I didn’t really know what to expect from this film. I knew it was based on a comic book (ahem…graphic novel) I have never read, and that, like many graphic novel adaptations, it has a film noir look. A few friends had seen it and mentioned its excessive violence. Otherwise, I went in pretty blind, and I must say that even if I had high expectations for the film, it probably would have blown them away.
I am interested in how film noir has reemerged in the last decade in all kinds of genres, both through a rebirth and modernization in movies like L.A. Confidential, Devil in a Blue Dress, and The Man Who Wasn’t There, and also in hybrids like Dark City, Memento, and Bad Education, but this film doesn’t try to give the noir look to something else, but uses it as a stylistic jumping-off point for a more ambitious project — that of faithfully “translating” the comic book look of the original (see the official website for more details). Rodriguez attempts to replicate the tension that exists between static frames separated by empty space, (see Rushkoff on this), preserving the graphic in the moving image, and he largely succeeds. Most of the film is in stark black and white, with patches of color from time to time, lipstick, a dress, blue eyes. The chiaroscuro effect of traditional film noir is enhanced not just through lighting and cinematography, but also through rotoscoping to create silhouettes and uncanny effects, such as the glasses the eerily silent Kevin (Elijah Wood) wears. The effects are difficult to describe, except to say they convey a gritty, surreal world populated by tragic quasi-supernatural characters. Rodriguez does not attempt any sort of realism, as many graphic novel adaptations do, preferring instead to stay with the exaggerated style of a morally simplistic world.
The three separate but related stories each stand up, and each tell a tragic story of revenge and sacrifice. The main characters do not care about their own lives, but are driven by an urge to set things right, to exact revenge, to root out the evildoers in the city (some of whom reside in the hierarchies of the church and the state). The heroes are convicts, prostitutes, and cops, while the villains are priests, senators and, well, cops. The lines between extreme evil and relative good are pretty well drawn, although there are some gray areas, such as Jackie Boy (Benicio del Toro), who ends up being something different from originally expected, although still pretty firmly bad. In other words, the viewer always knows with whom to identify. The dark humor and extreme graphic violence of the film help propel it through scenarios that get progressively darker and more dangerous the deeper they go.
Overall, the film depicts a dark world of extreme corruption and vice, peppered with troubled and troubling characters driven by the ethics of justice and revenge. Although there is an abundance of violence against women, it is nearly always punished, often through castration of some sort. The cinematography works, both in the b&w and with the occasional color, which becomes breathtaking when it appears, even when it occupies the smallest portion of the screen. Even for those turned off by violence, this is well worth seeing on the big screen, although I look forward to seeing the DVD extras for this one.
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