Classic Movie Review : 8MM (1999)
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It’s difficult to have a serious, unbiased conversation about Nicolas Cage. He’s obviously a strong actor, but he doesn’t seem to give a flying fuck about the movies he features in. So, he gets unfairly dismissed most of the time. But Cage was taken seriously in the nineties. It might seem hard to believe, but 8MM is from an era where film enthusiasts thought he was a credible dramatic actor. An era where snuff movies and sex gimps were also deemed serious business.
8MM tells the story of private investigator Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage), a humorless square who gets hired by a rich old lady to investigate the authenticity of the titular 8mm film she found in her dead husband’s safe. On it, there’s a young girl getting butchered by a hulking sex gimp named Machine (Chris Bauer). Being a square and deeply offended by the sight of this film, Welles vows to find the truth and walks into an absolute shitstorm for his troubles.
A weird PSA against sex
You might not remember it, but 8MM is pretty fucking good. Part of it is owed to the era it was created in. Internet porn existed in 1999, but Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay and the world at large were mostly oblivious to it. Marilyn Manson was at the peak of his popularity and anyone even remotely sexual was considered to be a freak. 8MM is a celebration of these years and its only real theme is that sex outside wedlock is fucking sick and perverted.
Everyone remembers this movie for the underground porn market scenes where Tom meets deviants and interlopers, but sex weirdoes are all over 8MM. There’s Dino Velvet (the immortal Peter Stormare), Eddie Poole (the equally immortal James Gandolfini), Mrs. Christian’s lecherous lawyer (Anthony Heald) and, of course, sympathetic porn peddler and Tom’s underworld guide Max California (Joaquin Phoenix). All of them are damned souls.
Oh yeah and Machine too. I was about to forget my guy.
8MM is not subtle by any means, but lack of nuance is what makes its charm. The libidinous pornographers don’t feel evil for the sake of being evil. There’s a sense of lust and power to their action. Dino, Eddie, Machine and the deceased Mr. Christian are not placeholders for evil. They’re soulless devils who are chasing orgasms like heroin addicts are chasing the dragon. Weirdoes like these could only have been written in an era prior to today’s moral relativism.
Max California
Not many people remember that Joaquin Phoenix played in 8MM, but he’s by far the best part of this movie. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker enjoys using classic literature to structure his stories and in 8MM, he used Dante’s Inferno with Max California being the Virgil to Tom Welles’ Dante. Unlike the other perverts, Max came to Los Angeles with pure dreams of a music career, but lost his soul working in a porn store to make ends meet.
I have no clue how working in a porn store makes you an expert in the underworld, but it’s part of 8MM’s magic. It doesn’t fucking matter. Max is the most interesting character in this movie, because helping Tom means something beyond the realm of transactional relationship to him. It makes him feel like he’s accomplishing something. Phoenix is, in many ways, too good for 8MM. But his performance gives the film a moral complexity it couldn’t get on its own.
It’s funny, because 8MM is completely uninterested in Max California and uses Tom's wife (Catherine Keener) as its moral trump card, which is hilariously ineffective. Keener is a tremendous talent, but her part is basically meant to forward the movie’s themes of the sanctity of wedlock and little else. There’s about twenty minutes worth of Tom’s wife taking care of the baby and guilting the shit out of him for not particular reason that could’ve easily been cut.
I’m all for strong, complex female characters, but that movie doesn’t have one. What it needed was more Max California.
*
8MM aged really well. One of its strengths is that it has a timeless antagonist: human desire. The bad guys are driven by a greater, invisible evil they believe to have mastered. They’re not just bad for the sake of being bad. It’s a little rigid around the edges regarding morality, but it manages to give a human face to some of our greatest fear. Nicolas Cage has little to do with it, but it should be a credit and not a detriment to his career.
The nineties were weird and 8MM is a great reminder of the warped, pre-internet era that used to be our world. It might be better today than it was then.
7.8/10
