Monkey Business
For whatever reason, the modernized remake of King Kong released 29 years ago has become less the “pop classic” that Pauline Kael insisted it was at the time than a dimly remembered punch line that starred a shaggy Jeff Bridges and a screaming Jessica Lange. Perhaps the movie never earned a better reputation because of its intentionally dopey dialogue; Bridges, as a groovy paleontologist with a monkey fetish, says things like, “There is a girl out there who might be running for her life from some gigantic, turned-on ape!” It was an impressive, deeply funny, and deeply felt remake nonetheless — and spectacle enough to win a visual-effects Academy Award, the kind Peter Jackson now wins in his (and the audience’s) sleep.
Jackson, maker of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, wastes not a cent of the $200 million his King Kong remake reportedly cost. It is a lively, frantic, noisy, and touching spectacle, which is to be expected from a man who claims the 1933 Kong as one of his favorite films. Yet it’s turgid and soulless, too — a nearly note-for-note remake of the Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack classic that spares no expense and runs nearly twice as long. In his gluttonous marathon, no scene can last too long; Jackson stockpiles his movie with thousands of bugs and dinosaurs and spiders and bats that live on Skull Island but exist solely on a computer’s hard drive. He wants to make sure you ogle every one of his inventions — and if one of them happens to be a gigantic, turned-on ape, so much the better.
Jackson and writers Fran Walsh (a Jackson collaborator ever since his brilliantly deviant 1989 puppet pic Meet the Feebles) and Philippa Boyens (the Rings movies) adhere so closely to Cooper and Edgar Wallace’s 72-year-old tale that the latter deserves top billing. Whole scenes have been copied, whole speeches lifted. Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is once again a starving New York actress, rescued from the streets by jungle-picture director Carl Denham (Jack Black, in way over his eyebrows) after he spies her stealing an apple from a curbside grocer. The hero is still named Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), but here he’s a spindly writer of plays about and for “the common man.” Despite his profession, however, he’s still awfully nimble with a machine gun.
There’s not much plot to Jackson’s faithful remake; King Kong remains, as Kael put it, “a tale of two islands,” Manhattan and Skull Island. Oddly, it’s the first Manhattan sequence that has the most life. Jackson’s computer-generated New York of the 1930s is a radiant, towering citadel obscuring a grimy reality. As Jackson moves to street level, he shows us haggard soup-line beggars and vaudevillian showboaters struggling to eke out a meager existence. The film’s first third hints at what the director could do if he ever again exhibits an interest in telling flesh-and-blood tales.
When Jackson drops anchor on Skull Island, King Kong becomes precisely what you expect: a deafening video game in which the characters overcome one squishy, sharp-toothed peril after another. Some of the sequences thrill — the stampeding dinosaurs, especially — but others are stretched until they snap. And Watts is saddled with the unfortunate task of trying to make us love a Kong that looks real only until he shares a shot with her; alas, you never quite forget that you’re watching an actress feigning tears against a green screen.
Jackson can easily afford to make a love letter to his favorite movie and cram it with in-jokes and garish special effects. He must see something of Carl Denham in himself; we giggle when Denham’s studio bosses dismiss him as a maker of extravagant, expensive pictures that have made him only a “near-success.” But Jackson is merely indulging himself here, too, doing something not because he should but because he can. Maybe that’s a good reason, but it’s not good enough. The girl still cries, the ape still dies, and all you’re left with is a ringing in your ears.
