Beyond the Multiplex

After the hissing, cackling and general incredulity of the "Hounddog" press screening had died down, many of us stumbled across the street for a late-night preview of "Chapter 27," another much-discussed title. This is the film in which Jared Leto plays Mark David Chapman, and it's focused entirely on the three days Chapman spent in New York in December 1980 before the murder of John Lennon. I can't say that the reception for this film was a whole lot warmer than for "Hounddog," but that might have been hangover and accumulated Sundance fatigue at work.

There's virtually no context provided here, about Lennon or the Beatles or New York or Chapman himself. To put it another way, the film's entire context is Chapman, a tormented consciousness obsessed by Lennon and the Beatles, and most of all by Holden Caulfield and "Catcher in the Rye." (No, he wasn't interested in Jodie Foster; that was the guy who shot Reagan.) Leto narrates much of the picture in a sort of enraged mutter, and sometimes in competing streams of enraged mutter. It's easy to crack jokes about actors who undergo "Raging Bull"-style physical metamorphosis -- Leto packed on more than 60 pounds to play the paunchy Chapman -- but this is a highly compelling performance on many levels.

Leto has to carry the picture by himself, and pretty much does so. The only major supporting part belongs to Lindsay Lohan, as a girl Chapman briefly befriends on the sidewalk outside the Dakota, and she's pretty good -- a ray of light in the rapidly darkening gloom of his world. Of course we know what's going to happen, so the drama and pathos of "Chapter 27" concern how Chapman is going to get there, and whether things might have been different.

Writer-director J.P. Schaefer's script is based on the interviews with Chapman in crime reporter Jack Jones' 1992 book, "Let Me Take You Down." That book enraged some Lennon fans, and there's already a tepid Internet boycott of the film. But I don't see how acknowledging Chapman's humanity, or presenting his psychological struggle in a compassionate manner, equates to excusing his actions or dishonoring the memory of his victim.

Leto's portrayal of this hunched, pudgy, unhappy man is both merciless and sympathetic. His Chapman seems almost like a garden-variety suburban fanboy, with his own autodidact theories about the world -- and one area of total derangement. There's no way to explain why Chapman's intense identification with the hero of J.D. Salinger's novel led him to believe he had to kill Lennon, because it's a pathway paved by a profoundly disordered mind. But as Chapman veers from paranoid arrogance to painful flashes of reality, channeling bits of Salinger into his own internal monologue -- and nearly convincing himself, after meeting Lennon briefly, to take his autographed copy of "Double Fantasy" and go home -- Leto almost makes you feel how it happened.

Some viewers may well find "Chapter 27" sleazy or distasteful, and I won't argue the point. But Schaefer's movie creates its own highly compelling world, which is pretty much the prime directive in filmmaking. On Tuesday I also caught up with James C. Strouse's "Grace Is Gone," one of the most celebrated films at Sundance this year (and the festival's highest-priced acquisition to date, I believe). Its subject is far nobler -- an uncommunicative American dad has to figure out how to tell his daughters that their mom isn't coming home from Iraq -- and its emotional appeal is pretty universal. What it lacks is precisely the cinematic vitality, propulsive force and even darkness that drive "Chapter 27."

I understand that "Grace Is Gone" is a movie about grief, but I wish it didn't fall so thoroughly into the pathetic fallacy. John Cusack plays Stan, the home-supply-store manager and military vet who abruptly takes his daughters, ages 12 and 8, on a mysterious Florida road trip. It's another physical-transformation role; Stan's a bulky, limping, ex-jock who greets his sales team in football-style huddles and treads pretty heavily in the world as in his family life. His young female costars are nearly as strong, and the forced hilarity of their road trip is often acutely painful. But all three sometimes just disappear into the affectless, low-energy drift of "Grace Is Gone." They stare at carpets, curl up on motel room beds, sit on sidewalks, gaze at the featureless American landscape.

Out in the audience, we have to rely on our own snuffles -- our own identification, as a nation and as individuals, with Stan's grief and loss -- to carry us through. I won't claim I didn't shed some tears, but I longed for some window-smashing, lamp-throwing, fuck-all-you-bastards catharsis. There's no question about the film's integrity and good intentions, and Harvey Weinstein has now bet millions of dollars that its grave, understated approach will appeal to a mass audience. He understands these things better than I do.

After the screening I attended, Cusack got up and spoke forcefully for a few minutes in response to questions from the audience. "There's almost a feeling of impotence or powerlessness" in the country right now, he said. "We're just being lied to about this war repeatedly, and it's so frustrating. There's not much we can do about it sometimes, so making a film about grief felt like something tangible. I'm outspoken in my views, but I'm not a politician or an expert or an activist. Maybe I can give people 90 minutes of something -- of silence, of grief -- and then we can find a way to really talk about it. That's what I can do."

This story has been corrected since it was originally posted.

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