The Million Dollar Hotel

When this movie cam out in 2000, I marked it to watch, but it was in and out of the art-house before you could cough. What was strangest about it was that it had huge pedigree: produced by Icon (Mel Gibson's production company), directed by Wim Wenders, written by Bono. Mel Gibson had a major role in it, and it included Milla Jovovich, Jimmy Smits, Peter Stormare and Amanda Plummer. That's not a bad amount of talent behind a film, and I wondered what could be wrong with it to chase it out of the theaters so quickly.

Gibson is an FBI man sent to the eponymous hotel -- a way-past its heyday flophouse in East LA, sheltering mentally ill people too poor to afford medical care. A man -- the son of a wealthy businessman -- had lived there, and jumped/fell of the roof. Gibson was sent to figure out who killed him -- if he was killed. But the film is not so much a whodunnit as a characters film.

Well, I saw it tonight. And it could stand to be re-edited. It ran a long, by about 30 minutes (122 min), dragging quite a bit, thanks to a self-indulgent script. But there were some nic e performances by Jovovich, and the film's star Jeremy Davies (who, nonetheless, manages to be a bit annoying after a while -- again, an editing problem). It's not a blockbuster film, but it's at least as interesting to watch as any other film on the shelf. The film is kind of interesting, because there was very little style in it -- it was almost untouched -- but just enough that it couldn't have been a TV drama.