Chopper
Directed by Andrew Dominik.
Starring Eric Bana, Vince Colosimo & Simon Lyndon.
Given its subject, Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read, this film has inevitably attracted enormous attention. Read has made his name with cultivated notoriety, playing up to the public’s prurient fascination with seediness and brutality. The film captures well a violent and paranoid personality combined with natural flamboyance and a craving for attention. Both the first and last scenes show him reveling as the subject of an interview; and then again with the guards who watch it on television with him. But when they go he is left alone and empty.
I came out of this film feeling that I had dignified a repugnant man with the thing he desires most, an audience. In this sense, the film triumphed. Eric Bana convincingly depicts a real person. Some of the other characters are caricatures but nevertheless they are all quite believable.
Dominik’s direction is excellent. The simple visuals are very striking. Some scenes are very clever, such as the evolution of the Bojangles Nightclub murder from hideous realism, then retold in Chopper’s apologetic version, and lastly as it came to exist in the public imagination in surreal artificiality.
Bio-flicks need some unifying theme and overarching structure to be dramatically satisfying. Shine moulded itself on the ‘fall-and-redemption’ theme. Shadowlands confined itself to a narrow aspect of C.S. Lewis’ life. Gandhi used biography as an approach to history. The People versus Larry Flynt and the recent Joan of Arc I found unsatisfactory because they included too many aspects of their subjects’ lives from over too long a period, losing any unified structure. This is the ultimate feeling I had from Chopper: it comprised a few loosely connected semi-fictional anecdotes. Ultimately, I am not convinced that this film had much substance or point to it.
Guy O.
