The Cinemasochist takes a look at movies that have been
notoriously rejected by the mass populace, and tells you if you might
perchance be missing a classic. Or not.
If The Artist really does fulfill its promise of bringing the silent picture back to the American cinema, Zack Snyder will be the first director I'll be eager to see make one. Snyder is a master at telling a story with images. His prologue and opening credits sequence for Watchmen were fascinating and set up everything we needed to know for the film, with very little dialogue. The film became less compelling as the storytelling became hamfisted, but the first twenty minutes contains some of the most memorable film images in recent years.
The same can be said for Sucker Punch, which begins with a masterstroke of a prologue. It tells a story in itself, completely free of dialogue, using only montage and images. If it were released in the 1920s, it would be praised as an expressionist masterpiece. This silent sequence proves that Snyder is a born silent film director. The talkie film that follows, unfortunately, proves the same.
But still, what an opener. We meet Babydoll (Emily Browning), a young girl who's just lost her mother. Her wiley stepfather (Gerard Plunkett) is upset at not being included in the will, and after a series of unfortunate events he has Babydoll locked away in a mental institution. At this early point in the film, Snyder has established character, status, and conflict as succinctly as the best directors of the silent era.
Once we get to the mental hospital, the movie goes off the rails and keeps chugging. When Babydoll is committed, we learn that she's going to be lobotomized in five days. She then retreats into a fantasy world in which the hospital is a high-class brothel where the female inmates dance and seduce rich people. The psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) is the madam, the orderly (Oscar Isaac) is the pimp, and the fellow inmates (Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung, Vanessa Hudgens) are fellow prostitutes. But that's not all: whenever Babydoll dances, she goes into a further sub-fantasy, where she and the girls dress as soldiers and fight dragons, under the command of a mysterious leader (Scott Glenn, aping David Carradine).
The '70s were rife with an exploitation subgenre known as the rape-revenge movie, in which formerly helpless girls took righteous revenge on the beastly men who attacked them, and the movie was generally just as interested in watching the poor girl get savaged as in depicting her rapists' retribution.
Sucker Punch is a step down from that: it's a rape-run-and-hide movie. Though it's toned down to a PG-13 level, it's still morbidly fascinated with watching its team of girls get emotionally and physically abused by men, whether it be by the stepfather, the lecherous pimp, or a lobotomist (Jon Hamm, in a desperate cameo). But rather than glorious bloody revenge, the characters' triumph is in retreating into their minds.
I have always had a problem with movies that find their victory in the magic of imagination. Though one or two have done it right (Tarsem Singh's brilliant The Fall is an example), most are condescending and insulting (Marc Forster's insipid yet somehow Best Picture-nominated Finding Neverland being the most insidious culprit). Sucker Punch is a few steps more tragic: the idea that any victim of abuse should find any sort of victory by retreating into fantasy is absurd and, when you think about it, extremely sexist. Though it fancies itself a girl-power flick, what with its battle scenes of chicks decked out in army gear and kicking ass, Sucker Punch is firmly on the side of the attacker: when you're abused, the thing to do is deal with it yourself, in your own mind, without bothering anyone.
Even aside from that distressing implication, Sucker Punch is a story poorly told. The fantasy-within-fantasy motif, which must have been modeled on Inception, might just as well have been ditched. If the brothel scenes are predictable and dull, the battle scenes are completely devoid of any stakes or any connection to the story. There are a lot of explosions, but what's being achieved is never quite clear. Compare it to Inception, in which each level of reality has an effect on the other, and a bullet fired in one reality creates the stakes for the next.
The cast of girls is interchangeable. They're a talented group of actors, especially Cornish, who starred as Fanny Brawne in the fine John Keats biopic Bright Star, and deserves better. Browning, so good in the underrated ghost flick The Uninvited, is given little to do as the movie explodes around her. The only actor allowed to make an impression is Isaac, who as the film's primary villain eats up the scenery and spits it out violently. Jon Hamm, who doubles as the hospital's lobotomist and (in Jiminy Glick makeup) a rich customer at the brothel, must be on a quest to prove that he can cameo in everything.
It doesn't help that the film is plastered with wall-to-wall bad covers of classic rock songs. The most egregious is Yoav's gutting of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind," though the eardrum-bursting rendition of "White Rabbit" that plays through one battle scene is formidable competition. For a saving grace, Browning does a quite nice version of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" which plays over the prologue. And as a nice touch, the movie prominently uses Bjork's "Army of Me," which makes for a great revenge anthem.
This is Snyder's first film based on an original script (which he wrote with Steve Shibuya). He struggles with coming up with his own conceits; he's excelled mainly with finding ways to translate other works to the screen. Building stories into images is his talent; here he comes up empty. If the film had only consisted of the first ten minutes, it would have been a masterpiece. As it is, Sucker Punch is a discouragement to abuse victims everywhere, disguised as a pointless, endless, loud mess.
* out of ****
Is it really that bad?: It's worse.
Pain level: Excepting the first ten minutes, high.
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