I’m sorry. I have to say something.
I had a problem with Val, and I have a problem with Val, the Amazon film that’s dazzling critics and has set social media a’swoon.
Complete with yearbook videos of Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon and others from the dimpled heyday of a Dirty Dancing generation, Val charts the Shakespearean fall of a man who never lived a life more than an arm’s length from a videocamera. And that’s how Val feels: like a sad video with heart that can’t quite connect because the lens gets in the way.
Make no mistake: Val is courageous filmmaking. Any Hollywood project that underscores the humanity of an inhumane industry is worth noting. And seeing Kilmer squeeze synthesized words through a dime-size hole left gaping in his throat because of cancer is agonizing. Combine that with the actor’s admission that he’s been reduced to autograph-signing for a living, and his film is a bonafide heartbreaker.
But having an Incurable doesn’t make you a hero, or even brave. And Val seems too content to conflate illness with fortitude, disease with determination. In that sense, Val is guilty of a cardinal-sin-trope.
That is a common mistake in film, however, and I have learned to forgive it. My real problem with Val is my problem with Val. He is one of two actors in my career who I considered insufferably aloof.
The first was America Ferrara, the Disney star who has become the poster child of princesshood. I was interviewing her for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and she was backstage for some made-up award. While she fielded my questions, she never took her face off a mirror. She would play with a lock of hair, gazing adoringly while she gave pat answers. And I thought: She will not remember a moment of this.
A similar realization struck when I interviewed Kilmer for the film Alexander. We met at a diner on Wilshire, just down from the Academy. I arrived early and took a booth by the window to see him arrive. He must have taken a back or side entrance, though, because he seemed to just appear — and walk past the booth. He did not look around; Kilmer was used to being recognized, not recognizing. I called him back to the booth, and tried to interview him.
I say try because it wasn’t really an interview. Like America, Kilmer spent the entire lunch gazing away. Unlike America, Kilmer wasn’t looking at his reflection. He was looking at a bus stop on the corner, as if he were watching a dog read a newspaper there; transfixed, bewildered, but not enough to warrant mentioning. I assumed he was high, drunk, or both. Either way, he was rote, automatic, and checked out for the interview.
Which is the failing of his autobiographical film. Kilmer has clearly gone through intense personal drama, from cancer to the jacuzzi drowning death of his 15-year-old other brother. Yet none of that grief and recovery seems to inform a film that is, ultimately, about loss. Val’s moral seems to be ‘Shit happens, so look good when it hits.’
And Val looks good. The movie makes clear: Kilmer went nowhere without a videocamera and an Action! worldview. An early adopter before that was even a term, Kilmer used a camera as electronic journal, taping actor buddies, ambushing directors with 60 Minutes-style confrontations and lamenting their shortcomings in video confessionals.
But his famous feuds with Cruise and Marlon Brando were unfilmed and almost unmentioned here, instead glossed in the movie with press junket pleasantries. There is no reflection on whether a James Dean lifestyle led to a James Dean darkness. No pondering whether smoking led to cancer. Not much pondering, period. Just ‘Love is the answer.’ And ‘Jesus saves.’
That’s a form of filmmaking honesty, I guess. But it’s a subjective, selective honesty.
Hollywood honesty.
Speaking of which, I wasn’t going to review Val because of the above personal interaction with him. And I acknowledge that feeling brushed off by him — and from anything real and personal — likely colored my impression of the man.
I just can’t get over feeling the same way about the film.
