“All books have a destiny of their own.”
“And a life of their own.”
Okay guys, this is on me. The Ninth Gate is absolutely not a horror film. It’s more of a conspiracy thriller in the mode of Alfred Hitchcock, replete with a blonde female lead; it’s easy to picture Hitchcock directing this film with Cary Grant in the lead role. It’s a cool idea, and Roman Polanski is a very talented director, but no one is more adept at aping Hitchcock than Brian de Palma, and a lot of The Ninth Gate reflects that.
The germ of the story is cool, though. Based on Arturo Perez-Reverte‘s novel El Club Dumas, The Ninth Gate (which is a better title) follows Dean Corso (Johnny Depp), an unscrupulous appraiser and purchaser of rare books. “Bad boy book dealer” is a tough sell for an audience, and The Ninth Gate tries to sell it by having Corso drink or smoke in almost every single scene (but if you show your character constantly drinking without ever showing him drunk, isn’t it just window dressing?). Corso gets hired by Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to track down and verify two copies of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, an adaptation of a book supposedly written by Satan.
Academic thrillers are fun. They entertain the audience while also making them feel smarter. It’s why The Da Vinci Code was so successful, and this tradition goes back to Harrison Ford’s rough-and-tumble paleontologist in Raiders of the Lost Ark. (This is also why I was nicer to As Above, So Below than I probably should have been.) So there’s no reason why The Ninth Gate shouldn’t work. It boasts a good director, a charismatic star, and hints of devil worship that call to mind Polanski’s own Rosemary’s Baby. But it commits the cardinal sin of any thriller: it is, at times, boring.
Part of that is due to the insane amount of information thrown at the viewer. Seriously, Silent Hill, maybe the most expository movie ever made, has nothing on The Ninth Gate. It’s fifteen minutes shorter than The Shining and manages to feel longer. Between every interesting development in the film, there’s a 10-15 minute lull, and this makes it impossible for Polanski to maintain any sense of real intrigue or tension. The slowly unfurling mystery is better-suited to point-and-click computer games like Myst or Syberia (man, point-and-click games really like subbing out I for Y); it’d be fine if it were interactive, but it doesn’t grab the viewer the way it should.
Which is a shame, because The Ninth Gate has some solid elements to it. Johnny Depp is fun to watch in the lead role. He’s a very expressive actor, which has served him well (in Ed Wood) and poorly (his hammy mugging in Alice in Wonderland), but he plays Dean Corso as a stoic, which is a tough balancing act for any actor (Matt Damon also did a great job as a stoic in The Good Shepherd). How do you keep a character like that from being boring? Depp and Polanski find a way, and even find a way to downplay Depp’s natural good looks. He’s hidden behind facial hair, glasses, and graying hair, and honestly it’s a good look for him. This is probably the most normal he’s ever looked. Barbara Jefford is a lot of fun in the few scenes she has as the Baroness Kessler, another book collector. The production design, too, is sumptuous, but it’s obvious that even the scenes set in America were filmed in Europe, because Polanski isn’t allowed back in America for very rapey reasons.
The rest of the film is more uneven, sadly. Langella is fine in a boogeyman role, but the rest of the supporting cast doesn’t fare as well. Emmanuelle Seigner is flat and one-note as the femme fatale credited only as “The Girl,” which works to the film’s detriment because the Girl is so often used as a deus ex machina who gets Corso out of tight spots (and floats down a stairway, which is never commented on). The score by Wojciech Kilar, at its best, recalls Bernard Herrmann’s iconic work on Psycho and North by Northwest, but at its worst it’s more inquisitive than ominous, with a playful clarinet that kills any mood Polanski is trying to cultivate.
The climax of the film, unfortunately, belongs to a much goofier movie. If The Ninth Gate were filmed in the 1970s, it would star Peter Cushing as Corso and Christopher Lee as Balkan, and it would end the exact same way, with a Satanic ritual being performed at a big Eyes Wide Shut mansion. The big finale (which, like most of The Ninth Gate, is too thematically reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby), takes place in a small castle, where Balkan tries to summon the devil and sets himself on fire for no reason. Polanski comes close to replicating the demonic sexuality of Rosemary’s Baby, but it doesn’t come off nearly as well, with Corso and the girl having sex while the castle burns down. So if you ever wanted to see Johnny Depp’s o-face against a bad green-screen backdrop of a burning castle, The Ninth Gate is for you. In fact, all the sex is The Ninth Gate is incredibly unsexy, and for that I blame the way Depp attacks his co-stars’ faces. Every kiss in this movie looks like it’s his first kiss, and it’s just as awkward as that sounds.
There’s a cool mythology at work behind The Ninth Gate, but the film spends too much time explaining it. It doesn’t allow its talented director to stretch himself, and as a result it comes off as more of an anecdote than a conspiracy thriller. It’s not scary, it’s not eerie, and it’s not a disaster – it’s a missed opportunity.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5: The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10/28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
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