Sin City

(Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, US)

By Adam Nayman

There is an exhilarating moment in Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) when a sneering villain played by Josh Lucas gets rocked by an explosion and flies towards the camera, arms pinwheeling, mouth agape. It appears that his momentum will carry him through the lens and into our laps, but instead he stays suspended in mid-air—a splayed chalk outline-in-waiting. It’s a fittingly 2-D end for a very one-dimensional character, and a witty, affectionate nod to the material’s comic-book roots. Robert Rodriguez’s neo-noir Sin City, adapted from the popular graphic novel by Frank Miller, takes this concept of the film frame—an inherently kinetic space—as comic book frieze, and distends it to feature length.

The result is a film that’s rigorous but also rigor mortised. Sin City might as well be a piece of installation art or a photographic exhibit. Its carefully arranged, digitally augmented tableaux just sit there on the screen, dutifully approximating Miller’s original illustrations. It also replicates his novels’ episodic narratives, playing out as a loosely connected, Tarantino-like triptych about three unlikely white knights—craven goon Marv (Mickey Rourke), enfeebled cop Hartigan (Bruce Willis), and surgically altered photographer Dwight (Clive Owen)—labouring to avenge, rescue, or otherwise redeem a smorgasbord of scantily clad gutter princesses (including Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, and Rosario Dawson) from various bizarre villains. Those who argue that an adolescent misogyny is the piece’s organizing principle are absolutely right, but as bothersome as Sin City ’s dime-store nihilism gets, its aesthetic deficiencies trump its moral ones.

Rodriguez’s calling card has always been his impatience—this is the dude whose how-to book contained an appendix called “The Ten Minute Film School” (later reproduced on DVD) and whose Chef Boyardee spaghetti Westerns Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) suggest he never met a first take he didn’t love. (Exhibit C: those maladroit Spy Kids moppets.) Something about Miller’s work must have struck a chord, though, because the laboriously airbrushed Sin City is obviously a product of painstaking digital craftsmanship.

Call it a step forward, then, but certainly don’t call it good: Sin City intrigues as the cinematic equivalent of a kid eagerly tracing over his favourite comic book, but as far as escapism goes, it’s the pits. Its black-and-white-and-red-all-over universe is a closed circuit; where the dreamscapes of Terry Gilliam or Jeunet and Caro feel somehow permeable, Sin City presents the viewer with an aesthetic cul-de-sac. One recalls Pauline Kael’s wrong-headed excoriations of Barry Lyndon back in 1975: “[Kubrick] suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable; he must believe that his perfectionism about the look and sound [of the film] is what will make it great.”

The difference is that Barry Lyndon’s stately choreography and funereal pacing were intended as a critical parody of upper-class mores. Kubrick, as ever, knew exactly what he was doing. Rodriguez, though, doesn’t understand the effect of his painterly ambitions on his material. The elements are in place for Sin City to be a lot of grotty fun. The players are vividly grotesque, and their backwater playground has been impressively realized. But there’s no heat to their various misbehaviours. When Rourke’s Marv bulls his way through a hotel door to dispatch the phalanx of crooked SWAT-teamers on the other side, there’s no force, no sense of explosion: it’s a fart in a monochrome fishbowl. Time and again, characters are subjected to physical violations (stabbings, shootings, and old-fashioned pummelling), but as rendered within Rodriguez’s coy colour scheme, the resulting expectorations are quite literally bloodless—their guts dribble out white and silver, like tepid drips from a soldering iron. And they keep dribbling, with such numbing regularity that you’d sooner take tea with Barry Lyndon and the gang than sit through one more disemboweling.

The grating faux austerity of the violence is one problem; Miller’s comically hard-boiled narration is another. The characters don’t talk to each other, but at us. The turgidity of the dialogue works on the page, of course—your mind’s voice processes it in precisely the flat, unaffected tones that make it sing. When spoken by actors, though, these word balloons turn leaden. There’s a fine line between deadpan and catatonic, and for all its visual restraint, Sin City crosses it consistently—Rodriguez artfully positions his actors within the frame and then leaves them to drown in a sea of bad poetry. When Clive Owen’s Dwight refers to girlfriend Rosario Dawson as a “Valkyrie,” he sounds less love-struck than confusedly sullen, like a student reading aloud from his cribbed term paper on The Ring.

Both Rourke and Willis do better to suggest world-weary heroism, but they’re playing clumsy abstractions—the gold-hearted thug and defiantly anachronistic cop, respectively —and while both manage to enact a righteous vengeance on their nemesis, their satisfaction doesn’t extend as far as the audience. Like Kill Bill (2003) (whose director makes a “guest appearance,” helming one sequence), the film thoughtlessly traffics in extreme violence without suffering; since its protagonists are able to shrug off the various abuses levelled on their comically sturdy frames, we never doubt their ability to overcome. What’s supposed to make them vulnerable are their puppy-dog attachments to imperiled (or, in Marv’s case, dead) women, but their Rapunzels aren’t worthy of them: they’re basically indistinguishable amidst Sin City ’s thriving naïf population.

The silent, bespectacled monster played by Elijah Wood (he kills prostitutes and eats them, but not before mounting their heads Bluebeard-style on the wall) encapsulates the movie’s failures. Wood’s villain cuts an impressive figure, but he’s humourless and disappointingly remote—his bookish appearance is initially funny, but the lenses of his glasses are opaque, denying us any vicarious identification with his malevolent countenance. The script insists upon his deadliness before we really ever get to see it. Like everyone else in Sin City , his reputation precedes him, but the threat he poses is defused almost instantly: he’s killed off in his very next scene. His end is amusingly gory, but he’s such a narrow character that he doesn’t even seem to deserve it. When John Cassavetes gets psychically annihilated at the end of Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978), he’s brought it on himself with his ceaseless pithy nastiness; when Wood gets eaten alive by some dogs, it’s just another entry in the film’s blithe inventory of depravities.

The tossed-off sadism is annoying, but isn’t worth getting worked up over. Sin City teems with cruelty, but its callowness is transparent, with none of the stabs at gravitas that marred Kill Bill. That film’s arty appropriation of grind-house disreputability was irritating and reductive, but Tarantino’s misstep was, at least, borne of genuine movie love. Rodriguez claims a similar affinity, but he hasn’t really made a movie here. Sin City ’s attempts at artistic cross-pollination wind up devaluing both mediums. Rodriguez has credited Miller as his co-director (a gesture that cost him his own DGA membership), but he can’t pass the buck on this one: he’s taken the author’s studiedly self-contained triumph and blown it up bigger than all outdoors, exposing and enshrining its shallowness for all to see.

Sin City

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