October 18–25, 2001

movie shorts

From Hell

by Cindy Fuchs

(recommended)

Jack the Ripper is the ostensible subject of Albert and Allen Hughes’ From Hell, but he’s more a point of departure, an obviously sensational hook, than the focus. The real subject is the street, the brutal, frightening, thrilling experience of urban life. From the moment the camera begins its descent — from a breathtakingly lurid orange skyscape to the filthy closeness of London’s Whitechapel slum, 1888 — it’s clear that From Hell takes its title fairly literally. As the camera tracks the stunningly red-haired prostitute Mary Kelly (Heather Graham, who, it must be said, looks too milky and sweet to be living Mary’s hard life) through back alleys and past dingy doorways, the city’s dark ferocity is almost palpable.

The Ripper story is, of course, an infamously gruesome mystery. Never identified, he killed at least five prostitutes (or, as they are delicately referred to at the time, "unfortunates") with ritualistic precision, often cutting out their genitals or internal organs (livers and uteri), and (perhaps) wrote cruel, smug letters to the newspapers and police department. Though it’s not clear whether any of these letters was genuine, at least one suggested the Ripper’s grim, enduring effect: "One day men will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth century."

It’s a bloody, awful process. The fact that the Hughes brothers choose to open their film with these words underlines the connections among the street, the century and the self-consciousness enabled and even necessitated by media, press and movies included. Where other films of the Ripper story have been chastely spooky, this one vividly exposes the dreadful Victorian moment that produced Jack, with scenes detailing the surgical classes at London Hospital (specifically, the performance of frontal lobotomies); the Prince of Wales’ syphilis; the commercial exploitation of John Merrick (the Elephant Man, who appears first on the very street where Jack skulks, then again on display for a titillated, well-dressed crowd); and everyday horrors endured by poor folks. Filmed in disorienting swish pans, time-lapse and digital discoloration (the greens here are just painful), the murders grow increasingly graphic as the film invites you further inside the monster’s mind.

Appropriately, From Hell doesn’t make it easy to see any of this. Though the guide it offers you — intrepid Inspector Fred Abberline (Johnny Depp) — is certainly charismatic, he’s also wracked by malfunction and personal pain. Aided by his rock-steady associate, Sgt. Godley (Robbie Coltrane) and using the few crude tools available to 19th-century forensics, Abberline studies wounds and crime scenes, consults surgeons, attempts to reconstruct the killer’s thinking, and, most terribly, suffers disturbing "visions" of the murders while under the influence of opium and laudanum-laced absinthe.

He’s a sympathetic addict, with a recognizable motive: grief over his wife’s death during childbirth. But like the Ripper, he is also a product of his environment, a reflection and judgment of urban "progress." In other words, the high grants Abberline no escape from his tragic memories, moral sensibilities or career choice. (To be a cop in this brutal time and place simply offers no reward.) The high is as metaphorical as it is literal, anyway; you never see Abberline make a street buy, but his necessary mingling with members of high society, his face pale and his lips tight with distaste, seems almost a worse fate. For, as From Hell structures it, the pervasive evil embodied by Jack is class-based and, inevitably, trickle-down.

If the dank underclass neighborhood streets put vice and misery on full view, a less visible depravity emerges from privilege. This is the monstrosity of the class system: The wealthy can believe they’re not responsible for anything but satisfying their own desires. While the film ennobles the Ripper’s victims, showing Mary and her friends’ heroic efforts to pay off street punks and bad cops at the same time that they must solicit clients, it indicts those who observe the Elephant Man with their hands placed delicately over their mouths or use prostitutes, drink and drugs as cheap stimulations.

Saturated with atmosphere and politics, the film deals with its primary problem — the fact that the Ripper’s identity remains unknown — by making an educated guess, based on Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel and derived from the work of Ripperologists, those enthusiasts who have studied the photos, drawings, descriptions and reports, handed down now for more than 100 years. Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias’ script delivers a villain, but eschews resolution. The Ripper sustains his secret — as does Abberline — because he is not of the underclass, because he is nurtured and protected by his own kind.

This conclusion — not to mention the film’s thematic interests — will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Hughes brothers’ work, or even their reputation. Each of their earlier films (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents and American Pimp) is concerned with the ways that economic, cultural and political systems create monsters. And From Hell’s account of the events must be incomplete: After 1888, the 20th century only gets worse, after all.

(Ritz 16)