# Million Dollar Hotel, The (2000)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten
     Lions Gate Films
     Director: Wim Wenders
     Writer:  Bono, Nicholas Klein
     Cast: Milla Jovovich, Jeremy Davies, Mel Gibson, Jimmy
    Smits, Peter Stormare, Amanda Plummer

During the sixties a popular notion among acolytes of the student left was that so-called insane people are not insane at all: that the society which in the Twentieth Century brought us two world wars, a holocaust, genocidal "cleansings" of Armenians and Bosnians and Serbs and Rwandans among others, and assorted cruelties on a more intimate, family level, is the party which is guilty of being thoroughly demented. On a less dramatic note, psychologists like Wilhelm Reich and perhaps most others in that field even today stress the concept that in a defensive world in which people guard their emotions as tightly as do nations in their paranoia, love is difficult to find. Wim Wenders, known to American audiences most notably for his surreal, lyric fairy tale "Wings of Desire," is down to earth this time around and has hooked up with an ensemble of performers you'd not expect to find in a small, character-driven work like this. By focussing the action in and around a Los Angeles hotel that was the trendy place during the 1920s but has since become an occupant of skid row, he contrasts a bizarre bunch of tenants--uninsured mental cases all--with an FBI agent so uptight that he metaphorically displays his stiffness by wearing a brace that extends from his neck down to his lower back. While juxtaposing the story of an unconventional romance with an investigation into the possible murder of one of the hotel's residents, Wenders attempts to demonstrate an array of themes from the age-old difficulty of our species to communicate, the view that lunacy is simply a product of society's beliefs that fluctuates according to time and place, and that the Great Truths come from the mouths of so-called disturbed people whose defenses are weak and who are therefore able to spot verities that "sane" people cannot. That Wenders does not succeed in his mission should take no credit away from the noteworthy director. We are regularly inundated with formulaic, banal films churned out by Hollywood committees and need the challenges that Wenders and others of his ilk provides for us. His willingness to take risks and fail--as he does in this case because of a threadbare plot and irritating characters unable to support the weight of his arguments--makes him a better man than the box-office driven suits who play their cards straight and thereby guarantee by-the-numbers hokum.

The hotel of the title is inhabited by a cross-section of down-and-out Americans in much the style of Lanford Wilson's Hot L Baltimore, each with a specific idiosyncracy that makes him or her lovable or annoying. The most amusing of all, Dixie (Peter Stormare), looks and attempts to sing like John Lennon and claims to have been the Beatles' songwriter: if you listen closely to his gibberish you might find some kernels of insight. While he rarely if ever leaves his room, Geronimo (Jimmy Smits) by contrast is an American Indian who is look to make a killing by selling some paintings allegedly completed by one Izzy (Tim Roth), the victim of murder or suicide, a rich man's (Harris Yulin) son who was either pushed or fell from the roof of the hotel. With FBI Special Agent Skinner (Mel Gibson) patronizing the tenants to discover the truth behind the presumed crime, a romance unfolds between the retarded Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies) and the introspective intellectual, Eloise (Milla Jovovich), who hides behind a book because she thinks she is nothing.

The hotel's derelicts at times prove not so different from the respectable folks in the "sane" world. They meet in the hotel lobby to exploit the death of the painter and evoke the interest of the media in the paintings which the dead man had produced--tar pictures, actually, huge smudges of black which have suddenly become trendy and have brought fame, media, and beautiful people to the now celebrated lodging.

Two turnabouts are striking. In one situation FBI Agent Skinner, whose naked back displays a gruesome series of stitches as though the man had been taken apart like a character in a David Cronenberg film, realizes that he is as much a freak as the tenants of the hotel. This leads him to make a startling decision: to protect the person who later confesses to the crime rather than add a notch to his resume by making the arrest. At about the same time Eloise has made a sharp recovery, tossing aside her books and behaving like a thoroughly standard woman open to love.

The film, unfortunately, is unconvincing in cementing its argument that 'tis folly to be sane if the whole world is insane. Wenders gives the impression that when the pressure is on, these loony tunes can meet and vote democratically on how they will deal with the death of one of their own and the investigation that the tragedy evokes. This is a "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" that is unable successfully to dramatize the triumph of the human spirit as did Milos Forman in his adaptation of Ken Kesey's masterwork. Listening to these people prattle on and watching the St. Vitus-Dance antics of Jeremy Davies in the role of Tom-Tom is an exericise in tedium.

Rated R. Running time: 124 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

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