The Million Dollar Hotel
Germany/USA 1999
Reviewed by Richard Falcon
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Downtown Los Angeles, 2001. Tom Tom, a childlike young man, jumps to his death from the roof of the Million Dollar Hotel. As he falls, he narrates the events of the previous 14 days, beginning with the death of fellow hotel resident Izzy Goldkiss who plunged from the same spot. Izzy was the son of media-czar Stanley Goldkiss. FBI agent Skinner investigates Izzy's death. Using Tom Tom as his guide, Skinner interviews the hotel's eccentric residents, including Izzy's artist roommate Geronimo, self-proclaimed "Fifth Beatle" Dixie, the drunk Shorty and addict Vivien. Tom Tom speaks to the withdrawn Eloise for the first time. Skinner plants bugs in each of the rooms. The residents hold a meeting where Geronimo resolves to sell off his "tar paintings" as Izzy's work.
Skinner persuades Eloise to go to Tom Tom's room to elicit information. She falls chastely in love with Tom Tom. Skinner arrests Geronimo for Izzy's murder, so Shorty and the others persuade Tom Tom to confess to the murder on television. At the exhibition it emerges Izzy was an art thief: the tar on the canvasses covers paintings from downtown galleries. Tom Tom escapes arrest. He confesses to Eloise he allowed the suicidal Izzy to fall from the roof after Izzy had told him he had raped Eloise to prove "she was nothing". Tom Tom jumps to his death. Afterwards, his spirit observes Skinner and Eloise consoling each other where he hit the ground.
Review
Ever since his 1987 film Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders has repeatedly claimed to be a storyteller rather than an "image-maker". This curious tension (always central to his work) makes its presence felt during the impressive opening of The Million Dollar Hotel. A digitally enhanced helicopter-mounted camera floats us angelically across the LA skyline, allowing us to relish the marriage of the images with the U2 ballad 'The First Time'. This opening is Wenders' calling card, blending a superb rock soundtrack, lovingly observed Americana, a prodigious visual sense and an openness to the tools of the digital age. But as Tom Tom, Wenders' latest holy innocent protagonist, leaps over the hotel's parapet and Wenders catches him up in the film's death-defying embrace (like Otto Sander's angel catching the falling child in Faraway, So Close), the film crashes to earth without protective armour.
This is a long-cherished project of Wenders', which has gone through many revisions (at one point it was going to be a science-fiction film, presumably along the lines of Wenders' Until the End of the World). U2's Bono conceived of a film based around the hotel on whose roof the band shot the video for 'Where the Streets Have No Name'. In the end, it's business as usual for Wenders' remaining fans, bridging moments of film-making brilliance with passages of dismaying banality and misjudged humour. You would think scriptwriter Nicholas Klein (Wenders' collaborator on The End of Violence) had just rediscovered R. D. Laing, since the 'oddball' characters populating the hotel all owe their adopted identities to their creative response to an insane world. "If enough people believe in the same thing, that's reality... the reality game," says "Fifth Beatle" Dixie. It's a view echoed by the media-czar Goldkiss, who tells FBI agent Skinner, "Truth is whatever most people want to buy - this is Hollywood, an ounce of shit and they make a shit soufflé."
Jimmy Smits, as a Mexican pretending to be Native American, and Bud Cort, underused but still a treat as a drunken opportunist in a loose toupee, do their considerable best with roles driven more by abstractions than a concern with character (a perennial Wenders problem). Each brings memories of 70s films: Cort of his role in Harold and Maude (1971), while Geronimo invokes Will Sampson in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). The concern with abstraction continues when Tom Tom begins courting the wan and ethereal Eloise who tells him she is a "fictional character". All this protests its own postmodernism too much, especially when none of the major characters is developed enough to sustain even simple empathy. Jeremy Davies and Milla Jovovich grate in their roles, and there's a deliberate uncertainty about whether we're meant to take her complete regression and his near autism as willed behaviour or their natural state. Both possibilities, of course, aggravate in different ways.
Tom Tom's ambivalent hero-worship of special agent Skinner ("You could see he was special, even before he told you," he says) does, however, provide some effective comic moments, notably a fast-motion sequence in which Tom Tom pogos around the room to a Spanish cover version of 'Anarchy in the UK'. In turn, Mel Gibson is remarkable as Skinner, both the pre-Oedipal Tom Tom's surrogate father figure and, in his status as an "ex-Freak", a possible comic allegory for a corseted, restricted but brutally efficient mainstream Hollywood.
But if The Million Dollar Hotel means anything for Wenders' oeuvre - and despite the heavily signalled presence of the director's well-established themes the movie doesn't necessarily have to lend itself to auteurist readings - it suggests his attempt to rebrand himself as a 'US independent' film-maker, perhaps the "father of the US independents" as he described himself to a German interviewer. This film proves a 'Wenders' movie' still has the power to astonish, but compared with such recent indie-spirited hits as American Beauty and Being John Malkovich it works far too hard for its quirkiness.
Credits
- Director
- WimWenders
- Producers
- Deepak Nayar
- Bono
- Nicholas Klein
- Bruce Davey
- Wim Wenders
- Screenplay
- Nicholas Klein
- Story
- Bono
- Nicholas Klein
- Director of Photography
- Phedon Papamichael
- Editor
- Tatiana S. Riegel
- Production Designers
- Robert D. Freed
- Arabella A. Serrell
- Music
- Jon Hassell
- Bono
- Daniel Lanois
- Brian Eno
- ©Road Movies Filmproduktion GmbH, Berlin
- Production Companies
- Icon Entertainment International presents a Road Movies production in association with Icon Productions and Kintop
- Pictures
- Executive Producer
- Ulrich Felsberg
- Production Supervisor
- Sabrina S. Sutherland
- Production Co-ordinator
- Jennifer Scott
- Unit Production Manager
- Deepak Nayar
- Location Manager
- Jeremy Alter
- Post-production Supervisor
- James K. Jensen
- Assistant Directors
- Christine Larson
- Laura Nisbet
- Andrew Ward
- Script Supervisor
- Sylvie Michel-Casey
- Casting
- Heidi Levitt
- Monika Mikkelsen
- Associate:
- Leah Buono
- Camera Operators
- Kirk R. Gardner
- Wally Pfister
- Steadicam Operator
- Kirk R. Gardner
- Digital Effects
- Das Werk
- Digital Effects Supervisor:
- Thomas Tannenberger
- Digital Effects Manager:
- Andreas Schellenberg
- Digital Artists:
- Nastuh Abootalebi
- Niko Papoutsis
- Dominik Trimborn
- Oliver Stück
- Bernd Schulze
- Scanning/Recording:
- Moritz Peters
- Martin Krefft
- Wire Removal:
- Walter Hörger
- Special Effects Co-ordinator
- Gary P. D'Amico
- Special Effects Foreman
- Philip D. Bartko
- Special Effects
- David Domeyer
- Kristine Onesky
- George Vrattos
- Set Designer
- Will Batts
- Original Artworks
- Julian Schnabel
- Alejandro Garmendia
- Storyboard Artist
- John Coven
- Costume Designer
- Nancy Steiner
- Costume Supervisor
- Marina Marit
- Key Make-up Artist
- Debbie Zoller
- Make-up Artists
- Rene Dashiell
- Amanda Carroll
- Body Brace Designer
- François Hacquard
- Key Hairstylist
- D.J. Plumb
- Hairstylists
- Annette E. Fabrizi
- Cheri Ruff
- Title Design
- Melissa Elliott
- Titles/Opticals
- Title House
- Musicians
- The Million Dollar Hotel Band
- Vocals/Guitar/Piano:
- Bono
- Guitars/Vocals/Pedal Steel:
- Daniel Lanois
- Trumpet:
- John Hassell
- Keyboards:
- Brian Eno
- Bass:
- Greg Cohen
- Drums:
- Brian Blade
- Beats/Synth/
Programming: - Adam Dorn
- Guitar:
- Bill Frisell
- Piano:
- Brad Meildau
- Music Supervisor
- Sharon Boyle
- Music Co-ordinator
- Jason Alexander
- Studio Tech
- Rab McAllister
- Guitar Tech
- Fraser McAlister
- Drum Tech
- Sam O'Sullivan
- Music Producer
- Hal Willner
- Music Editor
- Eric Liljestrand
- Recording/Mixing Engineer
- Eric Liljestrand
- Sound Recording Engineer
- Richard Rainey
- Soundtrack
- "The First Time", "Stateless" by/performed by U2; "Nyack Oud Dance" by Hal Willner, Adam Dorn, Martin Brumbach, performed by Hal Willner; "Dancin' Shoes" by Daniel Lanois, Bono, Nicholas Klein, performed by Bono, Daniel Lanois; "Ground beneath Her Feet" by U2, Salman Rushdie, performed by U2 with guest Daniel Lanois on pedal; "I Am the Walrus", "A Day in the Life", "Eleanor Rigby", "Hard Day's Night" by John Lennon, Paul McCartney; "Satellite of Love" by Lou Reed, performed by Bono and the MDH Band; "Anarchy in the U.S.A. (Retitled from "Anarchy in the U.K.")" by Stephen Jones, Johnny Rotten, Paul Thomas Cook, Glen Matlock, Tito Larriva, performed by Tito Larriva and the MDH Band, additional musicians: Larry Mullen (drums), Adam Clayton (bass), Chris Spedding (guitar); "Falling at Your Feet" by/performed by Bono, Daniel Lanois; "Amsterdam Blue (Cortege)" by Jon Hassell, performed by Jon Hassell, Gregg Arreguin, Jamie Muhoberac, Peter Freeman; "Never Let Me Go" by Bono, John Hassell, Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, Nicholas Klein, performed by Bono and the MDH Band
- Sound Design/Supervision
- Elmo Weber
- Sound Mixer
- Lee Orloff
- Re-recording Mixers
- Jeffrey Perkins
- Dennis Patterson
- Sound Editors
- Ai-Ling Lee
- Orada Jusatayanond
- Klaus Peintner
- Stuart Nelson
- David Peifer
- Gary Gerlich
- Dialogue Supervisor
- Russell Farmaco
- ADR
- Supervisor:
- Russell Farmaco
- Foley
- Artist:
- Monique Reymond
- Recordist:
- Klaus Peintner
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Bobby Brown
- Film Extract
- Enter the Dragon (1973)
- Cast
- Milla Jovovich
- Eloise
- Jeremy Davies
- Tom Tom
- Mel Gibson
- Detective Skinner
- Jimmy Smits
- Geronimo
- Peter Stormare
- Dixie
- Amanda Plummer
- Vivien
- Gloria Stuart
- Jessica
- Tom Bower
- Hector
- Donal Logue
- Charley Best
- Bud Cort
- Shorty
- Julian Sands
- Terence Scopey
- Conrad Roberts
- Stix
- Harris Yulin
- Stanley Goldkiss
- Charlayne Woodard
- Jean Swift
- Ellen Cleghorne
- Marlene
- Richard Edson
- Joe
- Tito Larriva
- Jesu
- Jon Hassell
- Hollow
- Justin Lafoe
- Marlene's son
- Ezra Buzzington
- reporter
- David Stifel
- screamer for Jesus
- Winston J. Rocha
- waiter
- Frederique Van Der Wal
- diamond woman
- Roger Stoneburner
- Erik Rondell
- punks
- [uncredited]
- Tim Roth
- Izzy Goldkiss
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Icon Film Distribution
- 10,962 feet
- 121 minutes 48 seconds
- Dolby digital/SDDS
- In Colour
- Anamorphic [Panavision]