On Friday, April 1st I saw the new film Sin City. I'm sure by now you've seen the advertisements and you've probably already heard that the film is based on a series of "graphic novels" (or "comic books," as most people call them) by Frank Miller. I'm by no means a comic book buff, but I've got friends who are hooked on the stuff. Sin City was highly recommended to me and I read four of the many books while "working" last summer. I don't know at what point I decided to see the film on opening day but I'd like to think it wasn't a result of the media bombardment of trailers, posters, and TV commercials. I loved the books, certainly, and I have enjoyed much of director Robert Rodriguez's previous work.
What did I think? It was great, really great. Rodriguez set out to duplicate the look of the comic by filming actors against a green screen and then filling in the world around them with computer animation. It's not cheesy though, like in those newer Star Wars films where you spend ten minutes watching a computer orgasm on the screen. The actors are nearly always the focus, save for a few driving scenes where the cars always manage to grab some air when going over a hill. Most of the film is black and white, like the comic, with only dashes of color added in. There's a splash of blood here, one girl's blue eyes, and so on. Some shots are done in that "silhouette" style where the background is black and the foreground and characters are all white. There aren't any comic panel transitions or caption boxes like there were in that awful Hulk movie two years ago, but short of that this is as close to a moving comic book we've ever seen.
That's the genius of the movie and why I enjoyed it so much: this is the most faithful screen adaptation of any published material I've ever seen. Even national bestsellers by respected authors end up going through the Hollywood ringer when they hit the big screen, dropping characters, changing motivations, inserting trite product placement and pop songs owned by the studio's record label. Rodriguez made no compromises bringing Sin City into theaters. In fact, you may have heard that he chose to quit the DGA in order to properly credit Frank Miller as co-director. That's a testament to how seriously Rodriguez took Miller's work and how closely he wanted to film to mirror it.
The catch, however, is in the details. 95% of Sin City's transformation from black and white drawing to motion picture is flawless, but the small flaws which exist are slightly magnified because everything else is so accurate. For starters, not all of the actors seem to fit their roles, and one in particular seems to have her role changed to fit her. I'm speaking of Jessica Alba as Nancy Callahan. In the original Sin City books Nancy is a blonde, busty nude dancer, typically drawn in giant, full-page illustrations. These large, iconic-scale images made Nancy a central character in the Sin City books, even though she rarely speaks or does anything besides dance on stage. Jessica Alba is not a blonde (just because she has blonde hair right now doesn't mean she is a blonde) and she declined to appear without her clothes on. So now Nancy is an athletically slender dancer wearing more clothes than most women wear to the beach. This glaring oversight is made more apparent when references are made to Nancy "putting clothes on" before she goes out of the club despite the fact that she's already overdressed compared to every other female in the film. I have to wonder why this choice was made. Does casting Jessica Alba really put more butts in the seats? Surely there must be hundreds of qualified actresses out there who would have allowed the real Nancy Callahan to appear in the film. One or two of them might also have been able to deliver Nancy's dialogue a little better.
A more complicated problem is the notion that this is a moving, speaking comic book, an art form defined by still images and silence. Some moments don't look right with human motion thrown in, and a few lines sound very awkward being delivered rather than read. In particular, the meaningless word "Yeesh!" is used several times to react to some of the more extreme violence in the film. On paper, the sentiment is clear but when Rosario Dawson has to say it and make me believe it, I don't. Not to single her out or anything for poor acting, far from it, but her "Yeesh" was the one that stood out to me the most.
I ended up seeing the movie a second time on Saturday and enjoyed it just as much as the first viewing. That day I was sitting next to a woman who did not enjoy the film because she found it "unrealistic." I don't know if she normally restricts herself to documentaries but she is right, this movie is wildly unrealistic. That's the point. It's hyperreality, an interpretation of an interpretation. It's actors wearing outrageous makeup and prostheses in a computer-generated world, narrating their every thought to the audience while they beat and shoot the hell out of the other actors. It's a movie based on a comic which was itself inspired by old detective novels and film noir, although those books and movies were actually tamer than today's movies anyway. If you "identify" with any of characters in Sin City you should call a psychiatrist immediately.
I guess the point is this: Sin City is an incredible movie (comic book or otherwise) but if you think for a second it's not for you, you're probably right. You don't have to read the books to appreciate it (or any comics for that matter), but if you find such material absurd and "unrealistic" then you've already decided you're not going to enjoy it. Sin City is deliberately not for everyone; it's not a compromise-laden, Spider-Man or X-Men crowd pleaser. That's why I loved it. It makes me hope that someday I'll be in a position to make a multi-million dollar film that only a select few will enjoy.
© Copyright 2005 Daniel Feit.