Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
No more romantic comedies this week! I’m getting down and dirty with Eight Millimeter. Directed by Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever) and starring Nicholas Cage and Joaquin Phoenix, 8MM, as it is called, is the stuff of contemporary legend and nightmare. Yet, in the hands of a brilliant cast and a commercially canny director it emerges as a surprisingly gentle study of gentle people caring for and caring about each other.
Be very sure, there is violence. Be warned that the subject is the extreme form of pornography known as the "snuff film," involving an eroticized but real murder. But, be reminded that as I was leaving the theater, I heard a young man say to his date that 8MM had put his foot to sleep.
The widow (Myra Carter) of an extremely wealthy man has found among his personal effects an eight-millimeter film that appears to be an authentic snuff film. She hires Tom Wells (Cage), a young private detective who--like some internet movie reviewers--seems to be a has-been before he ever was, to determine whether the film is genuine, and if so, to learn the identity of the young woman killed in the film.
The movie (to distinguish it from the film in its plot) stretches from Miami to Los Angeles. There Wells meets Max (Phoenix)--punk rocker, Truman Capote fan, and guardian angel by default--who takes Tom under his pierced and tattooed wing to guide him through the underbelly of the underbelly, the dark, extremely wild side of the porn industry. Tom is an outsider in this outsider’s world, in his dressy but cool threads, calling his wife every night, almost.
Along the way, his audience is reminded that at least from Graham Greene until the contemporary James Lee Burke, detective stories have been the last refuge of the eschatological, the only fiction in which serious evil can be taken seriously. The detective, a good-natured but somehow limited individual, goes like some ancient pilgrim into a dark wood, aiming for the heart of the matter, the belly of the beast, the conundrum wrapped in the mystery of evil.
One of the surlier monsters in the current outing remarks that he has committed his crimes not for any sort of politically correct and jury-pleasing reasons, just because he likes to. In other words, we are dealing with evil, purely, simply, not evil that can be talked away, either in some touchy-feely therapeutic mode or as the product of some socio-economic structure: Evil, with a capital "e" –and that rhymes with "t" and that stands for trouble.
And there is trouble in this film. The first half-hour drags, as Tom, coming home from a job in Miami, offers to cook dinner, later gets up with the crying baby, and rakes leaves. (A note to the women who read this column: no, this is not science fiction.) This leaves Catherine Keener, who plays his wife, stuck with not even a one-note role but a half-note role; she greets this paragon by nagging that he still smokes!
Throughout the film director Schumacher seems more at home at home, showing Tom’s menage, his nagging wife, his crying infant, and his leaf-prolific trees, as a moral norm against which Tom’s descent into the hell of the ultra-pornographers, is measured or given value. Cage, whose performances so often are so intense, remarkably underplays his role, again except when he is at home. There is a hint that Tom has some attraction to the world into which he descends, and when he finally goes over the top, or more likely, down into the depths, Cage lets go with a few of the most convincing and terrifying minutes I’ve ever spent watching a film.
Those few minutes do not sustain the 122 minutes of this movie. On one end of the extremes to which this 8MM is stretched, the world of incredible wealth and privilege that Tom’s client inhabits never comes alive. It takes more than a fleeting glimpse of a mansion (remember The Beverly Hillbillies?) and a few dark interiors stuffy with wainscoting to convince us that anyone could be so powerful, so rich. At the other extreme, what is supposed to be a kaleidoscopic view of the pornography industry fizzles. Quick shots of street people and the occasional leather mask don’t convey the horror into which Tom strides.
Yet, 8MM did not put my foot to sleep. Instead, as I walked out , the carnival that pops up every Friday evening outside the theater, was marked by a different light or darkness. Just as Tom’s experience shook his quiet, ordinary life, so did my experience of this film shake mine. It is well worth the effort, but watching it is an effort that some might not want to make. But, in the final moments of the film, with Tom once again raking leaves, the final words are about caring, and as I looked at the tired suburbanites, the teenagers with their faces full of pimples and piercings, I wanted to care.
To prepare myself for this film, I spent a couple of evenings exploring the similarly dark sides of the Internet. After a couple of evenings, my overwhelming feeling was sheer boredom. There has been a great deal of publicity about pornography on the Internet, and it is a valid concern for schools. With Peanut.org as the Internet service provider for the Worth County schools, access to pornography has been pretty effectively blocked there. But, appropriately, I am including no links in this review.
But, the Internet is not some chamber of horrors. It is a mirror. Each of us finds images of himself or herself in the computer monitor. The Internet is a tool. How we use it, and what we construct with it is up to us. So, especially, when you walk through the moral quagmires of films like this, or brave the darkest shadows of the Internet, keep your feet dry, and your heart defensively full of noble thoughts.