Mr Brooks

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Mr Brooks a recent film that aspires to be the film that launches the careers of the new versions of the Coen Brothers. Coen Brothers launched on Blood Simple a twisty story of killing and revenge and guilt with many cool shots.

Mr Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a well-respected Oregon businessman, man of the year of his chamber of commerce, and a super-wealthy man who owns a box business. He also has a hobby of making pottery in his own studio with his own kiln which turns out to be a very convenient way of disposing of the evidence of his other hobby, which is killing people.

Mr Brooks, you see, is a serial killer. He is aided in this ‘addiction’ by his alter ego ‘Marshall’ (William Hurt) who is the one egging Mr Brooks on to kill and kill again. Mr Brooks does fight to control his addiction, but as our movie opens, after going without for a full 2 years, Mr Brooks – after enduring the awards banquet naming him Man of the Year – succumbs to Marshall’s temptation and kills a couple making love in their apartment.

Unfortunately, the couple liked to make love with the lights on and the drapes open, so all their neighbors could watch; and tonight one of those neighbors saw them killed. What’s more, he also was taking photographs.

Mr Brooks has his own problems with his daughter, who shows up at his office and declares she’s dropping out of school. But Mr Brooks and Marshall both know the daughter is lying, covering up something else, the real reason she left school.

But wait – ‘Mr Smith’ appears at Mr Brooks’s office the same afternoon, with pictures of Mr Brooks at the scene of the murder. He’s not a blackmailer though, all he wants to do is experience the thrill he felt when he saw the lovemaking couple killed, but again, and up close. All he wants is to be there when Mr Brooks kills again.

A pretty puzzle, that the scriptwriter/director delights in. Now I must ask, why is America so enamored of serial killers? I don’t know, but I trace it all back to The Silence of the Lambs and its sequels, and Anthony Hopkins’s charismatic performance as a serial killer.

Be that as it may, Mr Brooks starts taking ‘Mr Smith’ around cruising for a victim – Mr Brooks is very choosy about his victims – and at home, Mr Brooks finds out the reason why his daughter has quit school: she’s pregnant. Oh no, the daughter says that is not the real reason, and Marshall, Mr Brooks’s alter-ego, agrees that the girl is still hiding something, something really big. This we discover when a couple of cops from the college town arrive. There was a murder on campus, a bloody savage murder with a hatchet which was left on the scene, and daughter-Brooks is the prime suspect.

Yes, that’s right: we have not one serial killer, but a serial killer in training (‘Mr Smith’) and a fledgling serial killer, daughter Brooks. All we need now is for Mrs Brooks to be a serial killer, and pretty soon everybody in the cast will be killing, killing, killing! But Mrs Brooks doesn’t get anything interesting to do but be good wife.

While all this is going on – isn’t it enough? Not for our neo-Coens – we follow the detective who is on the case of the ‘Thumbprint Killer’ or as we know him, Mr Brooks. The detective is played by Demi Moore, and she is also, as it happens, fabulously wealthy. Her father was a very successful banker, but she works as a cop, and a good one. But her second marriage to a handsome younger jerk is ending, and the jerk is asking for millions of walk-away money.

But wait, there’s more! The detective is famous for sending yet another serial killer, Meeks, aka ‘The Hangman’ to jail. But Meeks has escaped and is looking for revenge against the detective. And, he has a tough as nails girl accomplice. So our scorecard is now up to five, yes, five serial killers in the story. Heavens, is everybody in Portland a serial killer or wannabe?

Mr Brooks debates what he should do. On the one hand it would be best to let his daughter be convicted and go to jail, because she is going to kill again unless she is stopped now. And Mr Brooks wants to die and end it all. On one level he is tired of all these games. But he loves his daughter, which prompts him to fly down to the college town, and kill somebody else using the same methods of the hatchet, to give his daughter an alibi and send the police looking for a serial killer who’s still down there.

That much taken care of, Mr Brooks turns his attentions to the problem of Mr Smith. This is very complicated, but in the end, to cut to the end, Mr Brooks has murdered ‘Mr Smith’ and convinced the police that ‘Smith’ was the ‘Thumbprint Killer’ and he has killed the detective’s ex-husband and his lawyer, and he has sent the detective to where Mr Brooks knows (by amazing coincidence) Meeks, the ‘Hangman’ is hiding out. The detective gets rid of her husband, she becomes a hero when she does away with Meeks and his girlfriend in a pitched gun battle which is staged, I suspect, for no other reason than to give us lots of cool shots of guns blazing and an exciting action scene for a climax.

Mr Brooks is left only with the problem of his daughter, future serial killer. There are a couple ways it could end. She might even decide to kill daddy. The neo-Coens solve this in an ingenious though well-worn method, showing daughter kill daddy in bloody savage attack, then twist and reverse and presto, it was a dream, a nightmare Mr Brooks was having.

Mr Brooks ends the movie just as he began it, reciting the Serenity Prayer in what we all know will be a useless effort to overcome his addiction.

The casting is interesting. For my money, reversing Costner and Hurt was the natural play: Costner is very good at playing footloose and feckless and charming, as he showed with his first breakthrough in Fandango and William Hurt is much better at showing tormented depths. It was perhaps a clever joke to put them in roles against the grain. On the other hand Costner is a bigger name, and he would probably jump at a chance to play against type, stretch himself, do something dark and very different. (The scenes in cars with Costner in front seat and Hurt in back reminded me a little of that Tom Cruise movie where he played a heartless hit man being driven around by Jamie Foxx. In fact I’m sure that hip people, who have seen and memorized Coen brothers films and other violent serial killer movies, could find many quotes and cribs here in Mr Brooks.)

I didn’t like it. I was about to turn it off. I kept watching, and in the end the intellectual puzzle had me hooked, despite many implausibilities and loopholes. The main tour de force here is in trying to get the audience to be rooting for a serial killer to kill again. They almost pulled it off with me; I can’t answer for anybody else.

Only I wonder, why should anybody spend millions of dollars to get people to root for a murderer? And why should audiences spend $10 for a ticket to watch killing after killing and enjoy it? We are all serial killers; maybe this is the point, maybe the movie is simply presenting us with evidence of our own depravity as proven by the fact that we paid money to watch and haven’t walked out. On the other hand, this movie, produced for a very small budget (as Kevin Costner vehicles go) was a flop.

Maybe Americans aren’t serial killers after all?

(9 April 2009)