Cine-Trash
Moreau – The Rebuttal, or The Doctor Is Out To Lunch
by William Ham
illustration by Michael Corcoran
What exactly went wrong here? In spite of its impressive credentials – good source material; a fine, often subversive (The Manchurian Candidate) director; two good actors and a certified (certifiable?) legend in front of the camera; and enough animal makeup to give the entire cast of Cats mass skin cancer – this Island ends up drifting far closer to Gilligan than Moreau. Or, more accurately, like something the Professor would envision after a bout with sunstroke and too many of the native mushrooms.
Mr. Bikowski was kind/merciful enough to reiterate the Gordian plot, leaving me the opportunity to take up my critical scimitar and slash away. The bad seeds are sown right from the start – Moreau sets a distant, unpleasantly hallucinatory tone from the first jerky frame of its bombastic credit sequence, then leaves you scrabbling about in the underbrush, digging desperately for morsels of significance, for the remainder of its running time. Perhaps Frankenheimer (even the director’s name sounds like it’d make a better horror flick than this) was after an Apocalypse Now kinda journey-to-the-edge-of-the-world discombobulation with this – that could explain the bulk of his casting (Brando). Actually, it’s a shame he didn’t take that notion farther – imagine having Thewlis’ character being greeted upon his arrival by a creature that’s half-goat, half-Dennis Hopper. (“You don’t talk to Moreau, maaa-aaaan! He talks to ewes! Got any cigarettes or tin caaaa-aaaans?”)
Most of the actors in Moreau appear to be lost in this miasma. Thewlis, so effective in Mike Leigh’s Naked, comes off hysterically overwrought, gesticulating a lot as if trying to take a cue from the half-breeds here, sprout wings, and fly off to a better film. Val Kilmer plays Montgomery as a hybrid of his own, a cross between the stoned rock star of The Doors and the smirking prodigy he played in Real Genius, proving that the only thing worse than a smartass is a wasted smartass.
And then along comes Marlon. Say what you will about the man, you can’t call him vain – in his mime-at-the-beach white makeup, topsail-sized kimono, and fey, lisping voice, his Moreau comes off less like a Nobel Prize-winning reclusive madman than a gay sumo wrestler dabbling in Kabuki. In truth, his casual, what-do-I-care-I’m-only-on-set-for-a-week attitude is the most enjoyable and comforting thing about Moreau, although I have a hard time buying a pro-vegetarian tirade from a man who looks like he just ate the cast of Babe at brunch. Still, once he’s offed by his progeny, all that remains is a long, tedious, confusingly staged riot sequence and Ron Perlman (the second half of the title of TV’s Beauty and the Beast), the philosophical manimal (you can tell ’cause he has a cane) intoning the film’s moral: “Maybe four legs are better than two.” Yeah, thanks, Simba. And maybe genetically-spliced monkey men might fly outta my butt.
