BEFORE: Robert Downey Jr. carries over from "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" to another film that's somewhat influenced by the old-style detective novels, like those of Raymond Chandler. But I recall that this is a remake of a BBC mini-series, I think my Mom watched it on PBS many years ago, and I tried to follow it, but I don't really remember much about it - it sort of failed to leave an impression. Well, I certainly don't have time to watch a full miniseries, but watching one feature film based on it seems like another one of my patented time-savers.
THE PLOT: From his hospital bed, a writer suffering from a skin disease hallucinates musical numbers and paranoid plots.
AFTER: Oh, there's so many of the things I hate to see in a movie, all located here in one convenient package. First there's the portrayal of a writer who can't seem to write his next book, even though he's lost in some kind of fantasy world. (Well, then if his imagination is working fine, what's the PROBLEM, exactly?) Then there's the blending of reality (movie-reality) and fantasy, which sometimes goes hand-in-hand with the whole writer thing, like these people have some kind of magic key to break down the barriers between this world and the next, which is just not how the creative process works. Then there's the use of an illness (usually madness, but here's it's some kind of fever condition brought on by a bad skin disease...) to further blur the lines between that which is "real" and that which is "unreal". No, no, no, there's just the two things, and they don't interact.
The mystery novelist here, Dan Dark, is admitted to a hospital and begins to have fantasies of the doctors and nurses singing 1950's songs like "At the Hop". Things get better from there with a sexy fantasy about the nurses, but it's all downhill after that, when he imagines that his wife is having an affair with someone from a film company in order to make a movie screenplay out of one of his novels, and together they're planning to make a ton of money and cut him out of the deal. Umm, I think that's what happened here, honestly this was very hard for me to follow. Then there were flashbacks to Dark's time as a young boy, where he evidently spied his mother cheating on his father, with someone who looked very much like the man he imagined having an affair with his wife, and then after that he and his mother went on the run, and his childhood got a lot worse.
Things got even more confusing when the two gangsters from the "crime drama" storyline started showing up in the real world scenes, and then they also appeared on a bus in the flashbacks. So did Dan Dark write about these two characters because he remembered seeing them on a bus when he was a young boy? Because that still would not explain how they managed to become real and show up at the hospital in the present. Or am I just supposed to accept the spillover because the writer is going insane? There's no easy answer here.
I can get why Dark's experiences with his mother may have made him mistrust women, but what was the deal with his wife, was she really cheating on him or just genuinely delivering him a message about Hollywood's interest in his stories? It seemed for a while like she was visiting him only to learn the location of the screenplay that he wrote years ago, but then why was he so angry at her, like all the time? The pain that he was in because of his skin condition can't fully explain why he was acting like such an asshole - but maybe it was justified, maybe he had a reason to suspect her of infidelity, only the movie couldn't be bothered to confirm anything, because that would be too much like answering a question.
I could put up with some of these things if everything added up to something in the end, like if it all gave me some insight into the lead character and why he is the way he is, or what the fantasies all mean, or whether his wife is really out to cheat on him and get his money, but no, it never adds up to anything. I think this guy is just a jerk with bad skin who's mad at everyone for no reason. And that's not really something I find entertaining. Did I just not "get" this film, or was there nothing here to get? This came off like a poor imitation David Lynch film, like one where Lynch lost track of his own storylines and then couldn't be bothered to connect the dots.
Also starring Robin Wright Penn (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Jeremy Northam (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Infinity"), Katie Holmes (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Mel Gibson (last seen in "20 Feet From Stardom"), Adrien Brody (last seen in "The Grand Budapest Hotel"), Jon Polito (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Carla Gugino (last heard in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Saul Rubinek (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Alfre Woodard (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Amy Aquino, Eddie Jones, Lily Knight, Clyde Kusatsu (last seen in "The Face of Love"), David Dorfman, Earl Poitier, David Denman (last seen in "13 Hours"), Sandahl Bergman (last seen in "Conan the Barbarian").
RATING: 2 out of 10 rubber gloves
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