Nice Coat you Have There, Mr Miller

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2005)

I feel sorry for those familiar with the graphic novels from whence the stories and framing come. They are likely to take Rodriguez at his word that this is merely a "translation." I suppose you can believe that and that alone and still enjoy this.
But I am much luckier in that I can take this on its merits as a film, with decisions that are made because it is a film. After all, much of the art here is the selection of just which stories are used, how they are woven together and what the rhythm of the thing is. None of that came from Miller.
For background, you need to know that one of the three great inventions of cinema is the notion of noir, that particular framing of narrative where the very act of watching creates a cosmology that neither belongs to the world of the watcher, nor the characters but which tortures both by arranging coincidences. All these coincidences include the coincidence that you the viewer happen to be there together with the narrator.
The act of watching transmutes the vision into something you'd see, in well... a comic book.
In this case we have noir become cinema, become the genre of "graphic novel" become a specific movie that in its collage is neonoir.
That collage is three stories in a wrapper: Willis is a convict, framed by Senator Roark protecting his son, who protects a stripper; Rourke (the actor) is a convict, framed by Cardinal Roark protecting his adopted son, who gets revenge for the death of a prostitute (and is protecting other prostitutes); Owen is a convict targeted by Roark, protecting a whole society of prostitutes. Each has a hospital stay.
These stories cross at several points as if they were independent threads in the same city. But wait. In neonoir, we have folds that the noir of the forties didn't have. That means that to some extent these stories all collapse into one. And yes, all three main characters (not counting the salesman who is our surrogate) hallucinate to such an extent that they could be imagining their situation into the other story.
In other words, each of the three stories contains a "dream sequence" which is the others, each within themselves, and all within the bar. The wrapper is the salesman who seduces us, selling us one thing and slyly slipping in another.
It must be hell to be a filmmaker with a flood of ideas, the digital means to make many of them happen and have no story to animate. Miller's stuff is just an excuse  a passable one  for the real artistry here. If Rodriguez makes three of these (as we expect), let's hope he tinkers with the idea as much as he did with the spy kids and desperado notions.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.