"The Million Dollar Hotel"

Wim Wenders and buddies Bono, Rushdie and Schnabel botch a phony noir for the Artforum crowd. Only Mel Gibson escapes the fallout.

By Charles Taylor

Feb 2, 2001 | There's a vacancy in "The Million Dollar Hotel," and it's between Wim Wenders' ears. If I were choosing between what attempts to draw less attention to itself -- the amount of publicity Lions Gate Films is according the movie's release or a guy buying a skin mag at a newsstand -- Lions Gate would win. It seems to be hoping that no one will wonder why the picture has taken almost a year to reach America, and that it will close before anyone knows it has opened. You can hardly blame it.

Wenders' art noir is one of those pickles-and-ice-cream movies that leave you wondering what the people involved could possibly have been thinking. It desperately wants to be an American movie, a murder mystery-cum-doomed romance with a skid row Los Angeles setting and Mel Gibson as the dogged detective. Wenders loves the idea of American movies. You could tell that from his last movie, "The End of Violence," in which the Griffith Park Observatory scenes were clearly meant to echo "Rebel Without a Cause" and pulp director Samuel Fuller had a supporting role. In "The Million Dollar Hotel," when he shoots Milla Jovovich loitering in a nighttime alley while she smokes a cigarette and fog swirls around her, he's trying to conjure up the danger and romance of '40s noir. And the shots of bare hotel rooms with a single shaft of sunlight cutting through the dinginess or of street people huddled around diner counters in the wee hours continue the re-creation of the Edward Hopper canvases Wenders did in "The End of Violence."

But he doesn't understand the first thing about telling a story, about pacing or about reining in his actors. He's more interested in what might kindly be called "milieu" -- though his direction and sense of atmosphere are so flat that he seems to think that setting a tone is solely the job of the art director -- and in allowing members of the cast to out-oddball one another when it's their turn to swallow the camera.

The cast includes cult staples like Bud Cort and Richard Edson and cult staples in the making like Peter Stormare. It also includes Amanda Plummer, who is often reduced to being a cult figure by directors who have no idea how to use her freakish gifts. In some ways you can't blame these actors for overacting, since it's exactly what's required of them here. They, and others like Jimmy Smits and Gloria Stuart, are playing residents of a once-grand L.A. flophouse (actually the Frontier Hotel, built in 1917), and Wenders has encouraged them to come up with eccentricities that will tell us they're "special people." (A measure of how badly directed the actors are is that Smits, probably for the first time ever, seems completely inauthentic.) It's a little like the down-and-out rot of Charles Bukowski filtered through a kind of hippie sentimentality. They're all gentle, damaged souls adrift in the big city.

Wenders reserves the bulk of his starry-eyed approach for the lovers at the center of the movie, Jeremy Davies as the mentally handicapped Tom-Tom and Jovovich as Eloise, the object of his attention-deficit-disorder ardor. Tom-Tom is a kind of in-house errand boy, zipping through the lobby on his skateboard, delivering snacks and found "treasures" to the inhabitants. With unending layers of baggy T-shirts and trousers, his hair sticking out in Flock of Seagulls wings, Davies is the innocent caught in the investigation of his best friend Izzy's death. The header Izzy took off the roof appears to be a suicide, but his billionaire father (that king of heavy-spirited scenery chewers, Harris Yulin) is convinced it was murder and uses his influence to persuade Skinner (Gibson), an FBI detective, to investigate. Eloise, the faraway-so-close angel-girl who spends her days lost in the battered paperback she gets from a nearby used-book store, agrees to help Skinner get the skinny on Tom-Tom and gradually finds herself wanting to protect him.

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