Geeks and Dolls

MANOCHROME: Sin City's Marv (Mickey Rourke, right, with Carla Gugino) is an incredible hulk.

Nerdish thrills and masculine burdens fight it out in Sin City.

by Cindy Fuchs

There's no trumped-up realism here. It's more like a pure fever dream.
— Frank Miller

Mickey Rourke gets electrocuted, Bruce Willis is hanged, Devon Aoki kicks ass, Jessica Alba dances on a pole. What else do you need to know? The pulpy excesses of Sin City are gaudy, gorgeous and already well-known, seized more or less whole from Frank Miller's noiry graphic novel series. Indeed, the film's dedication to its source is already notorious: When Robert Rodriguez learned that Director's Guild rules prohibited him from sharing directing credit with Miller, he quit the organization and made the movie he wanted to make with Miller and his friend Quentin "Special Guest Director" Tarantino. Fuck the man.

And long live the man, too. For at the ghastly, desolate, silhouetted heart of Sin City, drawn from three of Miller's books (The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard) are men of all shapes and sizes, variously desperate, cruel, frightened and ferocious, not precisely seeking redemption but willing to take it. Their patter is hard-boiled ("Don't scream or I'll plug ya"), their bodies beaten down ("You're pushing 60 and you got a bum ticker," Willis' Hartigan tells himself), their perspectives ravaged by one bad knock after another. Marv (Rourke), face deformed and soul destroyed by the murder of his one night stand/true love, the hooker Goldie (Jamie King), pauses in his vengeful killing spree to wonder, "What if I've imagined all of this? What if I've turned into what they always said I would, a maniac, a psycho killer?" Ah, well, on to the next cadaver.

The three major stories all concern revenge: Hartigan wants to protect Nancy, the traumatized kidnap victim he saves from certain grisly death (Makenzie Vega as "skinny little Nancy"; Jessica Alba as her grown-up stripper self); Marv seeks the annihilation of everyone even slightly associated with Goldie's murder, including the cannibalistic Cardinal Roark (Rutger Hauer) and his senator brother (Powers Boothe); and ex-con/ex-photojournalist Dwight (the supremely brooding Clive Owen) runs into trouble with a rogue cop (there's no other kind here) named Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro), who abuses Dwight's waitress girlfriend, Shellie (Brittany Murphy).

Distraught, ornery, self-critical, these heroes are decidedly anti, but their motives are more or less clear-cut because in Basin City, the villains are outsized. The Cardinal and his spastically effective boy-toy assassin Kevin (Elijah Wood) eat corpses and keep the heads as wall-mounted trophies. The cops, purportedly pissed about Jackie Boy's death in Old Town, actually want to regain control of that lucrative turf: Hookers in thigh boots and jangly chains run the streets without oversight by male pimps. And poor Hartigan is up against a re-engineered child molester, now literally a Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl as a rejiggered sort of Gollum) and spawn of Senator Roark, making him nearly untouchable, at least by anyone who plans to stay alive.

Colorful as these tales may seem, they are also familiar and repetitive. You don't come to Sin City for illumination; you come for reinforcement. You know how these things go, and the film delivers. The backdrops are stark (mostly black, white and gray, with splashes of color in cars, neon signs and blood), the guys brooding, the dames bodacious, including Marv's best pal, the "dyke" Lucille (Carla Gugino, a long way from Mrs. Spy Kids), whose first appearance, wearing only a thong as she saunters to her bathroom and soothes the once-again shattered Marv, doesn't titillate so much as it astounds. Rourke seems unnervingly born for his part, and Owen makes his own dour, battered beauty subordinate to Dwight's devastation.

While the exhaustive transliteration of Miller's baleful graphic novel provides a nerdish satisfaction (the panels work as storyboards, and the film often lifts them as if right off the page), the movie offers other rewards. Primarily, it complicates masculinity, the bedrock of the genre. Though these guys look like basic dark-comic-book heroes, they're also quite miserable. Yes, they haul their asses into action to rescue or avenge ladies, the blondes in particular (Goldie, Shellie) incarnating classic "motivation." But they're sad, too. Like, do we have to do this again? This even as the Old Town girls seem self-sufficient: Gail (Rosario Dawson) and Miho (Aoki) are deadly accurate with assorted weapons. Like the guys, though, they're undone by a traitor within their ranks and need a little help from Gail's ex, Dwight.

The boys' burden here is not just female or even moral. It's more complicated, born of tradition, ambition and inertia. These big lugs can't imagine their way out of predicaments without the usual recourse to some version of balls-out violence or always-gratifying sadism. At times they make this load sound poetic ("This is the old days, the all or nothin' days," observes Marv. "They're back"); at others, frustrating (Marv again: "It really gets my goat when guys rough up dames") or fun. As Dwight explains, "You gotta stand up for your friends. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lotta people."

But masculine prerogative is always a load. It's painful and costly and seductive. Men are damaged no matter what they do — by betrayal, disillusionment, experience and revelation. And that's the story of Sin City, the one it tells insistently and horrifically. It's hard to be a boy.