shallow, pathos machine

Rating: 4/10 (11 August 2009)

This is the story of Joseph Merrick (here called John Merrick). Whenever I watch this movie I appreciate that it was filmed in b&w, and I cry a bit. It always makes me consider what an unbelievably cruel god it must be to take an already difficult Victorian life, add to that poverty and abandonment, and add to that virulent tumors that misshape a man to this degree, insuring absolute cruelty from his society, and that he can never seek employment. It's why I always have a big "No thank you" for religion. But I'm astonished that David Lynch (!) didn't attempt more with the material than mere sentiment. He tries to squeeze tears from viewers over and over. Apparently audiences are too stupid to get a point unless he wraps pathos-scented wrapping paper around a cinder-block and drops it on your toe.
The movie vacillates between two types of scenes. A) Sympathetic figures cry, or cause Merrick to cry, and b) Merrick's heartless antagonists show up at the hospital and torment him. That's 90 percent of the movie. No doubt the hospital situation was better than the sideshow mistreatment, but visitors with an agenda treat him with a treacly, phony solicitousness that must've soon become tiresome even to him. As in, "Hey famous actress, I don't like abuse but I don't need your self-congratulatory pity either." It always grates on me. For how little John Hurt is given to do, you could stick anyone under all that lumpy make-up. The character of Merrick is two-dimensional, if you're being generous.
The movie has very low dramatic stakes. I had sympathy for Merrick before the movie existed. I don't need Lynch to pump me for more. The developments in the script are repetitive and poor. Merrick is safely sequestered from his enemies in a hospital, after the first 20 minutes, but you can't do much with that dramatically. So, the script inexplicably allows cretins to reach him in his room over and over (with and without whores). Seemingly any villain can get to him inside his confines, and at the films weakest point, when some cheap tension is needed, his antagonist just knocks on his window, and voilà, now Merrick is in some quarters on the first floor, despite early interior sequences which showed people mounting stairs to reach him. Each ward invasion is more eye-rolling than the previous one, with shouting, etc. At one point an entire drunken midnight party converges on his room, and the ten-person strong, screaming crowd still fails to awaken the hospital staff. Gee, that's some terrific security that lets people roam your building at night; and some masterful handling of conflict. Come on! The absurd, manufactured conflict becomes very trying.