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New Rose Hotel Review by
Sean Axmaker
Where
did Abel Ferrara go? One of America’s most fiercely independent filmmakers,
the frustrating, abrasive, and actively obtuse director has shown little
mellowing with age. I’m not someone you could call a fan -- I abhor his
calculatingly controversial and spiritually contradictory Bad
Lieutenant even as I recognize the passion of the production and Harvey
Keitel’s performance, and I find The
Addiction a preening and pretentious mix of intellectual chic and sub-George
Romero splatter satire -- but I remain fascinated by the guy. New
Rose Hotel, years in the development, doesn’t even seem like a natural
project for Ferrara, The original short story by cyberpunk godfather William
Gibson takes place in the riffling memory of a doomed sap hiding out in a tiny
sleeping pod in the titular establishment, awaiting certain death in the
aftermath of a scam gone wrong. It’s just one guy wrestling with his thoughts
and challenging his memories to reveal the hidden story. To
mine the potential Ferrara opens the story up, playing out the elaborate plot of
black market corporate raiders Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe)
finding their mark, setting up their trap, and reaping the rewards… until it
all comes crashing down. Walken limps through the film in a neat but worn old
white suit like an emaciated Sidney Greenstreet, talking incessantly of making
his one big score. Dafoe’s X is far less ambitious and he seems weary of the
hustling. He’s found himself a warm body in bar girl Sandii (Asia Argento) and
starts to get attached to her just as Fox makes her the keystone of his latest
plot. Simply put, super scientist Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Akatani), the top
conceptual thinker at Maas, is a big time poon hound with a special liking for
sexy brunettes -- like Sandii. So when his wife (Gretchen Mol, her appearance
limited to silent surveillance video clips) leaves town they ply him with Sandii,
pry him from Maas’ royal prison, and sells him to multinational rival Osaka.
At least that’s what we’re told. Ferrara leaves all the actual action off
screen, feeding us the developments in reports, phone calls, and grainy video
surveillance footage. He’s
more interested in Fox and X, would be hustlers living in a veritable
underground of basement bars and bland hotel rooms, a future whose personality
has been blurred into generic sameness, lit by colorless fluorescents, and
finished off with a streaky, hazy look of bleeding color (it’s at least partly
by design, I’m sure, but I wonder how much of that is in the video transfer,
and I further wonder if that look was pushed by Ferrara himself). The future is
a depressingly bland world where cultural diversity appears to have melted into
one sleek, generic look. You can’t tell what city it is, or if it’s a number
of different cities, or if this is a Blade
Runner vision where the entire country is one giant urban core. It’s a
future where governments have been replaced by corporations, whose private
police forces have the feel of mob organizations. The more we discover about the
world they live in, the more these guys appear hopelessly out of their depth,
doomed dreamers. The narrative device of never showing the heist in action only
furthers this feeling (though it frustrates the hell out of anyone actually
watching it -- it’s maddening to finally get to the “story” and have it
withheld), making us helpless viewers in a culture of conspiracies and secrets. Ferrara
gives us unending conversations between the aging philosopher-hustler Fox and
his loyal-but-burned-out buddy X. “If you make this happen, will it do it for
you? Will it bring you redemption?” asks X. Fox replies, “It does not
behoove a gentleman to be introspective.” X is pure introspection, which is
his curse. He goes along with the plan only out of friendship to Fox.
“Aren’t you proud of me? I did what you told me to,” coaxes Sandii, with
whom he’s fallen completely in love over the course of mentorship as he
teaches her the finer points of seduction. “Yeah,” answers X, “but don’t
ask me to be happy about it.” A typical Ferrara male, he makes her whore for
him and then hates her for it, but in a surprisingly mature step he gets beyond
it and even plans to marry Sandii when it’s all over. A real life dream
grounded in a definable future, a far cry from Fox’s dream of a career of
bigger and better scams: “It’s not about the money, it’s about action.” Well,
the action backfires. It’s all very murky and narratively complicated, but
when the plot falls apart X hides out in the deserted New Rose Hotel, holed up
in a pod no bigger than a minivan and working through the plot like a half hour
recap. This is where Ferrara becomes true to Gibson’s story, except that when
he reaches back in his memory it’s a new view on everything we’ve already
seen. This time through he brings up scenes we never saw, shuffling them around,
trying to makes sense of their actions with hindsight. Is he stewing in
self-recrimination, working it out, or simply putting it in perspective? It’s
hard to tell, and ultimately it’s a more fascinating idea than an effective
cinematic strategy. For that matter you could define the entire film that way:
Ferrara promising a science fiction thriller and delivering scenes of two guys
talking to each other interspersed with titillating shots of Asia Argento in
various stages of undress. But by the end it’s a sad, melancholy portrait of a
romantic questioning his very understanding of his life, and as he reworks his
past, mining the past weeks for meaning he couldn’t see while immersed in it,
it gives us the tools to question our own understanding without leading us to
any definite conclusions. It’s
little wonder the film bypassed a theatrical run and wound up straight to video.
Practically every review (from festival screenings and test runs) has slammed
Ferrara for his murky narrative labyrinth and defiance of all genre
expectations. But there’s something in the sheer perversity of it that makes
me want to like the film, a reaction further enhanced by excellent performances
by Walken and Dafoe, who also serve as executive producers. Once again Ferrara
serves his actors wonderfully, helping them shape characters with
understatement. The film ultimately has little to do with the intricate
preparations and complicated exposition fed us every few minutes, and everything
to do with desperate hustlers dealing with forces far beyond their control.
It’s hard to recommend a film so determined to undermine every expectation its
audience has, but even if Ferrara can’t make it work, its minor rewards are
greater than the generic, predictable thrills of many far more coherent pictures.
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