King Kong
I saw King Kong last night. Wow. Applause in the theater.
An intense movie with a long, slow start, by the end careening through every film genre imaginable. An incredible recreation of depression-era New York City. Violent and spectacular. Tremendous special effects. Kong versus not one but three - count’em, three - tyrranosaurs! Freely referential but not derivitive, the movie is almost like a recap of the history of popular film. A film about making a film. Thick with subtext. Not always so subtextually, a scathing critique of the film industry (“Will it have boobies?”).
Sadly, Peter Jackson made a lot of decisions which serve to undermine the film he was apparently trying to make. Eaten head-first by giant maggots? Blithely machine-gunning giant crickets off another man’s body? It’s hard to care about any of the secondary characters because they’re so underdeveloped, though the hints dropped in their final moments are tantalizing. Miscasting. Jack Black would have been a perfect Carl Denham if Jackson had been able to pull a deeper, darker performance out of him. However, by the end of the film it is clear that, short of a line-by-line approach foreign to Jackson’s style of directing, Black is simply out of his depth.
But—the film is saved. The rendering of Kong is simply brilliant. The eyes, man. Those EYES. Andy Sirkis’ performance shines through. Andy has got to be one of the greatest physical actors of our time. He is a silverback gorilla. The body language, the facial expressions, that non-zygomatic primate smile. Yet, while Kong has no lines, he has Dialogue. Those moments where his Gorilla Otherness deepens into something else and you can read his face all the way down into his gorilla soul. Once, thinking he sees Ann Darrow chained up on stage in the same fashion he had been, you can almost hear it: “Oh no… they’ve done it to you too...”
The relationship. In the original King Kong, it was a one-sided erotic obsession. Here, it is a chaste and profound friendship built on a sort of mutual understanding, far deeper than the merely erotic (and far more credible, given the difference in size and species). They are both orphans who, in a sense, are forever alone because of who they are; the world wants them on display. For Kong, Denham’s stage is not so different from the burlesque or chorus line to which the world would consign Ann.
It’s a shame that after Fay Wray’s death it fell to Black to deliver the movie’s powerful last line, “It wasn’t the airplanes; beauty killed the beast,” for he loses the sense of it. In the original film, it suggested that it was Darrow’s beauty which had truly been fatal to Kong, falling like Icarus flying too close to the sun. In Jackson’s vision however, it is Kong’s own peculiar beauty which dooms him. All too often, Jackson seems to say, the world drags beauty into the limelight to be consumed and destroyed. Kong’s brief celebrity follows a familiar trajectory, down to the vulture-like descent of papparazzi on his corpse. Anyone familiar with the life and death of Norma Jean Baker is likely to notice resonances in both Darrow and Kong.
Jackson’s King Kong is a very flawed masterpiece, but it is a masterpiece, and by the standards of event films, it is an insanely great one. There is far more substance to it than Kong Fights Dinosaurs (though that part is AWESOME), and it deserves to be seen in the theater.
Four out of five stars.