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L.A.
Times Review In 1914 brothers Dwight and George Hart built the 264-room Rosslyn Hotel at the southwest corner of 5th and Main streets in downtown L.A., and it proved so successful that in 1923 they built a 422-room annex at the northwest corner in an identical Beaux Arts style and connected the two structures with a tunnel under 5th Street. Atop the annex--also called the Rosslyn but renamed the Frontier some years ago... ...a gigantic sign (lit by incandescent bulbs and recently restored in neon) includes the proclamation, "The Million Dollar Hotel." Director Wim Wenders took that proud declaration as the title of this romantic fable, which he filmed there with a large, star-studded ensemble cast. This dreamy reverie of a film, with its rapturously beautiful images shot by Phedeon Papamichael and its shimmering, seductive music composed by Jon Hassell, Bono, Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, recalls Wenders' "Wings of Desire" and its sequel "Far Away, So Close," but it is more demanding. Indeed, it's likely to elicit a love-it-or-hate-it response from most viewers, and this explains why a movie with Mel Gibson, excellent in one of his most complex roles, has sat on the shelf for more than a year. Of Nicholas Klein's script, based on an idea from Bono, Gibson has said aptly: "It is lyrical and heart-rending on the one hand, but on the other, it is very bizarre and darkly comic." If you're a Wenders admirer and can give yourself over to his gorgeous verging-on-surreal vision, you can come away deeply moved. A punkish-looking, goofy-seeming but actually acutely sensitive young man, nicknamed Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), discovers that finding "something to live for also means something to die for." Tom Tom has found a home at the Million Dollar among other marginalized people, taking delight in making himself useful to the hotel's permanent guests, whose eccentricities tend to cross the line into mental derangement in varying degrees and forms. Tom Tom and his friends have established an existence that is viable, yet not surprisingly, fragile. Tom Tom had become best friends with a junkie artist, Izzy Goldkiss (Tim Roth), who either fell, jumped or was pushed off the hotel roof to his death. As it turns out, Izzy was the dropout son of a media tycoon (Harris Yulin) who hires Skinner (Gibson), a veteran FBI agent, to get to the bottom of his son's death. Suddenly, the hotel becomes the center of a media circus, culminating in a splashy exhibition of Izzy's work at the hotel promoted by a prestigious art dealer (Julian Sands). He's a self-proclaimed arbiter of what is art and what is garbage -- Izzy's work, he declares, is "important garbage." (Amusingly, Izzy's work turns out to be Julian Schnabel collages of objects drenched by Izzy in tar--Schnabel, director of "Before Night Falls," made the tar-works especially for the film.) Skinner, who has a neck brace that gives him a touch of the Terminator, comes on as your standard macho, crew-cut, by-the-book, law-enforcement officer, but we gradually learn he has an even more bizarre history than any of the disturbed denizens of the Million Dollar than we could possibly imagine. He ultimately finds he cannot deny his identification with them, but before compassion sets in, he commits, in attempting to solve the case, an act of betrayal that will have drastic consequences. Meanwhile, Tom Tom has become transfixed with the sullen, withdrawn beauty Eloise (Milla Jovovich), who has apparently been a hooker and who shares a suite with her dotty but pretty and vivacious grandmother (Gloria Stuart), the building's blithest spirit. Ever so gradually Tom Tom manages to connect with the lost Eloise. The scenes with Tom, as he eventually wants to be known, and Eloise are piercingly tender and often take place by one of the hotel's large windows with their striking views of the city. These are moments of great beauty and emotion, and are the film's strongest. The weakest occur when Wenders gathers his ensemble cast; such gatherings of the disturbed and the weird verge on the overly theatrical. This is not, however, to take away from the cast itself, which includes Jimmy Smits as Izzy's ex-mental-patient roommate, a key suspect in Izzy's death; Peter Stormare, a scene stealer as the "forgotten" Beatle who wrote all those hits; Donal Logue as a no-nonsense L.A. cop assigned to help Skinner; and Bud Cort as a seriously faded ex-Hollywood agent. The hotel is itself always a strongly atmospheric presence, which will be especially appreciated by those of us who have cherished the Rosslyns since the days of their respectability, which extended into the '60s despite a location bordering on Skid Row. The film pays homage to the hotel's faded grandeur, especially to its enduringly handsome exterior with dark red brick walls set off by handsome window frames and an ornate cornice in cream terra-cotta tile. "The Million Dollar Hotel" is a fantasy, a fairy tale, but its characters and the emotions they elicit become painfully real. MPAA rating: R, for language and some sexual content. copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times www.latimes.com N.Y.
Times Review Elvis Mitchell reports on the new film, which started life more than a decade ago when Bono had an idea on a rooftop in Los Angeles during the Joshua Tree tour. I figured I could learn a lot from him," Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), the central figure and narrator of Wim Wenders's almost new movie, "Million Dollar Hotel," says of the F.B.I. agent, Skinner (Mel Gibson). The admiring and loony Tom Tom is tailing Skinner while Skinner investigates a murder in a Los Angeles flophouse. With a military brush cut and stiff suits that must be made from corrugated pinstripe, Skinner looks like an automaton parody of Mr. Gibson's action characters. Similarly, Mr. Gibson probably went into business with Mr. Wenders because he thought he might pick something up from this German director, a man who specializes in wanderers lost in a fog of longing. This may be why Mr. Gibson's company produced "Hotel," a mellow dream of a movie that's an acquired taste. It's attractive because of the oblique way that Mr. Wenders ambles through a murder mystery that's stronger on characterization than on plot. This may have sat uncomfortably with Mr. Gibson, who was quoted as dismissing "Hotel" as boring. He later amended this assessment and allowed that he was only joking. But even as a laugh, one of the world's biggest stars must understand that such a remark is not the kind of quotation that looks good in newspaper ads. "Hotel" wafts across the screen like ashes from a dying fire: it lacks the decisive logic and Point A to Point B payoff that is normally associated with Mel Gibson movies. Here, the dialogue goes from declamations to mutters, and words are murmured as asides so often that you're not even sure that you heard the narrator's name. (The screenwriter, Nicholas Klein, seems to have put together passages that echo the ebb and flow vocal styling of U2's Bono, who shares a story credit and was a co-producer of the film.) Mr. Gibson's frustration may also come from his character's having to observe the chaos instead of churning it up. Skinner is trying, in his way, to find the murderer of a flophouse inhabitant, who turns out to be the son of a very important man. The suspects are the hotel's residents, whose various forms of lowlife paranoia thwart Skinner's investigation. "Hotel" has Mr. Wenders's mottled benevolence; he has nothing but kindness in his soul, and his slightly faded fable is as full of freaks as the auditions for "Survivor: The Australian Outback." But instead of stranding his collection of outcasts in the outback, Mr. Wenders puts them all in a downtown Los Angeles haven for losers. They are all angry and crazy and a step away from being homeless; the group of downscale inhabitants includes Bud Cort, Jimmy Smits, Tom Bower, Tito Larriva, Richard Edson, Gloria Stuart and Amanda Plummer. (Donal Logue, Harris Yulin and Charlayne Woodard also turn up.) Mr. Wenders has a complicated love of L.A. He starts the film off with a helicopter shot of downtown Los Angeles's multimillion-dollar skyline. The cinematographer Phedeon Papamichael slowly brings the camera down to earth and to the crummy rooftop of the formerly grand Million Dollar Hotel, now a fleabag residence, a City of Angels landmark that looks like the site where Bono stood for U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" video. It's indicative of Mr. Wenders's perspective that he doesn't hose down the city's streets for the usual glossy, shiny look. He lovingly lingers over the baked, cracking pavement, blowing kisses to the city's flaws. Instead, he chooses to hose down the hotel's floors. To throw a scare into its uncooperative dwellers, Skinner floods the building's interior, and water cascades down the marble stairs. (It's as if Mr. Wenders is determined to give this modern, impersonal city the garish seediness of today's Berlin.) Like Brandon de Wilde in "Shane," the aimless Tom Tom, one of the hotel's citizens, needs a hero and finds one in the brusque Skinner. Tom Tom's hair is slicked back on top, with tufts sticking out of the sides like crab grass; he looks like a human version of Woodstock from the "Peanuts" comics. He waddles after Skinner like a baby duck. Compounding the birdy joke, Tom Tom's head pops into the frame while a man is seen watching a cockfight on television. Mr. Wenders tosses off other visual puns: a Beatles-obsessed suspect (Peter Stormare, using a Liverpudlian accent that sounds like a different member of the Fab Four with each syllable) who keeps Granny Smith apples on his windowsill. Mr. Wenders demonstrates his casual mastery by shifting to black and white, freezing the frame and resorting to jump cuts to show the disorder in Tom Tom's head. He focuses only when he beholds the lovely Eloise (Milla Jovovich), an introverted rosebud who wanders the hotel's halls clutching books like "One Hundred Years of Solitude" when she's not hidden away in a room that looks like a secondhand paperback store. Like many of Mr. Wenders's other films, "Hotel" has a score that's a music lover's jackpot; it was composed by Bono, Jon Hassell, Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and also features covers of "Satellite of Love" by Bono and "Anarchy in the U.K." by Mr. Larriva, the kind of pedigree most filmmakers can only dream of... Read the rest of the review at www.nytimes.com |
