Three men, unknown to each other and in three self-contained mini-plots, are on a hunt to find a serial murderer, a serial child rapist and killer, and a violent thug who brutally assaults women. After intensive investigations their sources give up just one name, leading them to the same place: Roark. Roark is the name of two powerful brothers whom no one dares to cross. One is a Catholic Cardinal (Rutger Hauer), the other is a Senator (Powers Boothe). Both are protecting the culprits for their own purposes and wield the massive power of the police to protect their interests.
Sin City
Cast:
Bruce Willis ... Hartigan
Mickey Rourke ... Marv
Clive Owen ... Dwight
Jessica Alba ... Nancy
Rosario Dawson ... Gail
Brittany Murphy ... Shellie
Benicio Del Toro ... Jackie Boy
Elijah Wood ... Kevin
Michael Clark Duncan ... Manute
Directors:
Robert Rodriguez
Frank Miller
Quentin Tarantino
In this adaptation of a series of graphic novels by Frank Miller, Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is an aging cop with heart problems investigating child kidnappings. As he is about to nab his suspect and free the most recent missing child, his partner shoots him – intentionally. He barely escapes with his life and vows to protect the child and to find the person responsible.
Marv is a violent anti-social brute recently released from prison for various crimes. Disfigured by years of violent living, he accepts that no woman will love him. But one night he meets a beautiful woman named Goldie (Jamie King) whom he feels so tenderly for that her murder, committed silently while they are sleeping, drives him to seek vengeance on her killer.
Dwight (Clive Owen) is drawn into the hunt by a man (Benicio Del Toro) who abuses his ex-girlfriend (Brittany Murphy), now Dwight’s current love interest.
Once each of these men scratches the surface of the truth, he finds himself drawn into a fierce race to find the power behind the killing, otherwise face their own certain destruction.
Will the culprits be caught? Will justice be served? Sin City isn’t Hollywood, and justice isn’t simple or swift.
In a memorable scene that recalls the rush to war in Iraq, Senator Roark explains to Hartigan what power is. Roark says, in effect, power is when you can lie to the whole world about what you are doing and they go along with it. Real power is when they know that you are lying and that what you are doing is wrong, but do what you want them to do or stand back and let you do it. "Then you know you’ve got them by the balls."
Power, however, is more complicated in Sin City. Some organized sections of the people at the bottom rung have fought for some version of freedom. One example is the women of "Old Town." Old Town is a conclave in Sin City ruled by prostitutes who have fought off the pimps, the cops, and the government. Led by Gail (Rosario Dawson), they are a powerful multi-ethnic band that has forced a truce with the outside powers: the cops and pimps will leave them alone and allow them to have a monopoly on the "red light district" in exchange for bribes and peace.
While three distinct stories dominate the action of the film, they are all intertwined, suggesting that violence and corruption in Sin City is all connected and leads to one place: the top. Even though their paths do not cross, our heroes are bound together by their relationship to that power that threatens their lives.
Sin City is a phenomenally original pastiche of images, styles, hard-boiled idioms, props, genres, colors, timelines, reality, surreality, imagination, the human and the grotesquely inhumane, emotionally vulnerability and physical weakness erupting unpredictably into brutal power and desensitized violence. Some of the sets, costumes, dialogue and props suggest a 1940s time frame, but high-powered automatic weapons and other technology suggest more recent times.
No comparison to any other film is quite adequate.
It is a crime thriller, black-and-white film noir that has collided with a comic book science fiction romance tale. It is about love, violence, sex, and the thinly disguised struggle of people on the bottom of society to understand what is going on, who is out to get them, to piece the meaninglessness of the violence they encounter daily together to decipher and discover the power behind events. It is without a doubt a movie about class struggle, as much as it is about an apparently random collection of individuals accidentally caught up in the same sordid mess.
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Extreme violence, graphic gore and sexualized scenarios are the plot elements that drive this story along. Even so, the violence is stylized as abstract and ordinary – a powerful reflection of an American society that commits frequent mass shootings in high schools, funds killer cops, consents to a government that has institutionalized inhumanity and brutality, ignores bombings at women’s clinics, chuckles at right-wing vigilantism, weeps at terrorism, and operates a military industrial complex led by a president that has downplayed the slaughter of innocents in the war in Iraq. It is a brutal film about a brutal society.
There is a bright side, I think. While the powerful exploit the powerless, the exploited value personal loyalty and the intimacy of friendships and close relationships. Intimacy for the exploiters is violent, sexualized, even cannibalistic. And betrayal marks one as on the side of evil – if such a fine line can be easily staked out.
Does Sin City glorify violence? I’ll leave that to the pundits. But if you listen to them carefully, the pundits glorify violence constantly: whether in providing banal justifications for a war that has killed over 100,000 people, in their uncritical opposition to the control of firearms, or perhaps in their love for the death penalty.
See Sin City, or read a newspaper.
--Roberta Jones reviews movies and music for Political Affairs and may be reached via -mail at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
