Joel Schumacher’s 8MM (1999) initially hooks you the way a lurid, low-grade episode of a true-crime docuseries on a channel like A&E or Oxygen might when you’re absent-mindedly surfing channels at a hotel during an overnight stay. There’s no mistaking its shabbiness. But you’re also only human, and when you’re presented with a tantalizing mystery you only naturally want answers.
The mystery of 8MM is whether the subject of an apparent snuff film uncovered by the elderly wife (Myra Carter) of a late business magnate in his safe is still alive. The wife hires a private detective who speaks in a consummately professional monotone, Tom (Nicolas Cage), to get answers for her peace of mind.
Chances are low, of course, that something kept in a safe and looks like a snuff movie — generally not really a thing unless you don’t take urban legends with a few grains of salt — would be tucked away among a rich creep’s things and have it turn out to all be simulated movie magic. It isn’t long before Tom is finding leads, and more leads from those leads, that take him into a seamy world of local underground pornography. His de-facto assistant through it all is an adult-store clerk he befriends whose name is, or maybe isn’t, Max California (Joaquin Phoenix).
8MM plays like a scuzzier, darker rejiggering of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), where a concerned, severely out-of-his-element father, played by George C. Scott, wades through the L.A. porn milieu hoping to find the young daughter who’s absconded without a trace apparently for a professional life in it. Hardcore functions well as stylishly sleazy neo-noir; its recreation of its Hollywood scene felt as true as it could with its commercial restraints, and we believed in its characters as people.
8MM’s portrayal of the underground-porn world conversely has the texture of one imagined by a well-off 60-something who wouldn’t know much about that kind of thing and is just making things up as he goes along. The film has a self-conscious severity whose humorlessness might make you laugh. That isn’t because this movie, shot with such grey solemness that even its shadows have shadows, is so-bad-it’s-good funny. It’s because it’s so insistent on being as bleak as possible that it can get silly, overwrought to the point of feeling like a breathless cautionary tale over a phenomenon more prevalent as a plot device in a movie than something to be worried about in real life. (Though the underlying message — girls: don’t trust strange men! — holds water, though I don’t and the movie doesn’t need to tell you that.)
The silliness becomes especially pervasive after the mystery that had hooked us has gotten cleared up. The movie turns into a joyless revenge thriller where a disturbed Cage turns avenging angel. His performance had until then been sort of refreshing because he was underplaying in a way antithetical to the keyed-up style for which he’s known. But once the narrative switch is flipped, we get Cage as we so often expect it: bug-eyed, sputtering. You know this intensity specific to Cage when you see it. It would be more off-putting if we weren’t so entertained by the seriousness with which he’s willing to take a role that doesn’t deserve it.
8MM’s unserious seriousness arguably gets its sealant by what it gives Catherine Keener, one of our most naturally funny, original actresses, to do. All she does in 8MM is wait around as Cage’s worried, shriller and shriller wife, frantically making phone calls while cradling a newborn baby Cage’s character basically never parents. I feel bad that Keener’s time, and to a lesser extent mine, was taken up.
Peterson Reviews 