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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
Photo by Universal Pictures
Naomi Watts and Kong (performed by Andy Serkis) in "King Kong."
He's big, he's back, and he's ready to sweep you up in his warm, hairy palm and take you on a rollicking romantic adventure!
Dec 14, 2005 | There's no doubt that, because the studios are so desperate for your moviegoing dollar, movies are getting bigger. It's the pictures that are getting smaller: Particularly during the summer and at holiday time, there's no shortage of expensive vehicles that sure feel important, and yet are sorely lacking in imagination and emotional resonance. A big movie doesn't have to be a bad one. And yet the afterglow of most blockbusters lasts 10 minutes, if we're lucky. We may leave the theater with conflicted feelings: We've gotten our 10 bucks' worth, and we've also been robbed.
But good things do come in big packages. The trick for any filmmaker is to find the small movie within the big one, which is exactly what Peter Jackson does in "King Kong." Jackson, who was an intelligent, capable filmmaker even before he made the majestic and enveloping "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, knows just what to do with a palette as big as this one. The scale of "King Kong" may be large, but it's never needlessly, or willfully, overwhelming -- which isn't to say Jackson isn't a showman. Like Merian C. Cooper, who made the groundbreaking (if somewhat sadistic) 1933 original, Jackson is out to impart a sense of adventure. His movie is bathed in an aura of movie-palace grandeur, and, with the exception of a somewhat saggy midsection, it holds you tight from scene to scene. But in spirit, Jackson's "King Kong" owes much more to John Guillermin's wonderful, sorely underappreciated 1976 remake: Like Guillermin, Jackson is far more interested in the relationship between the girl and the ape than he is in the power of special effects for their own sake. As big as "King Kong" is, its sense of intimacy is what really sticks with you. This is an epic Big Little Book of a picture.
Like the earlier versions, this "Kong" begins and ends with hubris: In Depression-era New York City, small-time, cartoonishly sleazy movie director Carl Denham (a made-to-cartoonishly-sleazy-order Jack Black) has obtained a map to a secret island, on which he hopes to film a blockbuster adventure. But he finds himself minus a star and he needs to find a substitute, someone who will fit into her costumes. On the street, he sees just the right girl: Out of desperation -- and out of work -- the very delicate-looking Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), a vaudeville performer who'd like to be a "real" actress but who can barely make a living as it is, steals an apple from a fruit stand. Just as the vendor catches her, Denham steps forward and pays up. He brings her to a coffee shop, buys her a meal, and before long, he's convinced her to embark on this dangerous moviemaking adventure, clinching the deal by revealing that a playwright she greatly admires, Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), is writing the screenplay. "You're perfect, look at you," he tells her, his eyes blazing partly with delight at the amount of money he thinks he can make off her, and partly with amazement at the purity of her beauty: "You're the saddest girl I've ever met."
So their adventure begins: They board a crusty old steamer with a shifty-looking captain (Thomas Kretschmann) and a cook named Lumpy (Andy Serkis, who acted the part of Kong to give Naomi Watts a living presence to play off when she was filming the blue-screen sequences). Ann's costar-to-be, Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler, in a wry, funny little performance), is also aboard, as is Driscoll, whom Denham tricks into going out to sea. Nothing seems particularly untoward -- at least if you disregard the stash of bottles below deck, marked with the ominous word "CHLOROFORM" -- until the ship hits an unexpected blot on Denham's map, home to a very big monkey who has no idea what's about to hit him.
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