Frank Miller's Sin City

Adaptations are a funny thing. As I’m sure Charlie Kaufman would share if asked, they’re not easy. Stray too far from the source material and you risk alienating core fans while also losing what made the previous edition work so well. Slavish devotion to the original, on the otherhand, can lead to stiff storytelling and lack of visual identity. Sin City, adapted from the Dark Horse comic book–excuse me, graphic novel–series by Frank Miller and co-written and directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez, flaunts all of these conventions. Rodriguez hooked Miller into the “unfilmable” adaptation by hyping his devout faithfulness to the work.

Prepping Miller with a one-off screen test featuring Marley Shelton and Josh Hartnett (seen in the movie as the prologue), Rodriguez showed he could translate Miller's unique imagery (high-contrast black and white line art with occasional splashes of color) into a motion picture without losing the soul of the work. Rodriguez and Miller worked to contsruct shots that not only mimic the graphic novels, but often are eerily accurate. The result is in a way like Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho, only this doesn't feel like a tedious exercise in filmmaking. It is alive in a way the images on a printed page could never be, and masterfully translates to motion and three dimensions the high-contrast "flatness" of the original artwork.

Which brings us to the movie, dubbed "Frank Miller's Sin City," as if Miller were of a stature akin to William Shakespeare. But that might be my only contention with holding Miller in such high regard. Rodriguez utilized all of his plentiful skill (director, camera operator, editor, composer, etc) in creating a modern masterpiece of style, genre and technical wizardry. The movie collects three of Sin City's major mini-series: Sin City (aka The Hard Goodbye), That Yellow Bastard, and The Big Fat Kill. All feature various overlapping of characters, yet all operate as distinct episodes. What holds the picture together is the style. Much like the similarly groundbreaking Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Rodriguez shot the entire film on green screen, adding backgrounds, colors and other elements in post-production. The result is both like nothing you've ever seen before and an almagamation of the various genres and films (pulp fiction, film noir, Pulp Fiction, etc) which inspired the film and the original graphic novel as well.

Miller's tale boils the clichés and stereotypes of noir down to their truest elements: in Basin City (dubbed Sin City by its denizens) everybody is either a bad guy, a tortured good guy, or a sexy dame. You've got Willis as Hartigan, a cop with a bad ticker trying to save a young girl (Jessica Alba as Nancy); Rourke as Marv, a beast of a man trying to avenge the death of a girl (Jamie King as Goldie), and Clive Owen as Dwight, a private eye fighting for the honor of a girl (Rosario Dawson as Gail). All the while they meet up with some nefarious villains: son of a senator known as Junior aka "The Yellow Bastard" (Nick Stahl), silent assasin Kevin (Elijah Wood), and crooked cop Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro) Sense a theme? Sin City takes these tried-and-true formulae and recycles them into a kind of new pop art. The violence is ludicrous (Marv and Hartigan are both shot multiple times in the chest only to live on) it verges on Wile E. Coyote-style comedy. In fact, the audience I saw it with laughed throughout the film, whether it was the many dismemberments or the demonstrative acting and dialogue (as seen in some of the commercials, when Dwight asks for "a hardtop with a decent engine and make sure it's got a big trunk," how can you help but laugh).

Joining the violence in the over-the-top department are the costumes (or lack thereof) worn by the females. Rosario Dawson spends the entire picture in the fishnet getup seen above, which is a step up from Carla Gugino's Lucille, who prances around naked for much of her time onscreen. This is where some of the women viewers may start to cry foul. But the movie does not make women out to be simply hapless victims or sexpots, even if the costumes suggest otherwise. Gail leads a band of hookers to reclaim the streets, while Dwight is there only to fix what he screwed up. Hartigan's damsel in distress, Nancy, has a few tricks up her own sleeve, and Marv finds his way with the help of Lucille and another mystery girl.

It all adds up to a movie unlike any you've seen in recent times. It is not a "comic book movie," but the truest visualization of the art and storytelling of comic books/graphic novels ever portrayed on film. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller have created a film together that assaults your senses in the best possible way. A visual extravaganza with heart, humor and sexiness too, Sin City is the first great movie of 2005.

Grade: A
Similar Tastes: Pulp Fiction, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, Sin City: The Big Fat Kill, Sin City: That Yellow Bastard