King Kong
Starring: Naomi Watts (Ann Darrow), Jack Black (Carl Denham), Adrien Brody (Jack Driscoll), Andy Serkis (Kong/Lumpy)
Written by: Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, from a story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
Directed by: Peter Jackson
Red screen, blue screen, green screen, Watts:
her work, moment-by-moment, makes us believe. |
Remakes of classic movies are almost always a bad idea. Unlike the theatre, where everything depends on what is happening in the moment and new productions can offer startlingly fresh perspectives on familiar work, a truly classic film becomes burned in the cultural memory, and much of its potency is derived from that very permanence. Come to think of it, a frequent characteristic of classic films is their unchanging freshness, the way in which they not only stand out in their own era, but in all eras.
But Peter Jackson's King Kong isn't just any remake; it's one of the most extraordinary films of 2005, a work of unrestrained showmanship, imagination and artistic vision, and an epic labor of love by one of the world's best moviemakers. That it's also a flawed masterpiece should not deter anyone from seeing it; a flawed masterpiece is better than no masterpiece at all, and rare enough on its own.
Many people, who may only be familiar with the atrocious 1976 Kong remake, have wondered aloud why the man who made The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) would bother with this creaky tale as a follow up. In fact, it's well known among Jackson's most devoted fans that he's been trying to remake the original King Kong (1933) for the bulk of his career, the most visible member of a dwindling club of filmmakers and historians whose devotion to Fay Wray and her stop-motion leading gorilla has never died. It's a sign of the times, and the movie business, that some of the most important landmarks in the Hollywood canon are now so absorbed into the culture, they've become the visual equivalent of dead metaphors. Only a few famous images, such as Kong battling biplanes atop the Empire State Building, live on in the collective memory, regularly providing fodder for political cartoonists and advertisers while completely losing their cultural and emotional relevance.
Yet, we now live in a media matrix that swirls with visual effects imagery, and it can be said without the slightest exaggeration that Kong 33 remains the most significant inspiration for the people who create these images. The film is cited by every major visual effects artist in the world as the seminal vocational experience of their lives, from stop-motion godfather Ray Harryhausen (whose last film was Clash of the Titans , 1981) to 9-time Oscar winner Dennis Muren, whose dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) launched the modern explosion of CGI effects, for better or worse.
Kong 33 didn't have this impact merely because its effects were revolutionary, and unsurpassed for forty-four years (until Star Wars came along to revive its almost forgotten techniques). Rather, the still-astonishing effects in Kong are always subsumed in the story, something few filmmakers ever really grasp. Kong 33 has inspired several generations of filmmakers because it remains the gold standard for imaginative moviemaking, a wild-eyed adventure/fairy tale for adults that draws audiences into an unforgettable fantasy world. Though some of its effects are transparent now, the creative spirit behind them still burns through, and Kong himself bristles with character and life, remaining one of the movies' most memorable monsters. In the original Kong , visual effects were not just used to dazzle audiences, but to make them feel something.
Peter Jackson's short but impressive oeuvre has always been motivated by the same spirit of recklessly inventive storytelling, and by using effects as a means rather than an end. He couldn't be less interested in plausibility for its own sake; to him, a few well-drawn characters are all the plausibility any story needs and the rest takes care of itself. This is an oversimplification, of course, but it's also a fact: Jackson's gallery of characters in LOTR often Out-Tolkiened Tolkien with their sheer economy of gesture and thought, sometimes packing volumes into a single scene. With so many believable characters on board, characters, moreover, who believed in their fantasy environment, Middle Earth came alive on screen. LOTR's magnificent production design was finally just icing on the cake of world-building.
While Jackson's King Kong is certainly about creating one of the most astounding visual worlds in contemporary moviemaking, it is only one layer of Kong 33 that he has taken to heart. The original film is also the once-and-future granddaddy of movie thrill rides, and any remake worth its salt was going have to be up for that task, a cliffhanging heart-in-your-throat esthetic crammed not just with action, but with freakin' terrifying twists of fate and bone-crunching horror. This fairy tale has never been for children, which is why most kids love it.
It's no surprise that Jackson, who began his career making low-budget horror gross-outs, is capable of translating all this into the digital age; his Kong was all but predestined to be the compleat visual feast, with peerless action. Nearly anyone with a good cinematographer, a good editor, and a private state-of-the-art effects facility could do that.
But Jackson's great accomplishment here, the thing that makes him, most likely, the best sci-fi/fantasy filmmaker of all time, is his characters. Kong 33 was one of the riskiest ventures ever attempted in classic cinema and there wasn't a lot of screen time given over to developing its people or its monsters. But Jackson, once again enlisting the aid of priceless mime artist Andy Serkis (who, as everybody now knows, was the performance model for the digital Gollum in LOTR), has truly re-invented Kong himself, expanding and deepening his portrayal with compassion and subtlety.
This Kong far surpasses his namesake on every level, his motives becoming crystal clear at each story turn, and he's all the more affecting because of it. He is wholly gorilla (Kong 33 had more than a few anthropomorphic traits); his initial fascination with Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), the woman sacrificed to him by a very scary tribe of lost primitives, has to do with her creativity and humor, her ability to keep him entertained, rather than any psycho-sexual confusion; and he eventually comes to love and cherish her out of the novelty of communicating with another species, a much more profound emotion than any evoked by the original story.
Initially terrified of Kong, Ann grows to understand his loneliness, by watching and sharing and not losing her cool, eventually using simple sign language to commiserate with him on some of life's eternal mysteries, like the beauty of sunrise. She, too, is lonely, from a world full of users and manipulators, and despite the astronomical differences in size, she finds in Kong a kindred soul. This is Jackson turning the whole story inside out; one of the best moments in his version is the topsy-turvy dissonance he creates when Ann is saved from Kong's clutches by her would-be boyfriend Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody). When watching the original, we are relieved and thankful that Ann is finally escaping an unpredictable monster; watching Jackson's film, there is an urge to cry out, Wait, wait, they just got to know each other!
Now that's a bloody remake, by god: If you're going to do it, do it better than right, or do something else. Regardless of how much familiarity you may have with each twist and turn in the King Kong story, Jackson's film is guaranteed to alternately delight and shake you with the breadth and depth of his understanding - of film storytelling, of action, adventure and the Depression Era that spawned the first Kong , of the unnamable chemistry that is possible between different species, of Kong himself and the meaning of his destiny. Peter Jackson's King Kong has an almost spiritual sense of the natural order, which includes authentic creepiness alongside the awe and wonder; the film's incredible visual effects are just one more element of the whole imaginative fabric.
King Kong 's primary flaw is its almost overwhelming too-muchness. Jackson explores every single permutation of the story with a novelist's eye for detail, expanding and adding to all the characters and events, and once again showing his own special talent for extending each moment to its dramatic breaking point. For some viewers this is a strength, but I'm with Shakespeare's Polonius on this one: brevity is still the soul of wit, and Jackson's
King Kong could lose about thirty minutes worth of exuberant flourishes without sacrificing a single thing of any importance. The whole point, as a moviemaker, of providing one's self with too much is to have room for shaping and refining in the editing suite. Especially in the first hour, less build up and a sacrificed minor character or two would give this Kong a pace nearly comparable with the original, which was a one-of-a-kind, non-stop entertainment.
But it's a drawback that fails to overshadow the enormous power and force of Jackson's vision for remaking his favorite movie. I have never been particularly moved by the original King Kong , in spite of being a fan since the age of nine. I've always loved it for its audacity and wicked humor, its technical achievement, of course, and most of all its unique, hard-driving narrative. But Jackson has revived these things and tied them together with the kind of heart that could only come from a long nurtured appreciation for what King Kong could be, as well as for what it once was. Like his LOTR trilogy, it is the film of an unabashed movie lover with a great respect for his source, but too much genius of his own to simply cart out an homage. He has made a complex and emotionally challenging King Kong , a better film than the original, and that only happens once in a lifetime.
None of this would be possible without the luminous, perennially underestimated Naomi Watts, who spends most of her screen time running from and acting with giant beasts that weren't really there when the cameras rolled. One of the few modern actresses with a genuine hint of 1930s glamour to her face, she is also the only one I have seen who can play both guileless and street smart in the same moment and make it look easy, as if that was her natural self. Her performance in Kong is just the kind of thing that gets passed over at awards time, because even other actors generally fail to appreciate a good job of performing with phantoms. Some people might argue that Watts did have Mr. Serkis with her, standing in for Kong on a scaffold, giving her something to react to. But it's not the same thing and we all know it; Serkis is just a man, not a twenty-five-foot tall gorilla. Watts has a gift of imagination far deeper than most actors and, more important, an ability to translate it into a remarkably versatile use of her instrument. It is her work in this film, moment-by-moment, that most makes us believe in Kong.
Manic Jack Black is also wonderful, as a crazier-than-ever Carl Denham, the conniving independent filmmaker who will stop at nothing to get his film made, and who drags everyone into mortal danger without telling them, or even knowing himself how bad it will be. Under Jackson's direction, Black is allowed to insert snippets of comic relief here and there, but he is primarily the irrepressible Denham, in a brave performance that often crosses the line into villainy. The original Denham (played by Robert Armstrong, whom Black more than resembles) was a little nuts to be sure, but his disregard for all life, human or animal, in order to put together an incredible, money-making attraction, was ultimately glossed over as a necessary show biz evil. Jackson and Black never let Denham get away with that claim here; he's a certified remorseless bastard, representative of everything wrong with unchecked capitalism.
Adrien Brody has less to do, because the film is really about Ann, Kong, and their star-crossed friendship. And the effects - well, let's just say that Jackson's two effects companies, Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, have already proven they are the best filmmakers of their kind in the world right now, decisively leaving Hollywood in the dust since the turn of the century. It should be said that Kong himself is probably the most fully realized and believable CGI character yet in our age of computerized movies, though Gollum is an admittedly hard act to follow. The point is, the Weta technicians continue to improve and refine this sort of thing for the sake of film art, rather than filmmaking ease; they never do less than an exemplary job of transforming the pictures in Peter Jackson's head into moving widescreen images.
As might be expected, Jackson fills his movie with clever references to the original, but it is never gratuitous or telegraphed. The viewer just has to know things like costume styles, key dialogue exchanges, and large swatches of Max Steiner's 1933 score in order to pick up on their appearance in the new movie. Perhaps the most enjoyable reference comes during the brutally exploitative show that Denham puts on to showcase Kong for New York audiences: the sets, costumes, and the music thundering from a full orchestra, are all exact duplications from a native ritual in the first film, turning the faults of 1933 to rousing advantage, emphasizing Kong's misery in captivity and, incidentally, critiquing the misguided notions of another era.
One of this year's must-see films, be prepared for a very intense entertainment on many levels.
Notes
RHYMES WITH CIRCUS: Andy Serkis also has a substantial live action role, as the cook Lumpy, an over-the-top character bit which Jackson gave him in return for his work as a stand-in and computer graphics model. For his performance as Kong, he studied great apes for months in order to bring back input on their mannerisms and emotional states. One hundred and thirty-two sensors were attached to his face during the motion capture sessions to model Kong's mood swings and expressions. Mr. Serkis is also unlikely to get any recognition for this at awards time, since he is enabling a technical process that frightens everyone.
THE TWO ANNS: Fay Wray, the original Ann Darrow, was signed to appear during this film's finale, as a crone delivering the last thematic pronouncement about beauty and the beast. Unfortunately she died just before production started, in August 2004 at the age of 97, but not before she met Watts, whom she felt was perfectly cast in the film. Wray, who enjoyed her own fair amount of luminosity way back when, was a 25-year-old box-office star when she made King Kong ; Watts, who spent many more years as an undervalued performer before Mulholland Dr. (2001) changed her fortunes, was 36 when shooting began on Kong last fall, and her role for the remake was a lot more physically demanding than anything Ms. Wray had to endure.
SPECIAL FEATURES NOW: Breaking with long-standing video tradition, Peter Jackson has released a two disc DVD set this month (December 05) with four hours of behind-the-scenes footage that were originally webcast while the film was shooting. Like the documentaries in the LOTR boxed sets, these excursions are for hardcore fans who can't get enough of the process, although there is very much a sense of sitting down and spending quality time with some old friends.
WHAT-A?: the weta, after which Jackson has named his effects companies, is an unusually large and unattractive beetle indigenous to New Zealand, where the filmmaker makes his home.
His next scheduled film will be an adaptation of Alice Sebold's dark bestseller, The Lovely Bones.
Eric has returned to Indianapolis, and lesser internet film
reviewers quake in fear.
|
