The Caveman's
Valentine
review by Cynthia Fuchs, 9 March
2001
Ferocious
The
Caveman's Valentine
opens with a series of hard-to-read images, as if the darkness on
screen has come alive, filled with fluttering wings and pounding
heartbeats. As the image finally comes into focus, you find yourself
being stared at hard by the ever-intimidating face of Samuel L.
Jackson: "Don't you watch me!" he roars. And for an
instant, you might think better of what you're about to do.
Jackson's
character, the paranoid schizophrenic Romulus Ledbetter, is known
around New York City streets as the Caveman, because he lives in a
cave in a park. At that daunting moment when you first see him, Rom
is actually not yelling at you, but at a timid social worker, whom
he distrusts on principle. But throughout the film, Rom is trying to
beat back the demons that populate his own skull. As ferocious as he
seems to you, he's haunted by demons far more ferocious, beset by
nightmares he can't identify. Now dreadlocked, glowering, and
looming -- and when Jackson looms, you know he's looming -- he was
once a piano prodigy and teacher at Julliard. But it's been years
since his wife Sheila (Tamara Tunie) kicked him out of the house,
and though he understands his plight, he can't go back, no matter
how much he misses his former life.
Rom
isn't exactly a reliable narrator, but the film makes this
unreliability its focus, taking you inside his skull, so you can see
what he sees. He keeps a television in his cave, on which he sees
projected a series of "messages" directed at him by evil
(corporate) forces. Romulus's collective name for these forces is
"Stuyvesant," and he imagines they shoot devastating,
puke-green z-rays at him from the Chrysler Building. One morning,
Rom wakes to find a frozen corpse in a tree just outside his cave.
Believing that this street kid, Scotty (Sean MacMahon), has been
murdered by "Stuyvesant" as yet another message to him,
Rom heads off to the payphone down the street to call Lulu (Aunjanue
Ellis), who happens to be a cop. She answers wearily, roused from
sleep -- they've been through something like this before -- but soon
after, she arrives on the scene with a skeptical white detective in
tow. As Rom spits his theory of the crime, she's so frustrated and
saddened by his ravings that she tries to hide the fact that they're
even related.
Intriguingly,
The Caveman's Valentine asks you to sympathize with a
difficult character, and simultaneously to understand, from Lulu's
perspective, what makes him, frankly, unsympathetic. But as the film
turns more complicated and less coherent, it has trouble balancing
its thrilling plunges into Romulus's skull (where you see the
muscular black male angels that so unhinge him but also charge him
up) and its efforts to show you how other characters respond to his
lurching about. The swing character here is Sheila -- she stands
outside his skull, but she is wholly a figment of his need and
desire, appearing to him sporadically, to offer advice and
encouragement. But while he's talking to her, everything and
everyone else has to stop, and this makes for some awkward pacing.
In
part, the movie's unsettled structure has to do with Rom's own
problems with keeping things straight. His skewed perspective comes
across in Rom's scenes with his reluctant benefactor, a rich,
self-confident bankruptcy lawyer named Bob (Anthony Michael Hall).
When Rom asks the guy for a suit of clothes, Bob tests his musical
skills, then says okay, even inviting him into his super-nice
apartment to meet the wife, Betty (Kate McNeil) and enjoy a lime
rickey (and when you see the neon color of these drinks, you might
wonder just whose perspective is skewed here). Rom and Bob achieve a
kind of comedy routine rhythm, as each
eaks
past and around the other, then behaves, out of politeness, as if
everything's just peachy. Rom's own frustrations with the niceties
of social interactions are almost palpable here. But the most moving
image in the Bob and Betty world involves Betty, who warms up to her
unusual houseguest, helping him shave his beard and shampoo his
formidable dreads.
As
such cross-cultural change-ups suggest, the film -- written by
George Dawes Green, based on his 1994 Edgar Award-winning detective
novel, and tweaked by Lemmons -- is only superficially a murder
mystery. And on that level, it lacks narrative and logistical sense:
Rom implausibly moves between locations apparently many miles apart,
without visible, or even imaginable, means of transportation, while
tracking down world-famous avant-garde photographer David Leppenraub
(Colm Feore), whom he suspects of torture, murder, and general
sexual nastiness. Scheming his way into Leppenraub's Long Island
home (by unconvincingly pretending he's sane enough to have written
a piano piece in the photographer's honor), Rom meets Moira
Leppenraub (Ann Magnuson), David's sister and an artist herself. She
and Romulus share a certain disregard for commercial interests
(though she is clearly wealthy and used to privilege), as well as a
taste for life on the fringe. Briefly, their liaison helps Rom to
recognize himself again.
But
the father-daughter relationship -- at once connected and
disconnected -- is the film's most tenuous, crucial, and potentially
terrifying, much as it was in Lemmons' first feature, Eve's Bayou
(where Jackson also played an all-powerful and all-fallible father).
When the rest -- the murder mystery, the questions about art and
obscenity, the by-definition corrupt class system -- starts to feel
distracting, the movie flounders. Elegantly shot by cinematographer
Amelia Vincent and effectively scored by Terence Blanchard, The
Caveman's Valentine has much to offer, even aside from Jackson's
lauded powerhouse performance. Despite and sometimes because of its
unevenness, the film conveys the delusions of daily existence with
fierce poetry.
Click here to read Cynthia Fuchs' interview.
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Directed by:
Kasi Lemmons
Starring:
Samuel L. Jackson
Ann Magnuson
Aunjanue Ellis
Tamara Tunie
Colm Feore
Anthony Michael Hall
Rodney Eastman
Written
by:
George Dawes Green
Rated:
R - Restricted
Under 17 requires
accompanying
parent or adult
guardian
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