# 8MM (1999)

### reviewed by
Dennis Schwartz

8MM (director: Joel Schumacher; screenwriter: Andrew Kevin Walker; cinematographer: Robert Elswit; cast: Nicolas Cage (Tom Welles), Joaquin Phoenix (Max California), Catherine Keener (Amy Welles), James Gandolfini (Eddie Poole), Peter Stormare (Dino Velvet), Chris Bauer (Machine), Anthony Heald (Longdale), Amy Morton (Mrs. Mathews), Myra Carter (Mrs. Christian), Jenny Powell (Mary Anne Mathews), 1999)

    Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Joel Schumacher's "8 MM" jumps into the underworld of pornography, focusing on the makers of "snuff" films, those who are so vile that they make the ones in the regular porno business seem like angels in comparison. Nicolas Cage as Tom Welles, an ambitious career, family man from Harrisburg, Pa., whose father was a coal miner but he went to college on an academic scholarship, choosing to do surveillance work because that's where the big money is at. Slowly building up a repetition in the field because of his discretion, he gets his break when a coal factory tycoon dies and his widow, Mrs. Christian (Myra), on her lawyer's (Heald) recommendation chooses him to find out if the "snuff film" she found in her husband's safe, actually happened. She wants to know if the girl is alive or dead.

Tom kisses his loving wife Amy (Keener) and his baby daughter goodbye, and tells them don't ask questions, I'm doing this so we can all live better. Catherine Keener, a normally interesting actress, has nothing to do in this role but whine and act drab. All the Charles Bronson-like heroics are reserved for Cage, in a role that is more incredulous than believable, and less introspective than ridiculous, as he heads for Cleveland after tracking down who the missing girl is through the computer files of the missing persons records and identifies the girl as Mary Anne Matthews. In Cleveland he talks with her mother (Morton) and is able to track the white-thrash 16-year-old girl's next destination as Hollywood. Cage, at all times seems wooden, never relaxed in the role. It makes one nervous just watching him trying to act a role he can't seem to get the handle on.

All his reactions against the evil people he is up against, are knee-jerk reactions, whereas nothing feels hearfelt. It seems as if it is a set-up for the middle-class audience, the one the film hopes to attract, so they will get some vicarious feelings of revenge as Tom acts as a surrogate for them, who will enforce the law vigilante-style from his nebulous position of highly paid private investigator. What the director thought he was getting, was Tom searching for the evil in himself, where this straight-arrow becomes capable of taking the law into his own hands by dancing with the devil and becoming like the devil. It just never came off that way, and for a number of reasons, not the least of them being, was that Cage wasn't right for the part and that he was never seen in a reflective moment undergoing a life change. The dramatics here seemed misplaced, as if they were intended more for one of the director's Batman flicks, something the director brought more life to than he did with this film.

The writer is Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote ''Seven,''as he toiled at his day job as a clerk in a New York City Tower Records store. He again has a protagonist who looks at evil and is amazed by it. But this time the look seems artificial and not well-placed, as Cage is not really an introspective person, he is just someone trying to make a better life for himself at a job he is good at. And that is the main problem with the film, it has a false gritty noir look to it. This film is not the real deal, it's ersatz. Therefore it never works on the intellect, instead it attacks the emotions and cheapens its efforts by pretending to delve into Cage's angst. Even the credible camera work, which seems too sharp-edged for the film, works against it, because it is so much better than the story and the weak acting, that it highlights even more, how artificial the film seems.

The film seems most comfortable when it is in the middle of its soft porn scenes, as Tom reaches the sleazy streets of Hollywood and watches some porno films in his motel room. He finds an adult book store and befriends the clerk, Max California (Phoenix), into helping him get around in the porn world, a world Tom makes faces at, showing us how nice a guy he is by not liking this sleazy form of sex.

We know Max is a good-guy because he is reading Truman Capote, not some porn novel, while working behind the cash register. Tom is so impressed with Max, that he hires him to locate the maker of the snuff film he is looking for, and the two become soul mates, sort of telling us they both do what they do because they have to make a living and are blind to the consequences of their work. Max once had ambitions to be a musician, but in Los Angeles, the sex trade is such an easy lure, that it takes many an aspiring artist down its sleazy path, as they think there is no other way for them to make a living.

The heavies of the film are all personifications of pure evil. There is nothing good about them. They belong to the underworld of porn. Machine (Bauer), Eddie Poole (Gandolfini), and Dino Velvet (Stormare), are the ones Tom must come up against to find his answer if the girl is still alive. There is one other mystery evil man, the producer of the film, the one who pocketed most of the money for the film, cheating his trio of partners. Machine is the masked one in the films, the one who knifes the girl to death. Poole is the contact and distributor of the film. Velvet is the tacky artist; he makes the films. Velvet is considered to be the Jim Jarmusch of S&M films. His creepy studio of torture devices and knives and whips, will be the place where Tom takes these perverts on and seeks revenge for the girl he completely identifies with.

The results are as gratituous as any found in a myriad of cheap adventure films that appeal to a ready made audience, not looking for a thinking picture. The box office mistake of this film, is that it took itself seriously, somehow believing itself a thinking picture, and thereby lost both types of audiences. Because those who enjoy the exploitive gore films, must have found something lacking here also, like just enough thinking to turn them off from the film.

The film had perhaps one line in it that didn't seem phony, when the masked killer is unmasked and says, " The things I do--I do them because I like them. Because I want to. I wasn't abused as a child. I don't hate my parents.'' At last, the writer and director have located where the evil comes from that they are looking for. It is everywhere. The film's saving grace is that it had a morality to it, one that the viewer might have trouble reconciling in his mind, as the handcuffed to the bed private investigator fights his way out of the porno studio and has to call the victim's mother to see if she loved her daughter and thinks her killers should die, before he can take his revenge on them. That dilemma might have worked as a morality play, if the acting and the story didn't seem so wooden and phony.

    REVIEWED ON 2/12/2000    GRADE: C

Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"

    http://www.sover.net/~ozus

    ozus@sover.net

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