short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Domino (2005, UK/USA)

In the middle of Domino, Tony Scott’s fictionalization of the life of bounty hunter Domino Harvey, one particular scene pinpoints the film’s central problem. Domino (Keira Knightley) and her team (Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, and Riz Abbasi) have sat down with Domino’s mother and a team of television producers to discuss a reality T.V. show based on Domino’s life. The producer (Christopher Walken, phoning in the wacky yet again) is concerned that the footage they’ve gathered already is “too much like Cops,” and wants to lose the guys in favor of Domino’s sexy presence. Domino refuses – if she is going to do the show, everyone on her team will get equal coverage.

From this point on, Domino becomes the de facto leader of the team (though ostensibly still under the employment of Ed Mosbey (Rourke)), and Scott’s direction quite obviously stands in for Walken’s fictional character. The camera eats up Knightley’s body, sexualizing her character and injecting a dirty glamour into her violent lifestyle. Perhaps all of this is intended as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, but as with most everything else in Domino, it feels exceedingly hollow. It’s impossible to see how Scott could have missed the connection between the reality T.V. show and his film, but it’s quite likely that he just didn’t care.

Whereas the director’s Man on Fire used stylistic hyperbole (saturated colors, overblown subtitles, and frenetic jumpcuts) to give visual reinforcement to the emotional state of Denzel Washington’s character, here the same tropes are used for style’s sake alone. Rather than making a statement about the effects of a violent life, as Man did, Domino seems little more than Natural Born Killers redux. When an oracular Tom Waits shows up in the final third to give the bounty hunters a mystical purpose for their bloody mission, the film finally goes completely off the rails, attempting justify a series of bad decisions and violent mistakes. The painful, and yes, somehow grimily glamorous life of the real Domino Harvey, who committed suicide (possibly an accidental overdose) not long before Scott’s movie hit theaters, would likely have made an interesting and intelligent film about the reasons why an individual who seemed to have everything – money, good looks, brains – purposefully chose a life of violence. But through Scott’s eyes, Domino’s story has become little more than a sleazy, if well-packaged, piece of cinematic candy.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A rough piece of cinematic candy indeed. The editing was jarring, making the film a music video extended way past its two and half-minute safety zone. Tonm Waits' cameo was wasted, but I did giggle at the Walken character dilemma over "font issues."

3:12 PM

 

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