Stunted Hero and David Gale

Daredevil was made to bilk the comics audience, but comic book sensibility doesn’t belong on film. A bold statement, perhaps, seemingly contradicted by the number of comic book-derived movies we’ve endured lately. But despite all the floating, hurtling camera moves and cgi effects that director Mark Steven Johnson employs–just like the same moves and f/x in every other action film–few of these movies are graphically interesting. (Same goes for the lugubrious Spider-Man. Not even Sam Raimi could summon enough of his trademark, B-movie gothic hysteria.)

Truth is, comic book art hasn’t yet been ideally transferred to the screen–no matter how many readers wish it so, just wanting to see their subcultural passions "legitimized" by Hollywood hype.

The nighttime city vistas that Ericson Core photographed for Daredevil aren’t the phosphorescent marvels he achieved for The Fast and the Furious; they simply follow the model of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman (and not the baroque satirical look of Burton’s superior Batman Returns). This noir-manque feel has become a cliche rather than an ingenious visual style matching the cantered perspectives and compositional vectors that make graphic novels a distinctive art form. The drabness of Daredevil isn’t simply a result of Johnson’s lack of flair; it comes from following the profitable formula that mistakes conventional action-movie routines (which now include Hong Kong/martial arts acrobatics) for comic book artifice.

Not since Ralph Bakshi did Fritz the Cat in 1972 has an American filmmaker shown such sense–or dedication–in translating comics into animated film. That could change with Japanime’s growing popularity, but the inability to get Japanime audiences away from their DVD players and into theaters (even for the latest Miyazaki releases) suggests another impediment to the successful translation of comic book art to film. It seems to be part of the growing process for comic book readers that as they approach maturity, their desire to have their adolescent taste receive adult justification can only be satisfied by live-action moviemaking. (And Daredevil’s Marvel comics readers are a persnickety bunch.)

Unsuited as Ben Affleck seems for Daredevil’s red-leather fighting suit, he doesn’t show the physical agility–or eagerness–to make a superhero figure plausible. (Neither does the teen actor in the flashback set-up where the hero is blinded and discovers compensating talents along with a tormented desire to oppose corruption.) Jennifer Garner as Elektra has an unusual lantern-jawed look, matching gargantuan Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin, but both performers lack physical wit. (Duncan plays the comic book’s white villain as a black villain, unfortunately evoking the convenient racist dynamic Tim Burton resorted to at the end of Batman.) Only Colin Farrell suffices, playing the malevolent henchman Bullseye with malevolent glee. In the first use of his native Irish accent in a American movie, Farrell roots Daredevil’s fantasy in something believable–more believable than the sham ethnic realism of the story’s Hell’s Kitchen setting. Farrell’s jackanapish performance (with a target engraved on his forehead) is a reminder that the thrill of action movies comes from the credible visualization of stunts and personality–that’s also the key to the success of James Bond, Indiana Jones, even Vin Diesel’s XXX.

Cinematic wonder is stifled by Daredevil’s attempt to make photographic life resemble a comic book. Adult sensibility–not to mention fictional sophistication–is offended by the fatuous tropes in Daredevil’s narration: "My remaining four senses functioned with superhuman sharpness," and "I was the boy without fear," and "There are days when I believe and others will have lost all faith." The strain for religious significance (Daredevil’s hanging on a cathedral steeple) only passes for profundity with rebellious preteens (thus the hero calling himself "a guardian devil" but at this late date it does nothing more than evoke The Crow). Daredevil lacks intensity. Its only frisson comes when Michael Clarke Duncan’s mug is splashed across the front page of the New York Post with the headline "The Real Kingpin," cuz the transposition of Hollywood racism is too close to what the Post does daily.

Recent comic book movies are only interesting for their demonstration of cultural hegemony–boomers have come of age to assert their nostalgic, childish interests into the mainstream. That’s why it was surprising that Daredevil was reviewed far less hyperbolically than the equally mediocre Spider-Man. Maybe the media’s just saving it up for the wedding night of the Matrix sequels.

The Life of David Gale

Plump with emotion, dripping sincerity, the social activist, Lacan scholar and death row convict David Gale (played by Kevin Spacey) looks at a news reporter and intones, "There comes a point in life when your mind outlives its desires, beliefs and dreams." With that line, The Life of David Gale sets the bullcrap standard for 2003. Who can top it?

Outdoing the fakery of movies labeled "based on a true story," The Life of David Gale ignores facts and uses flamboyant fabrication to exploit current social issues (while the film’s title recalls Garth Brooks’ flop pseudo-album, In the Life of Chris Gaines). It’s proof of Hollywood’s wanton insensitivity that well-paid professionals would concoct this farfetched story about a disgraced professor wrongly convicted of rape and murder and still think they’re fighting the good fight for civil liberties. At least pushbutton liberals Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins semi-respected historical tragedy in Dead Man Walking and paid tribute to social crusader Sister Helen Prejean’s real-life struggle. Truth isn’t interesting enough for director Alan Parker, who prefers gaudy political circus, stirring up social anxiety with calculated dollops of totally made-up "entertainment value."

Parker, who specializes in extravagant, pseudo-important nonsense (Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning, Angel Heart, Angela’s Ashes), uses David Gale’s anti-capital punishment drama to hit various topical points of liberal sentimentality. Date rape, euthanasia, Southern racism, academic politics, feminist prerogative, single-parent fatherhood, psychoanalytical cultural criticism, prison reform and media exploitation–all get funneled into a plot that updates (or half-bakes) Puccini’s opera, Turandot. Such a mess suggests that Parker and company (including screenwriter Charles Randolph) don’t know what they’re doing, but they do it with single-minded arrogance–and the result lacks even the crude force of Dead Man Walking’s moral conviction.

Spacey and co-stars Kate Winslet (as reporter Bitsey Bloom) and Laura Linney (as activist Constance Harraway) evidently found the one charity benefit that comes with percentage points. Spacey and Linney perform this drivel with unaccountable seriousness. You certainly get to see what a skillful and fearless actor Spacey is, jumping at the rape scene with Jack Wrangler-ferocity or, once Gale’s academic career hits the wall, weeping through the streets of Austin, TX, a loquacious, zigzagging, pitiable drunk. These actors’ misguided commitment makes that bothersome crying-clown moment in David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls seem a model of integrity. Green risks the embarrassment of sincerity, hoping to commemorate private emotion. The Life of David Gale is simply the filmmakers showing off their political sentiments. They wind up exposing their political naivete. It’s hilarious irony that Parker has a reporter lamenting, "Blacks and Latinos are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites," while this movie proves a different bias: that whites are more likely to have Hollywood glorify their plight, even if it means cooking up a convoluted, implausible plot.

David Gale’s disingenuous politics continue in its central depiction of sex crimes: First when a red-haired wet dream of a female student walks into Gale’s classroom, her midriff exposed. Gale’s lecture on desire, power, life, lust, fantasy and Lacan is just Parker’s excuse for titillation. It continues with a gruesome videotape of the murder victim struggling with a plastic bag over her head; otherwise she’s as nude and pneumatic as a Playboy centerfold. Parker returns to this shot of a beautiful corpse several times, freezing it in video pixels as if inviting Lacanian analysis. This isn’t just vaguely obscene, it’s the movie’s dead end. It proves that there comes a point in the career of successful filmmakers when they themselves outlive all desires, beliefs and dreams–except making money.

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