Medievalism in Modern Guise

Rating: Null/10 (22 May 2005)

Sin City is Gothic-pulp-noir, a grab-bag of pop-culture echoes from Chandler's Philip Marlowe books to Batman to Dick Tracy to the films of Jacques Tourneur and Anthony Mann. It takes archetypes from all over fiction, processes them through a comic-book-geek imagination and out-puts a gallery of grotesques: Rondo Hatten-like freaks with righteous streaks, broken-down old cops, Amazonian warrior-hookers in the latest S&M fashions, cannibal murderers with glasses that hide their eyes like Marcy from Peanuts. It is probably the most complete attempt ever at capturing the graphic style of comic-books, the extreme angles, the dramatic sense of contrast, the splashes of vivid color (across mostly black-and-white images in this case). It is the kind of movie that CGI connoisseurs live for, one they can watch frame-by-frame like Renaissance scholars scrutinizing an endless series of Da Vincis. It has more T&A in it than anything you're going to see this side of a full-on porn film (or a Lindsay Lohan video). It is, in short, a dork's wet-dream.
It takes place in a fictional amalgam of every sordid metropolis in every dime-novel, B-movie or comic book ever created, a gothed-out hell-hole of dank alleys and seedy strip-clubs where people drive around in gaudy '50s cars, dress like models in a Gaultier show and talk like Sam Spade with Tourette's. This makes the film sound very atmospheric, but the goth-noir ambiance can only be described as strikingly artificial. The back-drop is stunningly rendered but the mood is purely second-hand. The influences have been processed and re-processed, like microwave fish-sticks, and the result is something that's not only bad for you, it doesn't even taste that good. There's enticing cinematic junk-food like Spider Man, a giddy anti-gravity act with an eye-popping color-scheme, then there's Sin City which might seem appetizing at first but quickly goes stale. This is no surprise for a film directed by Robert Rodriguez, whose work has always been characterized by a sense of visual histrionics that precludes the germination of anything resembling an underlying spirit. Rodriguez's debut feature, El Mariachi, was amusing but vapid, and since then his work has stopped being amusing. His failure to wring so much as an ounce of genuine atmosphere out of Sin City pretty much closes the door on the possibility of the guy ever living up to the talent he apparently possesses. It takes more than an eye for comic-book staging and frantic movement to be a filmmaker. It takes a deeper connection to the material, the setting, the characters, a connection Rodriguez has never succeeded in making.
The only unifying spirit evinced in Sin City is one of sadism, a reveling in cruelty and dismemberment that resembles the glee a child might feel at plucking the wings off an insect. The frenzied approach to violence is pure Rodriguez, but the deeper fixation on torture, mutilation and female imperilment reeks of a purely adolescent sensibility, and must surely be attributed to Frank Miller whose graphic-novels form the basis of the film. The attitude toward women is particularly telling. On the surface the film's Amazon-hooker characters, played by tough-cookie types like Rosario Dawson, might seem to represent the new modern archetype of the ass-kicking chick, but peel back the surface and you discover an approach to femininity that is as backward as anything in the whole pre-feminist world of distressed damsels and Lois Lane types. The story, a Pulp Fictionesque non-linear affair, is a compendium of situations where strong men are called upon to rescue and/or avenge women who have been wronged, violated or otherwise cuffed around. Miller might think he's being radical by populating his story with independent-minded prostitutes referred to as "valkyries," but the situations play out in ways that reveal these women as little more than props in a sick, masturbatory fantasy of male power. The fierce personalities given these women do nothing to disguise the fact that they are little more than helpless victims to be saved from the clutches of evil, characters with no more dimension to them than Princess Toadstool from the Mario games. Even Rosario Dawson, the fiercest of the fierce, winds up clutching Clive Owen in a pose familiar from every anachronistic adventure story where women are only kept around as trophies to be won. The film oozes old-fashioned chauvinism; and it oozes sadism too. The violence is strikingly heartless and, what's more, humorless. In Kill Bill Tarantino reveled in the staging of carnage, in exploring the rhythmic and poetic potential of violent action; in Sin City Miller and Rodriguez revel in violence for violence's sake. The staging is unsophisticated compared to Tarantino's. Even at its most over-the-top Kill Bill was still funny, but when Sin City goes overboard it descends into the shallow psychotic vehemence of a video game. The tone is not just dark, it's regressive.
If there's anything redeeming in Sin City it's the acting. Mickey Rourke savors the role of a deformed avenger like a dog chewing on a juicy bone, while Bruce Willis brings his particular brand of world-weary virtue to the standard tired-old-cop character. Whatever soul these characters have is purely a function of the actors playing them and not the conception. Whatever personality Sin City can claim is provided via glimmers of performance sneaking through the seamlessly overwhelming visual design, the sexism, the sense of adolescent psychosis splashed all over the screen.