumstance of the lonely with the recovered intensity of Hopper's "Nighthawks". Star Jeremy Davies justifies this gorgeous aesthetic conceit by giving it its human pulse, establishing the heightened point of view of the film's style.
 As
the narrator of the prolonged flashback that makes up the plot, Davies
plays the Forrest-Gump dim Tom Tom without Forrest Gump
glibness. We're enchanted from the first time we see him--just before
he jumps-- walking across the hotel's roof in slow motion, then posing
with an Anthony-Perkins lean on the railing with his skater punk hair
in its permanent electrocuted Wolverine quaff.
Davies gives nearly as amazing a stylized performance of modern anxiety as Jennifer Jason Leigh in Robert Altman's Kansas City or David Thewlis in Mike Leigh's Naked. He also almost achieves the psycho-social integration of Hopper imagery and Epic acting that was epitomized by Emily Watson in Alan Rudolph's Trixie and Steve Martin in the Hollywood remake of Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven. The weak structure of Bono's screenplay fails Davies' potential, but it gives him potent moments. The flashback details the romance between Tom Tom and Mila Jovovich's Eloise. The scene where he first tries to woo her is classic. Davies and Jovovich recede and advance with twitchy, stilted movements and line readings. She avoids his concern for her smoking: "I can't die. I don't exist. I'm fictional." Wenders punctuates this sequence with swoony slow motion that accents the stylized performances and the poignancy of the characters' romantic perspectives. That narrative strand intertwines with the mystery behind the apparent suicide of Tom Tom's best friend, Izzy, who also died from a fall off from the hotel's roof. Mel Gibson's Special Agent Skinner's investigation introduces us to the suspects who are the residents of the hotel. His confrontations with this group of "total losers" crystallizes into a few comic gems as when one of them who believes that he is the genius behind the music of The Beatles explains that in the process of John Lennon's divine inspiration: "God's just the middle man." Better yet, there's a classic explosion of Gibson's obscene screen persona when he declares to the hotel's residents: "No matter how strange or despicable your actions, I can do you one better because I work for the government." The mystery's key: Unlike Gibson's heralded sentimental odes to normalcy and homophobia, The Man Without a Face and Braveheart, The Million Dollar Hotel places him amongst the freaks. No wonder Da Man's gotta keep this movie down. |
Million Dollar Talent: Mel Gibson plays Special Agent Skinner in the Million Dollar Hotel 
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