The Spirit (2008)

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Director: Frank Miller

Screenplay: Frank Miller

Based on the comic book series created by Will Eisner

Cast: Gabriel Macht as Denny Colt/The Spirit; Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus; Scarlett Johansson as Silken Floss; Eva Mendes as Sand Saref; Sarah Paulson as Ellen Dolan; Stana Katic as Morgenstern; Louis Lombardi as Phobos, Logos, Pathos, Ethos, Bulbos, Huevos and Rancheros, Mangos, Adios and Amigos, etc.; Jaime King as Lorelei Rox; Paz Vega as Plaster of Paris

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

If American comic books were more value for money, like Japanese manga, or I could afford them I'd read more of this medium. I'd naturally scan the obscurer and idiosyncratic creations in the superhero genre rather than Spider Man and Superman - the failures, the cult heroes, the acclaimed work like Alan Moore's run of Swamp Thing, and significant figures of history deserving more eyes like Will Eisner's The Spirit. Annoyingly, Eisner's acclaimed creation is less available then his later era rejuvenation into a graphic novel writer, Eisner's legacy including the Eisner Award existing named after him as the standard of great comic book/graphic novel work based as much on his transformation into the likes of A Contract with God (1978) as it has been the man in the forties who created Denny Colt, The Spirit, and leap genres on those pages in a single bond. I have an unfortunate gut feeling, whilst this review isn't going to go down the route expected for the notorious adaptation by fellow graphic novel creator Frank Miller, that the 2008 adaptation of The Spirit for the cinema and its failure has left a spectre still needing to be exorcised.

The Spirit is no way near as bad as its reputation suggests, but let's not kid ourselves either that we have a film that is both all over the place but in this curious position of not being weird enough, inappropriately strange, and a mess. It does feel like the first film in a director's career, as I have always viewed his co-directing with Robert Rodriguez of Sin City (2005), based on his own comic series, was a faithful (even panel to screen transition) adaptation where the author was there more to bring it to life with his thoughts, a very different type of work than taking another creator's work and making an entirely new story for film from it. Using dominantly green screen as with Sin City, Miller does have a lot of room for improvisation, but he chooses directions that, for obvious reasons, raised many questions.

We will get to Samuel L. Jackson, as the villain the Octopus and beholder of some of the stranger creative choices, proclaiming toilets are funny and such things, later but the immediate curiosity with The Spirit is that its tonally scatterbrained, between Gabriel Macht as the hero speaking very sombre Miller style monologues of his true mistress being the city itself, against incredibly silly slapstick humour like The Spirit  losing his trousers down to his ankles in the midst of escaping a perilous drop off the side of a building, all with the Octopus (alongside Scarlett Johansson as Octopus' henchwoman) being played off as comedic villains from the get-go, what with their cloned minions (all played by Louis Lombardi) who are complete idiots wearing pun based black t-shirts. I see how, in a comic book, the passage of time would be clearer - for a film, where time is told different, the results here are hectic in its tonal shifts.

The humour itself is also not particularly funny, just perplexing in how odd it gets. You find yourself with a one scene kooky French sword fetishist called Plaster of Paris for one scene, in a skimpy Parisian belly dancer costume walking bare feet (and nearly bare) in the snow, having just skewered the Spirit on a whim, and you are wondering the hell was meant with the character. You don't get enough time to as ingest this as you immediately find The Spirit on death's door, his apparent immortality with limits as Death herself Lorelei (Jaime King) looks to claim him. Seriously, between this and the abrupt melting of a cat named Muffy a scene earlier, you don't get time to digest this material before another out of place joke or odd change appears.

And yes, let's go back to Muffy, as that's the scene that really encapsulates the issues and curiosities of The Spirit, at its most distilled. The one in which the Octopus, Samuel L. Jackson, is in full Nazi officer uniform among other details. The character, by all accounts, was an unseen figure whose name literally described a phantom whose tentacles were a metaphor for his control of the metropolis. Jackson, frankly, whilst he tries feels innately strained, a buffoon rather than menacing between his absurd costume changes (like samurai leisure wear) and obsession with eggs, neither feeling like a completely weird figure and pushing the absurdity further, in vast contrast to Johansson who, as the real brains of the operations, stands better out as a glib straight woman who just enjoys her work. Yes, Jackson in Nazi uniform is incredibly uncomfortable in imagining what was going on in his head during the take - thought I wondered more for Johansson, who is of Jewish descent, also in costume and at one point in front of a portrait of Hitler - though it's a scene where I don't think its Frank Miller being offensive but trying to be weird on purpose, a cack-handed attempt which misses the mark between this, Muffy appearing only to buy the farm, Plaster of Paris and admittedly one good idea in the film, that against a hero who regenerates chopping The Spirit up into little pieces and posting them separately in the mail might be effective against what is effectively an undead revenant.

From https://movies-b26f.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Spirit.jpg

Where it does have the right tone, and why I cannot fully damn The Spirit, is when the tone is a gee whiz old pulp one. It leans heavily on the Sin City aesthetic, but its heart's clearly to an older, slightly silly type of pulp in which everything is meant to be a lark, emphasised as the plot McGuffin, alongside the Golden Fleece of Jason being discovered, being that of Hercules' blood which has been kept in a horn for millennia and can offer immortal strength. It's meant to be a bit over-the-top, somewhat saucy and making a deal that Denny Colt, whilst a good guy and a hero, has a wandering eye which is played to with some credible attempt alongside the character of nurse Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson), daughter of the police detective who helps the Spirit whenever he is harmed but, in love with him, has to put up with his constant womanising, more so as an old childhood friend has returned as Eva Mendes.  Even if the plot is predictable, I see what Frank Miller was after with these scenes.

Yet he decides, abruptly, to have Colt enter monologues of exposition to himself (to us? To the cat that keeps following him around?), which even when I can accept the transitions between serious protector of the city and a doofus do feel jarring. There's also the cheesecake, which I'd have to deal with as Miller is at least obsessed with Mendes' figure and dresses most of the female cast in very revealing costumes, even diving costumes with strategically unzipped areas. Frankly, Miller's other work could reveal more problematic content, but in what I have read (Daredevil, even Sin City with its obvious issue of sex workers and femme fatales in armed fetish wear) the man still comes off as a saint next to the unfortunate and more objectionable issues with gender politics in American comic books, the lesser of two evils for good and for worst between the "woman in the refrigerator" concept spun from the frequent horrible death of female side characters to extremer body dysmorphic inducing character designs. The issue for me with The Spirit is that Miller comes off as being more juvenile than sexist, with all the issues that beholds.

And I saw this again knowing the late 2000s was when a backlash was seemingly brewing against Frank Miller, emphasised by The Spirit's box office and critical failure by a major marker of this string of events starting the era, vastly contrasting the love for the cinematic adaptation of Sin City and the surprise box office success of Miller adaptation 300 (2006) was. Even with a minimal reading knowledge of Miller, I know enough he is a talented creator, seen in his drawings on the end credits reinterpreting The Spirit character, and the various issues that came about in the 2000s seem like a series of waves that at the same time suddenly made him a man out of step of time - Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-2) which became a divisive follow up to The Dark Knight Returns (1986); All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder (2005-8), which may be as terrible as everyone says it is, but made "I'm the goddamn Batman!" a meme; the entirety of his negative views of Occupy Wall Street, which as someone who has entirely rejected both conservative and liberal sides, comes off more as petty arguing between sides; the belated, insanely late sequel to the first Sin City film in 2014, and its failure, where I still scratch my head, after the success of the first film, as to why it took so long to be green lit when the chance was clearly gone; the entire controversy around Holy Terror (2011), originally meant to be Batman versus Islamic terrorists until he had to create original characters, probably as offensive as its reputation suggests, but in mind that he regrets the work in the current day, seeing that it came from a huge swelling of extreme emotion and anger after 9/11 that, whilst still problematic, left a lot of spiritual injury on the USA that unfortunately led to a lot of ill advised ideas like that one. Suffice to say, unlike an Alan Moore or a Grant Morrison, a string of events like this didn't Miller bulletproof into the current day.

The Spirit at times does show this sense of being out of step, or at least a first time director biting too hard in ambition in terms of this jumble of genres and strangeness, something which Miller seems to deliberately play to as his own cameo is that of an older, gawky police officer. When he does focus, you get a moment like, falling to the bottom of a harbour, Colt floating pass the giant heads of all the women in his life rather than his life flashing before his, which is by far more artistically credible than from any of the Marvel Universe films I have seen. When the film is entirely riffing on old forties pulp, like its source material, what with Gabriel Macht playing the heroic but somewhat naive chad, The Spirit does actually start to have good humour and a sense of where it is going, and as much as the aesthetic of Sin City (comic and film) of monochrome with colour is superior, with more emphasis on the style rather than misguided comic beats, this almost sepia style would've worked.

Ultimately, it's a fascinating failure. It's not deserving of its reputation next to some utterly tedious superhero films over the years, but with honesty that it's not held highly for all its curious little mistakes for a very good reason. It really instead falls into my fascination for oddities, those films I don't necessarily defend but strangely find myself falling back to because they are so much more interesting in what they offer about their creators, as people rather than film makers, rather than a bland highly acclaimed work where the creator seems a blank slate.

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