FFVP Review

8MM

"8MM" starts out like a first class detective thriller complete with a P I who can keep his mouth shut, secrets of the rich and famous, and a labyrinthine journey into the cesspool of the porno trade. The use of an exotic third world tinged music score, that had echoes of the Page/Plant album, Unledded, gave the illusion that the world revealed in "8MM" would be as foreign to the audience as the cultures on the other side of the globe. I was mesmerized and riveted. At least until the PI finds his quarry. "8MM" suddenly switches gears and turns into a hybrid of "Hard Core" and "Death Wish" with a dash of "Falling Down" for good measure.

The only intriguing character in "8MM" is the widow who hires P I Tom Welles (Nicholas Cage) to find out if the eight millimeter film located in her deceased husband’s private safe is the real thing - a snuff film. You’re never really sure if she wants to prove to her self that her husband is not the monster a snuff film would make him out to be, or if she knows he’s a monster and can’t believe he could go as far as the 8MM film suggests. She tells Tom she wants to find out if the girl is alive. And off he goes! -zigzagging back and forth across the country in search of her identity! Away from his wife and kid and into the deviant world of illicit sex.

Joaquin Phoenix offers welcome comic relief as Max, a wise cracking mirthful clerk at a porno book shop. He becomes Tom’s guide through the soulless squalor of the sexual underworld. Max peddles his wares with the panache of a PT Barnum, and offers his detached dead pan observations like a stand up comic. His tag line about dancing with the devil making a person become more like the devil, while funny in and of itself, becomes the underlying theme of "8MM" - that to fight evil one must know evil, and to know evil one must experience evil. Unfortunately, this is where "8MM" falls apart. When Tom finally meets the makers of the snuff film, he turns into this avenging angel. He becomes, in a sense, as dirty as the people he’s after. It’s not that the morality of his actions are simply muddled, they are incredulous. It is one thing to kill or maim someone in self defense. It’s obviously another when there are other venues available, such as the Tom’s contacts in high places indicated in the very beginning of the movie. Suddenly you realize that you’ve been beaten over the head with the idea that Tom would damage his credibility if he went for help. At least that’s what the filmmakers would have us believe. I don’t. The only other clue, that this would not be the case, is not in the movie itself, but in the knowledge that the author of "8MM," Andrew Kevin Walker, also wrote "Seven" which was more concerned with its creepy milieu than plot. "8MM" ends in much the same way, except when the bad guys spill their guts, they’ve already lost their credibility, unlike the serial killer’s final moments in "Seven."

I have to mention Amy Morton’s heartbreaking turn as Mrs. Matthews, the mother of the murdered girl. She captured all the angst, loneliness, and regret of a woman who couldn’t hold onto her daughter. Her world is a limbo plagued with guilt. Anyone with kids could easily identify with her pain.

I am amazed that "8MM" drifted so far off track in the second half of the film. It lacked the psychological depth that made director, Joel Schumacher’s "Falling Down" such an intense experience. Tom’s descent into the void should have had the effect of stripping away his moral fabric until he was left vulnerable to the diseased numbness that allowed Max to treat deviance as part of the norm. To make matters worse, the filmmakers use Tom’s love for his baby girl as a motivational factor for his moral outrage. It just doesn’t work.