Originally published 4/4/2005
Sin City
Directors: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, with special guest director Quentin Tarantino
Writers: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, based on the graphic novels by Frank Miller
Producers: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Elizabeth Avellan
Stars: Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Elijah Wood, Bruce Willis, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Clarke Duncan, Carla Gugino, Josh Hartnett, Michael Madsen, Jamie King, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Nick Stahl, Marley Shelton, Arie Verveen, Devon Aoki, Alexis Bledel, Rutger Hauer
This is what the technology is for. Not for superfluous Burly Brawls or so Greedo can shoot first – with Sin City, an adaptation of Frank Miller’s revered graphic novel series, Robert Rodriguez has made the best and purest argument yet that the tools of digital cinema have a worthy place in the filmmaker’s arsenal.
All you have to do is just imagine the movie made any other way.
Lurid and atmospheric are barely adequate words to describe the world of Sin City, which is a world more than it is a movie with a start-to-finish plot. It’s a world that crashes film noir clichés into pulp icons and then shoots nitrous into the wreckage.
It’s probably the only post-Pulp Fiction film to truly understand the bones of that movie and successfully emulate its structure. And yet the graphic novel series started three years before Pulp, and with Tarantino here as a guest director for a funny and deeply strange scene in a car, you could easily get lost in chicken-egg postulations. It doesn’t really matter, they go hand in hand. They’re all part of the same mojo that looks backwards for style and gesture and forward for pop storytelling rhythms that shatter the boundaries of a reality not big enough for it to breathe in.
Some actors belong in black-and-white. We used to have Bogarts to remind us of this but nowadays we don’t even get the chance to find out. Now we know Clive Owen could have been one of those actors. He plays Dwight, a wanted killer in red sneakers who just can’t seem to resist being helpful no matter how high the bodies start to pile up. His story is about the waitress (Brittany Murphy) he befriends and all the things he ends up having to do to the head of her violent ex-boyfriend Jacky Boy (Benicio Del Toro).
There’s plenty of other stories to tell, including that of the hulking brute Marv (Mickey Rourke), whose tolerance for pain is beyond measure. He’ll devote all of it to avenging a woman (Jamie King) who was nice to him one night. And there’s Hartigan (Bruce Willis), the aging detective with a bad heart whose life becomes a lonely and painful quest to protect one little girl, even when she’s not so little anymore.
And looming over it all is the Roark family – the Senator patriarch (Powers Boothe), the Cardinal brother (Rutger Hauer), and the son (Nick Stahl) whose bad habits make life difficult for them all. The original crime fiction writers looked up from the gutter and painted us a picture of absolute corruption; where everyone sinned, but only people with nothing could afford to be honest about it. Those in power had hypocrisy to cover their workaday sins, and money and influence to stay ahead of the truly vile stuff. Once we know the Roarks control the cops and the wealth of Basin City, we understand the rest instinctively.
As with last year’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City was filmed almost exclusively on a bare green stage, with the buildings and backgrounds added in later via computer. It’s largely in black-and-white, although there’s flashes of color – a pair of blue eyes, the spatter of blood or a woman’s dress in the reddest red you could imagine, and of course the skin of the appropriately named Yellow Bastard.
It suitably honors the story’s origins, as what’s behind the actors can loom and stretch dynamically to reflect the prevailing mood. There’s also, I think, the best visual marriage I’ve ever seen between the “poses” of a graphic novel frame and a moving cinematic image. In the purest sense of giving the audience what they love about graphic novels, Sin City is the best movie adaptation of one ever made.
It’s also a giant step ahead for Robert Rodriguez. His work, from El Mariachi all the way up through the Spy Kids trilogy and his embrace of digital filmmaking, has never lacked for energy or style, but often feels one step away from total anarchy. His simple love of making movies often runs away from any storytelling discipline. In channeling all of his skills to the service of faithfully adapting Miller’s work, to the extent of bringing him on board to co-direct, we get all the action and cool and explosive violence, but in such powerfully enriched surroundings.
So ambitious a work is not without its missteps. Brittany Murphy sticks out painfully from the ensemble, proving that when performing in this piece a miss is as good as a mile. And once in awhile the technique of blending time periods creates slightly-too-large ripples of dissonance, like when one character uses a car phone, or how there’s just something slightly off about the dress and attitude of Jacky Boy’s posse.
But around those flaws such unforgettable grotesqueries – who knew Elijah Wood had a smile that could make your skin crawl like that? Who would ever dream of crossing a hooker in Old Town knowing they have enforcers like the lethal Miho (Devon Aoki) protecting their turf?
Punishments that display shocking cruelty and gore, ominous moods of damnation and hopelessness, and these are our heroes. When such clear abstractions feel so right to us, when we can look at the thoroughly imaginary Sin City and say I know this place, that’s gripping and vital art, and it’s what Rodriguez and Miller have made.