Eminent Victorian

From Hell

by D. K. Holm, www.cinemonkey.com

t's very boring for a movie reviewers to confess mixed feelings about a film. The writer should be firm, passionate, committed, expressing either hate for a meretricious film or defense of an unjustly undervalued work. But in fact these days, mixed feelings are about the only thing that most Hollywood films inspire. It seems as if every movie these days can garner nothing more than lazy, mixed reviews. After a terrible spring and a disastrous summer, it's a year that has so far only unveiled three valuable films (O.K., I'll tell you: Memento, Sexy Beast, and Ghost World, of the year's releases I've seen). From Hell, after Ghost World, one of the few films based on a graphic novel, is just another mixed feeling movie. But it could have been so much more.

The movie's source is Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's masterly graphic novel (published by Eddie Campbell Press, $35). Moore and Campbell's book is one of the great works of the 20th century, and this despite its adoption of a discredited theory concerning the identity of Jack the Ripper. Part of the pleasure of From Hell the book is its attention to detail and its narrative strategies. For example, for the book's second chapter, the narrative shifts gears to tell the life story of Dr. William Gull, whom the book offers up as the Ripper, after the theory put forth by Stephen Knight in his book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution; or at another part, out of no where, we witness the insemination of Adolph Hitler. Shaw, Wilde, Crowley, and others make cameo appearances or are mentioned, contributing to the strata of society affected (or amused) by the Ripper slayings. Most delightful of all are Moore's annotations to the novel, which comprise a signature's worth of close-printed pages at the back of the volume. Written in a wry tone that lightens the load of the intense material before it, the notes also give evidence of the prodigious research Moore and Campbell put into the book. The comic is in black and white, stark and dirty as the world it portrays. It's a book drawn in industrial soot.

The film, for probably usual reasons, straightens out all the narrative twists and foregoes the details. First off, the story is tilted 180 degrees so that it is now a mystery, and the viewer is suppose to be surprised when the killer is unveiled, especially given that he is presented in the film as disabled stroke victim (Ian Holm plays Gull). The film may gain in suspense, but it loses by diluting the clotted view of a stratified society that creates a great gulf between the lower orders and the elites. Second, two characters are conflated. The team drops Robert Lees the psychic and gives his "visions" to Abberline (Johnny Depp), who now, instead of a stolid beat cop, is an opium inhaling, absinthe guzzling widower still pining for lost love. Instead of living on and puzzling over the bizarre charade he finds himself in, the movie's Abberline dies in an opium den of an overdose (if that's possible). There is now also an imaginary romance between Abberline and a remarkably healthy looking Marie Kelly (Heather Graham), which leads to a bittersweet ending. Abberline, it seems almost futile to mention, was in fact a real person, and a modicum of authenticity, which Moore embraces, would have been nice.

ut the worst change really is the eradication of Moore's whole purpose for the book. He began to publish it in 1988, the anniversary of the Jack the Ripper slayings; for Moore, the events were oddly predictive of the 20th century to follow. In the book, Gull the visionary claims that he has even invented the 20th century. There is a similar remark in the film, but it's a small fillip, far from comprising the entire point of the piece.

Moore seems to be have a measure of compassion for the victims. To the filmmakers, they are quivering-bosomed "hos" not unlike the dummies Hughes Brothers in part profiled in their documentary about pimps. Moore presents them as whole, flawed people. He might agree with George Bernard Shaw, who noted that the Ripper had actually advanced the cause of reform. In a letter to the Star, Shaw wrote, "Less than a year ago the West-end press, headed by the St. James's Gazette, the Times, and the Saturday Review, were literally clamoring for the blood of the people--hounding on Sir Charles Warren to thrash and muzzle the scum who dared to complain that they were starving--heaping insult and reckless calumny on those who interceded for the victims--applauding to the skies the open class bias of those magistrates and judges who zealously did their very worst in the criminal proceedings which followed--behaving, in short as the proprietary class always does behave when the workers throw it into a frenzy of terror by venturing to show their teeth. Quite lost on these journals and their patrons were indignant remonstrances, argument, speeches, and sacrifices, appeals to history, philosophy, biology, economics, and statistics; references to the reports of inspectors, registrar generals, city missionaries, Parliamentary commissions, and newspapers; collections of evidence by the five senses at every turn; and house-to-house investigations into the condition of the unemployed, all unanswered and unanswerable, and all pointing the same way." Shaw came to the conclusion that, "Private enterprise has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation, and organisation, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disemboweling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism."

Would that the film bore this level of wit and thinking. The biggest non starter associated with the film is the idea that the Hughes Brothers are somehow at first inappropriate for the material, but then, when you think about it, eminenetly qualilfied to do a story that is essentially about "the streets." But that issue is irrelevant. This is about facts (details of the society as a whole), not feelings (being intuitively streetwise, for examle). The bottom line is that Moore and Campbell's graphic novel is more of a movie than the compromised, conventional, middlebrow material that the Hughes Brothers and company have splattered us with. In a way, graphic novels are still more like books than they are like cartoons or movies. There is room for detail. There is room for literary nuance. There is rooom for tangents and subplots and secondary incidents that flesh out the world portrayed. Movies have a (occasionally unjustified) reputation for dumbing down everything. Here's the perfect book to movie contrast to prove that point.

The thesis of this film has been committed to screens at least twice before since first enunciated by writer Knight, first in Murder by Decree from 1979, a loving Holmes pastiche directed by Bob Clark of Porky's infamy, but who is a director whose denigrated output really needs to be reexamined; then in Jack the Ripper a detailed anniversary TV mini-series from 1988 in which Michael Caine plays Abberline and Ray McAnally plays Gull. Moore's take is arguably the most imaginative of all these; little of that imagination and sympathetic identification gets into the film.

n the other hand, the film is beautiful to look at, filmed mostly on a set without looking so. Various process shots of grim dusks take you back to the great Disney films of youth. Heather Graham is a delight as usual, and Johnny Depp continues to be one of our very best actors. But that's about it. Not everything can be Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, of course, but From Hell the movie could have gone a long way toward honoring the detail of the source book by adopting the leisurely strategies of that brilliant mini series.

10/01

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