A Tale of Two Movies

Let the Right One In [Låt den rätte komma in]
Dir. Tomas Alfredson

Watchmen
Dir. Zack Snyder

It happened to be just coincidence that I saw these two films on the same day. It took a while for my town to finally get the elusive Swedish vampire film, but it was worth the wait. Every city in America was blanketed with showings of Watchmen, however, as its ubiquitous marketing made plain.

There are some similarities. Both traffic in plenty of horror, supernatural abilities and unusual sexual tensions, but I don't think I could link too much more. Let the Right One In utilizes subtlety and silence, inviting the viewer to sort things out for herself, to fill in the information only hinted at through the narrative. Images tell the story. Watchmen assaults the senses with violence, music and color as only a big budget American movie can do. Doubtless this will presage its success. But it's the Swedish film that will reward repeat viewings and a place of honor in any cineaste's collection.

Let the Right One In introduces us to Oskar, the bullied dweeb who has a peculiar penchant for collecting stories about gruesome murders. He secretly longs for bloody revenge on the boys who torment him daily in school. The sudden appearance of Eli, the ragged girl who looks to be his age, seems a hopeful addition at first, but there's her apparent invulnerability to cold (she perches on the snow covered jungle gym at night) and her "father's" inefficient forays to collect blood.

I love a director like Alfredson who appreciates silence, who allows the actor's bodies to do a lot of the speaking. Kåre Hedebrant who plays Oskar gives a stellar performance with nuances the best method actor would envy. His curious but surreptitious examination of Eli when they first meet shows how exotic a girl is up close—let alone a vampire, for we're sure at once that's what she is. It's a credit to John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel and screenplay that there's much more to the tale than that. There are layers of meaning and confusion that we often get only in glimpses (one of them you will miss if you blink at the wrong time). First Eli tells Oskar, "I can't be your friend," then proceeds to become just that. When Oskar haltingly asks her to go steady with him, Eli asks, "What if I'm not a girl?" We think we know why she asking that, but again things are more complicated than they seem. There's a telling scene when Oskar visits his father; when a "friend" arrives the easy bonhomie of two men drinking together provokes ripples of unease suggesting there is much more to the story of his parent's divorce than we first suspected.

Lina Leandersson inhabits Eli with perfect assurance and an amazing chameleon ability. Her health fluctuates depending upon her blood supply and the physical changes are harrowing, but no more so than her face and eyes. "I've been twelve a long time," she finally tells Oskar and we believe it completely because Leandersson makes it true.

All the cast is superb: the affable bunch of drunks help vary the tone from the tense school scenes. The long-suffering Håkan, played with a subtle and dogged world-weariness by Per Ragnar, will break your heart. All the child actors are completely natural and believable, which makes the typical hothouse American child actors seem all the more saccharine in contrast. A balance of humour and horror (there are some gruesome chuckles) works perfectly. The final scene achieves an extraordinary moment of both tender sweetness and ultimate horror when we see the future.

In contrast the bombast of Snyder's film assaults every sense. Overly reverential to the source, in the way visually-oriented directors are. I think of Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy which painstakingly re-created Sid's performance of "My Way" while it ignored simple facts about the family of Nancy Spungen (no video to recreate, I guess). It overlooks the fact that the popularity of Watchmen has little to do with the mostly banal superhero story told and everything to do with the innovative embrace of everything that the comics medium can do with storytelling. As many fans have noted previously, the best way to make a version of Watchmen would have been a miniseries or multi-part DVD (it will be released that way eventually, but without the vision that would make it work—yes, irony that Snyder was hailed as "visionary").

I did give a bark of laughter in the opening sequence when the coffee mug hurled by the Comedian knocked off one of the numbers on his hotel room door, leaving a "300" behind. But the sequence -- like just about every one in the film -- went on too long and had little to recommend it. Bad wigs and terrible make-up abound, as if Snyder's winkingly telling us, "we all know it's fake anyway." You will no doubt have heard that the title sequence, a witty run through the back history of the superheroes, is the best part. It is.

The film is slavishly reverential to the comic when change would have been a good thing: often dialogue that works in a still comics panel does not work when spoken by breathing humans. Ridiculous costumes look even more ridiculous when they're three-dimensional. Everything went on far too long. The worst actors: mopey boy Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan -- the voice of a god-like being should not sound like an emo star -- and Malin Akerman seems to be unfamiliar with human emotions (true, the wig and stupid outfit did not help).

Jackie Earle Haley did a decent job as Rorschach as did Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian. It seems telling that that the two most immediately unlikable characters came off best -- perhaps it was because the actors had something to do. The rest of the film was filled with too loving visual vistas, bone-cracking violence and overbearing music. It was assaultively irritating and incredibly tedious.

Worst sex scene ever? If not, it's certainly in the running for most embarrassing. I suppose if all you ask of a film is visual spectacle, then you'll be happy with this one. I need more.