Directed by Peter Jackson
Peter Jackson’s three-hour, $200 million version of King Kong is a monumental film but like most monuments, it compels awe but not admiration. Like this season’s other epic movie, The Chronicles of Narnia, Kong is a narrative filled with symbols and themes that are primordially stirring, and strong enough to withstand long stretches of misguided, fuzzy or outright inept filmmaking (of which there’s plenty, I’m sorry to say). This is the sort of years-in-the-making dream project that fantasy buffs will be predisposed to root for. Some may even call it a classic, a definitive big screen experience, or at the very least, a movie whose missteps can be written off as insignificant.
But they are not insignificant. This Kong is an epic mixed bag, at best one-third to one-half a good movie. Alternating between throat-clearing exposition and dead-end back-story, the most incidental moments detail the surreally tender moments between Kong and captive heroine Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and bursts of savage poetry (the Skull Island action sequences, portions of Kong’s New York rampage). Jackson credits the 1933 original with inspiring him to become a filmmaker, and has even indicated that he considers his Lord of the Rings trilogy a technical warm-up for Kong. His childlike (and at times childish) fanaticism infuses every frame of this remake, which is essentially a steroidal blow-up of Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace’s original scenario. (Jackson co-wrote the script with regular collaborators Phillippa Boyens and Fran Walsh.) But too much of the director’s energy is poured into the wrong places.
The movie’s many dull, poorly-thought-out, superfluous scenes (largely clustered in the first and final thirds) suggest Jackson has lost the exploitation filmmaker’s ruthlessness that made the Rings movies feel so focused and kinetic despite their comparable running times. During Kong’s early, supposedly character-building conversations between hustling director Carl Denham (Jack Black), starving New York actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and playwright-turned-stalwart-knight Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), you can see the principals fumbling to find a tone that will justify the copious screen time set aside for their characters—screen time that has been unwisely wrested from the tale’s inarguable dramatic core, the impossible bond between the beast and his beauty.
The movie’s voyage to Skull Island (which makes previous versions seem comparatively brief) asks us to endure unnecessary intrigue among supporting players, lame and sometimes creepy mugging by Black, and a supposed budding romance between Ann and Jack that’s less interesting than the romances in earlier versions. Watts saves her ardent fascination for the big gorilla; Brody seems like a cool pub-crawler faking a writer’s neuroses and a male ingénue’s decency. (At least in the 1976 remake, Jessica Lange’s ditzy disco blonde and Jeff Bridges’ hippie primate expert had a sweet sexual chemistry that made the Kong-Ann-Jack triangle mythically credible.)
When we arrive on Skull Island, the tone deafness continues. Some design touches inject plausibility questions into a fantasy that ought to trundle right past them. For instance, the wall around the native village, seen in both the 1933 and 1976 versions, has been recast in stone, expanded, and Tolkien-ized into what suggests the ruins of a once-advanced civilization, complete with Easter Island-style statuary and Great Wall of China partitioning. These manifestations make you wonder if Kong’s reign of terror is the cause of this civilization’s decline or a symptom. (This unwelcome intrusion of refrigerator logic recalls a moment from the 1998 crime thriller Phoenix, where Ray Liotta poses a question the original Kong never gave us a chance to ask: If the natives built that wall to keep Kong out, why’d they make doors big enough for him to get through?)
And yet...The island is so foggy-beautiful (it seems to have been painted in watercolor by Frank Frazetta), and the spectacular set pieces so vigorously executed, that the frame’s edges disappear, and for the first time you find yourself getting lost in a magnificent fictional space, a lush new rendering of a place that inspired movie vistas from Dagobah to Jurassic Park. Jackson’s Skull Island is like a hellish amusement park with a new flesh-ripping, bone-breaking ride around each corner: a brontosaur stampede, with raptors zipping around the plant-eaters’ legs and picking off fleeing humans; an expanded ravine sequence (based on a notorious bit that was cut from the original) in which the ship’s crew is attacked by huge bugs; a dazzlingly choreographed fight between Kong and three T-Rexes that starts in a jungle clearing and ends suspended in midair over a vine-tangled chasm. (The latter is the film’s aesthetic high point. The tight, precisely framed close-ups of Kong’s flailing fists and the T-rexes’ snapping jaws create a Cubist whirlwind of violence. As he tries to kill the dinosaurs and protect Ann, Kong’s concentration and desperation are moving and hilarious; he’s like Jackie Chan battling three goons while juggling a Faberge egg.)
Better yet are the quiet moments between Ann and Kong (pantomimed by Andy Serkis, Gollum from the Rings films), which attempt and often attain a Spielbergian simplicity. Their exchanges are depicted in a completely innocent, earnest, non-condescending way; they’re just a couple of intelligent mammals trying to find a way to communicate. Ann, an actress in career trouble back home, uses her stage skills and exhibitionist tendencies to endear herself to the beast, dancing and juggling. Kong doesn’t want to smile, but he can’t help himself.
Ann’s status as the beast’s love object is her role of a lifetime, and the dazed sparkle in Watts’ eyes suggests that on some level. When Kong places Ann on his shoulder and runs through the jungle, the movie becomes more than a display of technical adeptness and brute vigor. It’s a triumphant, stirring fairytale image, and the visual linchpin of a relationship as real, psychologically complex and moving as Eliot’s bond with E.T., or the hopeless love between Zampano and Gelosmino in La Strada.
The unspoken strength of Ann and Kong’s bond gives the ape’s eventual betrayal, torture, capture and murder a dreadful power. Kong gets treated even worse here than in previous versions; at various points, he’s raked with rifle and machinegun fire, flayed with grappling hooks, gassed with chloroform, and raised up onstage in Manhattan in an even more overtly crucifixion-like pose than the one in the ‘33 version. (This year’s theatrical one-two crucifixion punch of Aslan from Narnia and Kong recalls a great Pauline Kael description in her review of the 1976 Kong: “Christ as a mistreated pet.”) The beast’s long plunge into pinprick nothingness is heartbreaking: not just a murder, but also an incremental diminishment.
Does Jackson understand what an emotional mother lode he’s tapped? Incredibly, I don’t think he does. If he knew, I doubt he’d have devoted so much of the film to spectacular set pieces that don’t feed the Kong-Ann relationship (the brontosaur stampede, for instance), and bloodless human exposition that even he doesn’t seem excited about. He might have spent more energy integrating the notion of Ann-as-performer and Kong-as-audience. And he should have examined the tale’s never-subtle racial overtones (see David N. Rosen’s Jump Cut article “King Kong: Race, Sex and Rebellion”) with more care. As is, the subtext bubbles up onscreen and pops in your face: the ooga-booga natives with their drug-crazed eyes; the unmediated, clumsy juxtaposition of Kong in chains and a snippet of Bye Bye Blackbird.
The fact that Kong transports you anyway seems more a testament to the story’s primal allure than to Jackson’s unprecedented attempt to dazzle. Yes, for all its faults, it’s still moving, but so is hearing a self-taught keyboardist pound out a beloved melody on an out-of-tune piano. It’s the melody that gets you.
