One of Us.

Rating: 8/10 (14 August 2008)

This has to be the only totally straight movie that David Lynch ever put his fingers on. And at that, it's not entirely straight, but it seldom edges into Lynch's private vision, or through the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole, or into The Garden of Earthly Delights or the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, or wherever it is that his other films, beginning with "Eraserhead", have voyaged into.
I should note that all of David Lynch's movies are eerie and ominous, but that the atmosphere isn't created by directorial fireworks. The techniques are classical -- no instant cutting, no slow motion, no ghoulish colors, no funny camera work, although the lens may occasionally plumb the auditory canal of a severed ear. Instead, what makes his work exception is his control of the images and sound. The art direction, set decoration, the architecture and textures, and the sound are as filled with impact as the story itself.
It's a sentimental and ultimately tragic story naturally. John Merrick, the elephant man of the title, was a rude lump of foul deformity, a simulacrum of a human being. What else could they do, turn it into a comedy? A werewolf movie? John Hurt is Merrick, kept in thrall by Bytes (Freddie Jones) who exhibits him to the public in a freak show in Victorian London. Merrick is rescued by Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) who sneaks him into a hospital run by Carr Gomm (John Gielgud) where he is tended by nurses who are frightened of him. All the nurses except their chief, Mothershead. Mothershead is enacted by a starchy Wendy Hiller.
Here's how a director with a case of arrested aesthetic development and a craving for commercial success would have first revealed the hideous half-human that was John Merrick. Generic suspense music, please. A frightened nurse open Merrick's door, she drops the plates and shrieks while the camera zooms into her terrified face. Then -- a cut, and the camera whips up to Merrick's deformed face, accompanied by a loud, dissonant sting on the sound track -- WHAMMMMM! Not here though.
Gradually the staff come to realize that despite his disfigurement, Merrick is really a sweet and gentle soul, forgiving and grateful for the smallest of kindnesses. Warmth replaces fear. And when Treves takes Merrick home to meet his wife (Hannah Gordon), this caprice of nature begins to sob quietly, saying, "I've never been treated so well by a lovely woman."
Imagine how much worse it could have been. Instead of being barely able to hiss his lines -- instead of producing mediocre sketches -- instead of merely building a model cathedral out of match sticks -- the script could have turned him into a genius! How inspiring? Elephant Man rescued from freak show writes a smash hit Broadway play? Paints the Mona Lisa of 1890? Mentally extends pi to 23 digits in ten seconds? Invents Leggos? No. The only thing Merrick has going for him is his utter joy at being treated humanely. Thank God he's just a nice guy, not a saint.
The rest of the principles are frankly splendid. Models of acting, really, with not a sour note being struck. Especially interesting is Hannah Gordon's portrayal of Treve's wife. She's not a dazzling beauty but has one of the most expressive faces on screen. She tells us everything we need to know by just lifting an eyebrow. (What Freddy Jones could have learned from her!) Hannah Gordon doesn't have that much screen time here but catch her, if you can, in "Miss Morrison's Ghosts," in which she plays opposite Wendy Hiller, to see a true professional at her best.
The director, David Lynch, keeps his act together in this relatively straightforward story but it wouldn't have been made quite this oddly by anyone else. I mean, the film opens with a scene of Merrick's mother being run down and trampled by a herd of screaming, stampeding elephants. What the hell does that have to do with the movie? It's never mentioned in the script. It's certainly not Merrick's fantasy. And there's no reason to believe that his mother really WAS frightened by elephants.
Although Lynch doesn't use many tricky codes in the movie, he rarely passes up a chance to show us the grimy perineum of Victorian London -- the basement fires being stoked, the black smoke billowing from the chimney, the intricate reticula of a lace curtain stirring in the open window, the slick wet bricks of an industrializing city gone berserk, the iron webbing across Victoria Station's glass roof. Texture piled on texture, and all of it somehow ominous. He does for man's indifferent artifacts what Peter Weir and Nicholas Roeg did for Australia's natural features. He's invested them with dread.
It occurred to me while watching this that Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is usually described as drawing the audience into Jimmy Stewart's voyeurism and thus making us as guilty as he is, of snooping into others' lives. What does "The Elephant Man" do to ITS audience then? Turn us into gawkers at a carnival freak show? I wonder how many of us went to see this movie when it was released, not so much to watch an enjoyable and well-done film, but to see what all the fuss was about?
Lynch takes it easy on the audience in that regard. Merrick is horrifyingly deformed but there are no cheap shocks. Lynch gives us his appearance little by little until, by the time we see him in his awesome ugliness, we've gotten to know him a bit and to empathize with him. And why shouldn't we admire and respect him? We may look better than Merrick, but he'd be hard for any of us to beat in a contest of soul against soul.