THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL (2000) *** Nicholas Klein gets a lot of characters off the ground very quickly, and without resorting to stereotypes. It helps, maybe, that they're eccentrics from a glorified flophouse, but that only makes the feat more interesting, it doesn't lessen it. Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Jimmy Smits, and Peter Stormare (doing a very impressive John Lennon imitation) are imminently credible as the psychologically scarred but semi-virtuous whackos, and if they don't do it it doesn't get done. You can't have a film "like this" (gloriously original) without a special agent and a suicide (or someone and something else), which is why Mel Gibson's stalking around in a neck brace. Mel takes so many roles that don't require much acting, and does so little acting in them, that it's easy to forget how good he can be when he has something to work with. Whether he's supposed to represent America's power elite or not is irrelevant, and whether he does so successfully is unknowable (though, I think unlikely). What he does do is present a character so awful and complex that it's an absolute epiphany when, down the stretch, you realize that you feel some understanding and compassion for the horrible and incomprehensible. He breaks the rules incessantly, but not in a reflexive or random manner, and there's an argument that he doesn't always do so in his own self interest. Lots of great music: Bono summons shades that make me think that he's done his homework on what works best in film, and lands somewhere between, if slightly south of, Dylan and Cohen on the cinematic spectrum. Wim Wenders plays the film quirky, artsy, repulsive and funny, by turn, and he gives the game away early on purpose. None of this matters when he follows Davies' hands down walls of the million dollar flophouse, allowing no veil between the viewer and the too often veiled truth that what every one of us has is special, and sacred, and too perfect to imagine. It's a very impressive film: it's not easy to take so many chances and not look like an idiot, particularly whilst portraying one.
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