"From Hell"

The Hughes brothers' portrait of Jack the Ripper and Victorian England misses the intricate and disturbing nature of the graphic novel on which their film is based.

By Charles Taylor

Oct. 19, 2001 | Ever since the film was announced, the press has commented on how incongruous it was that Allen and Albert Hughes would stray from the modern urban American milieu of "Menace II Society" and "Dead Presidents" to the Victorian London setting of "From Hell," Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel about Jack the Ripper. The unasked question was, "Why do they want to do it?"

Now that the film is opening, that question has been answered: "They don't." The Hughes' version of "From Hell" is an extravagant period farrago that bears only a superficial resemblance to the novel. Of course, filmmakers have to be allowed the freedom to interpret or diverge from their source as they wish. But whatever choices they make does not mean that the source has been banished from memory. Yes, films have to stand on their own, and good movies can radically alter the meaning of the source (Robert Altman's film of "The Long Goodbye" and Roman Polanski's film of Ariel Dorfman's "Death and the Maiden" are just two examples). But adaptations that are inferior to the source deserve to have that inequality held against them.

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's "From Hell" is one of the most intricate and disturbing works that the field of graphic novels has yet produced. Springing from the gossip and speculation that has long named Queen Victoria's syphilitic son Prince Albert as Jack the Ripper, "From Hell" spins a variation on that theory. In Moore and Campbell's version, Albert falls in love with and marries a young prostitute by whom he has a son. Fearing a scandal that could rock the throne, Victoria calls on her physician, Dr. William Gull, to silence the mother, who has been placed in an asylum. A group of the young mother's fellow prostitutes decide to make some money with their knowledge of Albert's marriage and try to blackmail the Queen. Victoria once again summons Gull, who sets about silencing these women by murdering them.

The graphic novel is essentially a feminist work, in which the Ripper murders are the logical outcome of the sexual repression of Victorian England. The novel is loaded with graphic, shocking scenes. But nothing in it makes the blood run cold as much as the moment when Victoria hands Gull a list of the women to be silenced. She says, "We leave the means to you, Sir William. We would simply it were done, and done well." The obscenity of the moment comes from the disparity between what she is asking and the prim language she uses. And Moore and Campbell don't stop there. Gull, half-mad and steeped in pagan lore, designs the killings as a tribute to those pagan powers, the locations of the bodies forming a pentangle at the center of which is St. Paul's Cathedral. It is, in the view of the authors, less the ultimate blasphemy than an unholy revelation. It's Moore and Campbell's intention to tear down the wall that separated the powerful and the impotent in Victorian England by linking all that was most revered in that society to its most ghastly crimes, saying in effect that the Ripper killings were simply the most extreme examples of that society's everyday crimes.

Rendered in inky black-and-white panels, the graphic novel absolutely shuns the picturesque nostalgia which is always a danger with period works. The look of the movie couldn't be more different. Working with the cinematographer Peter Deming ("Mulholland Drive") and production designer Martin Childs, the Hughes brothers have splashed out on a period re-creation that manages to make even the crummiest back alley and sewerage-infested streets look like the latest addition to some historical theme park: Squalorworld.

Next page: A brain-dead version of a dark and complex work