The only things lacking from what is playing in your neighborhood theater are likely to be imagination, originality, and daring. Or, if daring there is, it is apt to be of the crassest kind. The prime, and dumbest, current example is Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions, the transposition of Les Liaisons dangereuses into a contemporary New York private-school setting, with a teenage Sebastian Valmont and Kathryn Merteuil wreaking sexual havoc. And then there is 8mm.
Mrs. Christian, the elderly widow of a just-deceased Pennsylvania nabob, discovers in her husband's safe a snuff film, i.e., a movie in which a young woman is tortured to death, seemingly for real. She summons a reputable, albeit small-time, private detective, Tom Welles, to track down the filmmakers and the victim-heroine, to find out what truly happened. Welles, a recent father living modestly in Harrisburg, cannot resist so unusual a case with an unlimited per diem, despite the entreaties of his wife, Amy. With relative (and unconvincing) ease, he tracks down the girl's mother in North Carolina. It transpires her daughter ran off with a boyfriend to Los Angeles to break into the movies.
From here on, Welles keeps making hurried and harried phone calls from L.A. and elsewhere to either his wife or his client, meant to convey affectionate solicitude and breathless pursuit. Typically unpersuasive are Amy's high-pitched pleas that he give up the case, as if she had mistaken the man she married for an accountant.
In Los Angeles, Welles haunts the porn stores for a lead, in scenes that strongly resemble those of Paul Schrader's Hardcore, where a father searched for his runaway daughter. Once again, finding a needle in a haystack is made to look like a middling challenge. Welles picks up a young porn salesman, Max, whose wit and savvy impress him, to be his Virgil through this porn Inferno. The path soon leads to a particularly odious porn filmmaker, Eddie Poole, and thence to his even more sinister New York colleague, Dino Velvet (James Gandolfini and Peter Stormare, good and creepy). Still, whenever Welles, in the most disreputable places, asks for snuff films, he is either told that no such things exist, or roughed up as if he had asked a Mafia boss to procure his sister for him.
The director, Joel Schumacher, claims that the work is social and moral commentary, and maybe it was so intended, but it is extremely hard to make such a movie without salaciousness and hypocritical posturing. What he and the writer, Andrew Kevin Walker, had to do is to convey the properly improper atmosphere without falling into the very thing they were reprehending. This requires a parlous dance on the high wire while being shot at from both sides -- for showing too much or not enough.
Take the scene where Mrs. Christian (note the tendentious name) has Welles watch the eponymous snuff movie in her sumptuous mansion. First we see as much preliminary torture as seems allowable (with the victim decorously permitted to keep her undies on), then we switch, in reverse angle, to Welles's horrified reactions. But Nicolas Cage is such a limited actor that his solemn basic mode here merely escalates into the exacerbated discomfiture of a patient whose dentist would economize on novocaine.
Again, when Welles is returning to New York to find the last malefactor he has not yet disposed of, a fellow he saw being shot in the stomach with a dart, he simply picks up his car phone, dials every hospital he can think of, and, pretending to be a police lieutenant Anderson, requests the name and address of a patient with such a wound. When he gets the right hospital, the information is promptly and unquestioningly provided. Hmmm?
Oddly enough, 8mm's scenarist also gave us the much better Seven in 1995, a film about a serial killer that was both scary and believable, but that also benefited from the key presence of Kevin Spacey, a much better actor than Nick Cage. Nor am I partial to the Amy of Catherine Keener, an actress who capitalizes on her one outstanding feature: homeliness. But Joaquin Phoenix as Max, Myra Carter as Mrs. Christian, and Amy Morton as the missing girl's mother all do nicely.
I accept the press kit's statement that "billions of dollars are being spent every year on mainstream and illegal pornography," though I would welcome enlightenment about the difference between the two in any case. A true artist, genuinely concerned, is free to explore a seamy subject, but the Schumacher-Walker-Cage triumvirate does not persuade me of such artistry. Nor does my most disliked film composer, Mychael Danna, contributing yet another score combining non-Western ululations with, to quote the press kit again, "electronics, minimalism, and manipulation."
Another, very different sort of quest film is Message in a Bottle, about a Chicago newspaper journalist who, on her New England vacation, discovers embedded in the beach sand a bottle containing a love letter. She (like, I assume, the screenwriter, Gerald DiPego) considers this missive supremely poetic and moving, and persuades her oafish editor at the paper to subsidize her search for its author as good potential copy.
This sensitive letter -- to a dead wife, as it turns out -- was written, as our heroine discovers with somewhat improbable ease, by a boat-builder on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Even more improbably, he is played by Kevin Costner, who, throughout the movie, displays the sensitivity and eloquence of a pizza deliveryman.
I shan't detain you with the details of the ensuing love story, a weepie that allows the choice of shedding tears over its content or its quality. Only three things are of genuine interest here. First, the wonderful performance by the lovely, extremely talented, and rather underused Robin Wright Penn, who can make the most dubious bit of dialogue sound as if it came from the right pen. Next, the extraordinary cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, making not only the boating scenes but also everything else seem almost distractingly beautiful, a failing, if such it be, to be gratefully welcomed in Luis Mandoki's dully directed film.
But most amazing to me is the steady deterioration of the producer and star, Kevin Costner, completely outacted by Paul Newman in the small supporting role of his father, not to mention the leading lady. I suppose what attracted him to this (as they say) property -- initially a novel by Nicholas Sparks -- is the chance to play the strong and silent type. But the piece is even less interesting than Costner's previous bombs, Waterworld and The Postman, whose dystopias at least took place in the future rather than mucking up the present.
Do you remember the charming actor in such films as Silverado, Bull Durham, and several others? How did Costner become the inexpressive hulk, the passive non-communicator of Message in a Bottle? Is it merely the ravages of stardom? I don't know. But it looks more and more as if not the message but the messenger should be bottled. Well, at least this isn't the yachting version of Dangerous Liaisons. And what kinds of movies are deserved by an audience in which a young man seated behind me and noisily munching on something from a crackling cellophane bag, when asked to desist, replied cockily, "This is the movies. People eat here"?
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