makings of a tragedy, but the filmmakers don't have the will. He just crashes and burns, sacrificed for the usual blood sport.
And so it goes -- pow, wham, splat. The most developed story hinges on Marv, a slab of sub-humanity played by a thoroughly unrecognizable Mickey Rourke. With a face like roadkill and a pumped up body, Marv is at once the classic cartoon underdog and a pulp superman, a lonely guy who can take vengeance on the world by blowing like Krakatoa. (Needless to say, he is also a classic identification figure for the stereotypical comic-book reader.) Like Hartigan and to an extent Dwight, Marv is also an avenger of women, a knight in shining black. Marv has a dream called Goldie (Jaime King), a stealthy enemy (Elijah Wood) and a taste for stomach-flipping violence. You may not look at your dog the same way after you watch Marv go about his gory work. The scene with Marv and what turns out to be a hungry hound could have been published in William Gaines' EC horror comics. Originally published in 1950, these comics hit a postwar America with an understandably strong appetite for horror, and are filled with Grand Guignol laughs, distressed damsels and terrors bubbling under the surface. Like many comic book artists, Miller was influenced by EC, but his voice and style are also steeped in the romantic fatalism of film noir. There is nothing urgent or remotely profound about Sin City and its pastiche of styles; here, the text is the subtext, and the horror is abstract, not rooted in the real. But Miller certainly knows how cool a guy looks, or thinks he does, walking its mean streets.
I bring up EC because Sin City has been made with such scrupulous care and obvious love for its genre influences that it's a shame the movie is kind of a bore. In recent years, Rodriguez has been a careless craftsman, but he went to great lengths to honor Miller's vision, even quitting the Directors Guild because it wouldn't allow the two men to share the directing credit. But in an effort to make a faithful adaptation, Rodriguez put his own movie sense on hold, not even bothering with a real script. He didn't just try to make his Sin City look like a graphic novel: He tried to replicate the private experience of reading one too, slowly turned page after slowly turned page. The problem is, this is his private experience, not ours.
The soporific vibe isn't helped by the fact that Sin City has the muffled, airless quality of some movies loaded with computer-generated imagery. The film feels as if it takes place under glass, which makes conceptual sense, since the characters don't bear any resemblance to actual life: They don't have hearts (or brains), so there's no reason they should have lungs or air to breathe. At the same time, Miller and Rodriguez's commitment to absolute unreality and the absence of the human factor mean it's hard to get pulled into the story on any level other than the visceral. When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who's landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep.
RSS