The Big Fistfight Over The Spirit
The training wheels are off. Frank Miller had director Robert Rodriguez to help make a movie of his graphic novel Sin City and Zack Snyder to make 300, but with his adaptation of Will Eisner's '40s comic, The Spirit (opening Dec. 25), he's all on his own, directing for the first time. Can he pull off a solo act? The first reviews by bigwigs don't think so. "Plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air," says Variety's Justin Chang. "When a man falls to the ground, his body covered with white bloodstains, it's unclear whether he's been felled by bullets or by incontinent birds." But smaller bloggers are rallying to Miller's defense. Ethan Alter claims it's "one of the boldest visual experiments to be released by a major studio in 2008." And Scott Hoffman insists it's "just as memorable if not better" than Sin City. Hoffman's blurb, "One of the best films of 2008," is all over the TV ad, causing Slashfilm's Peter Sciretta to give him massive shit. "The TV spot looks like it was put together from a positive review I sent out to Lionsgate a week ago," emails Hoffman. "I wish people would give the film a chance, it's been all hate mail." So what are the other best films of the year in Hoffmanland? "The Dark Knight will be on my top ten, also Revolutionary Road, Benjamin Button, a bunch of others."
But I still have a nagging doubt. As David Hajdu explains in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, The Spirit was Eisner's screw-you to the superhero genre -- he had no superpowers, no fancy costume. "The idea of the Spirit was a positioning statement of objection to comic-book ideas, brazenly cursory, a mark of contempt for the gimmickry passing for characterization in many of the comics of its time." Frank Miller is more like what Eisner was rebelling against. Nobody loves Miller's insanely flashy gimmickry more than me, but was he really the right guy to direct this film? --Tim Appelo
