Welcome to Hell
Robert Rodriguez-Frank Miller team-up is stunning, uncompromising and unrelentingly grim
by Noel Murray
Sin City
Now showing at area theaters
I gave up on Frank Miller shortly after his Batman graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, when nearly every comic he wrote or drew followed the same formula: eye-catching style in service of relentless nihilism. Miller's world festers and boils, tended to equally by ruthlessly fascistic right-wingers and humorless lefties who make life impossible for the violently amoral anti-heroes trying to upset the balance of power.
I gave up on Robert Rodriguez shortly after the first Spy Kids movie, at which point the director turned into a technophile ideologue, more enthusiastic about model-building and computer programs than telling stories. The exuberance and visual imagination of the man who made El Mariachi on a four-figure budget remains, but increasingly Rodriguez seems as though he's in training for a movie he hasn't gotten around to making.
Sin City isn't that movie, but in collaborating with Miller on an adaptation of the author's noir comics series, Rodriguez has delivered his first picture since El Mariachi that can really be called distinctive. Sin City translates three of Miller's graphic novels—The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard—into a new form of comic book cinema. Rodriguez treats Miller's art as sacred text, using blue-screens and digital effects to re-create the exact framing and design of his original comics panels. The film is shot in black-and-white with splashes of red, blue and yellow; and though the stories are hyper-violent, the stark lighting and abstracted color scheme makes Sin City seem more like a pulp dream than a gore-fest.
Still, make no mistake: this is one sick show. In The Hard Goodbye, Mickey Rourke plays Marv, a scar-faced ex-con who gets framed for the murder of a prostitute and follows the setup all the way to a remote farmhouse and a flesh-eating mute. In The Big Fat Kill, Clive Owen is Dwight, a false-faced fugitive who helps the self-governing prostitutes of "Old Town" butcher undercover cop Jackie Boy (played by Benicio Del Toro). And in That Yellow Bastard, Bruce Willis plays Hartigan, a police detective whose attempt to put away a murderous pedophile (a grotesque Nicky Katt) leads to the cop's arrest, with only sweetheart stripper Nancy (Jessica Alba) to count on. Some characters recur in each story, but each is a distinct narrative, with a tainted hero and an overload of gaudy brutality.
There's a lot to admire about Sin City. At a time when prudish moral crusaders seem to have commandeered every open microphone, it's bracing to see a movie that gives willing adults a healthy serving of sex of violence. Rodriguez and Miller are uncompromising, bringing the original stories to life with all the disemboweling, dangly earrings and topless lesbian parole officers intact. Plus, the digital world that Rodriguez has created is simply stunning. The whole look of Sin City resembles what Dwight says of über-prostitute Gail (played by Rosario Dawson): she's deadly, but it's hard to take your eyes off her.
Though I'd be one of the first in line to see another Sin City movie made by this team, I'm not eager to see this one again. For one thing, Rodriguez still hasn't overcome his tendency to stand detached from his material. A lot of Sin City should be funnier than it is, like when Dwight tells the Old Town girls that to clean up their massacre, he'll need "a car with a big trunk." As directed by Rodriguez, Clive Owen throws the line away. It's telling that in the one scene "guest-directed" by Quentin Tarantino—a traveling conversation between Dwight and the half-decapitated Jackie Boy—the actors suddenly find new levels to their performances.
For all the impressionistic bloodletting and special-effects splendor of Sin City, it's Miller's sensibility that drives the jalopy, for better and worse. After Miller created his "grim 'n' gritty" Batman, he became preoccupied with depicting the world as an unflushed toilet—one of the Sin City movie's dominant images. Miller's saw has gotten rustier and rustier, in large part because he's been working for an audience of aging comic book fans who think decay is inherently cool. Perversity and draftsmanship have become ends in themselves.
It wasn't always this way. When Miller was wrapping up his first seminal run on Daredevil, he closed with a story called "Roulette," in which the vigilante hero sits by the bedside of a paid assassin and tells a story about child abuse and heroism that has Daredevil openly questioning his violent methods of crime-fighting. With "Roulette," Miller looked hard at his kind of bruised and pulpy genre fiction, and he flinched.
He hasn't flinched since.
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