January 05, 2009
A Eulogy for The "Spirit"
A Case of Miller Lite
The Spirit, heralded by some as the worst piece of crap to hit screens in 2008, will be gone from theatres very soon, possibly by this weekend. Somebody should eulogize this film, so I pick me. Hello there. I can tell from the box office totals that you didn't take the time to see it. That's ok. Honestly, I didn't either. I watched about three-quarters of it out of a projection booth window, while babysitting a finicky lamphouse. Imagine Warren Beatty's 1990 version of Dick Tracy mixed with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Now take that mixture, wrap it in a Maxim magazine and mail it to Sin City. Notice I didn't mention Will Eisner at all? Writer/director Frank Miller claims Eisner wouldn't have wanted him to make a faithful Spirit adaptation, and while it's always nice to honor the wishes of a dead man, we're the ones that have to live with this boring film until the world ceases to exist (2012, according to Sony and the Mayans). Frank Miller makes two huge mistakes as the writer and director of The Spirit.
1. He assumes people know and love The Spirit.
2. He assumes people know and love Frank Miller.
He is wrong.
The reality is that people don't know The Spirit, and it was Miller's biggest task as the writer and director of this film to familiarize the audience with this character. The Spirit is obscure, having disappeared from newspapers a couple of generations ago, yet Miller lives in a bubble of Eisner-worship where he assumes that everybody knows and loves Denny Colt. Face it, the character isn't even that well-known amongst general comic book fans. If the majority of comic geeks are barely aware of The Spirit, then how could he (and Lionsgate) make the bone-headed assumption that we live in a nation full of Spirit fans? It's out-of-touch, and it affects the film directly. I know nothing more about this character having seen this movie than I did going in. He's a good guy that wears a suit and helps the police. Where's my reason to care?
Is that reason Frank Miller himself? As much as I have problems with The Spirit, it really is a Frank Miller comic brought to life. And not Dark Knight Returns-era Miller, but recent Frank Miller, the divisive one that doesn't just tread a line of self-parody--he stands clearly past that line, shooting people the middle finger, and complaining about industry hypocrisy while he does the very things he's been the most critical of. Those things include selling out to The Man to make a buck, something Miller has been comics' clear leader of for the past five years or so (this movie being a pretty good example of that). The guy who once gave an infamous industry keynote address about how comic creators should create comics, and not kowtow when Hollywood comes a-callin', continues to sign movie deals (Buck Rogers, coming soon), while he purposefully pisses off the fans by cranking out the most abrasive, juvenile material of his entire career (DC's All-Star Batman & Robin). The Spirit bears Miller's fingerprints, for better or worse, with misplaced dashes of Asian and Nazi fetishism, awkward, unending character monologues, and a childish sexual worldview. It's Miller giving the fans what he thinks they expect from him--not what they actually want from Miller, which is a hardboiled, two-fisted, heavily-stylized action story. The Spirit is all the things you don't like about Frank Miller, brought to the screen with deluded (and diluted) enthusiasm.
Nobody really cares about the name Frank Miller except maybe comic book fans, and that's the truth. To the American movie-going public, the "Sin City guy" is Robert Rodriguez (if they even know his name), and the "300 guy" has a new movie coming out called Watchmen. Frank Miller means next-to-nothing nothing outside of Wizard magazine, so there's no level of forgiveness for some of The Spirit's sillier moments. Those moments of ridiculousness will be familiar to anyone who's read a Miller comic in the past ten years, but to the millions of people that watch movies, those moments will only stand out as incredibly stupid moves by a rookie director who probably never should've had the chance to make a big feature film in the first place.
Comics and film are not the same medium, and neither one should ever be treated like they are. This is The Spirit's fatal flaw. Frank Miller may be a comic book legend, but he's a terrible filmmaker.