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DVD
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From J.D. Salinger to J.W. Lennon
John Lennon was only ten-years-old when the novel Catcher in the Rye was first published in 1951. But sadly for him, a fan’s twisted interpretation of that seminal work led to an abrupt end on December 8th, 1980.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 8:30 AM
By Telly Davidson
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Mugshots.com
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Denied parole in 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006
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Twenty months after scoring a sensational debut at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, Chapter 27 arrives on DVD as perhaps the most provocative film of this early fall. Actor Jared Leto, who is also a remarkable musician in real life, barrels into the role of Mark David Chapman, the man who all too sadly brought to reality the lyric in John Lennon’s song “God” – ‘The dream is over.’
Much like the controversy that surrounds the Showtime serial killer series Dexter, some may question the appropriateness of a movie told from a crazed killer’s perspective. Yet the most frustrating part of that moral question in this case is, like watching an inferior sequel to a classic film, the nagging feeling that we would be better off watching the story of John Lennon (or even Yoko Ono) instead.
Though there have been documentaries, news specials, TV movies and even an abortive Broadway show about the Lennon saga, we have not yet seen – nor are we likely to anytime soon, for rather obvious reasons – a warts-and-all Walk the Line or Life and Death of Peter Sellers type biopic of the most famous Beatle.
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Peace Arch Films
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A tour de force performance
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So this is what we are left with. To its credit, Chapter 27 refuses to embrace the masturbatory, leering style of so many fictional films on similar themes; it is instead documentary like and rather clinical. But that isn’t to say that the movie somehow magically erases any trace of exploitation. Though Chapter 27 has infinitely better acting and dramatic values, the movies which it most resembles stylistically are grimy art-house slashers like Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer, Joe Spinell’s equally notorious Maniac and the seminal Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. (Coincidentally, those first two films date from roughly the same era that Lennon was killed.)
While those kinds of movies are hardly the richest bloodline to draw from, in Chapter 27’s case it actually works most of the time, bolstered by Leto’s almost Kabuki-like transformation. The Lennon fans who wouldn’t be allergic to this movie from its very premise will find themselves hoping (not unlike the tag end of say, United 93) that just one of the people Chapman comes into contact with could break the rules of this rerun, and recognize the threat before it’s too late.
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BBC-TV
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He also had a dream of peaceful co-existence
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On that note, though our culture is infinitely more celebrity conscious and media-mad than it was in 1980, Chapman’s inappropriately star-struck behavior would today set off more alarm bells than a fire engine. He loiters at length around New York’s celebrated Dakota apartment building, trying to make small-talk with the doormen and asking after the comings-and-goings of the building’s famed residents. Yet instead of being hauled away in handcuffs, Chapman was smilingly tolerated by staff, tabloid photographers and gentle groupies. Indeed, the only person who gives a prescience of things to come is Lennon’s comically standoffish and elite assistant, who refuses all contact with the fans.
Predating such terms as “stalking” and “battered wife syndrome,” the Manhattan sidewalk era portrayed in Chapter 27 will seem almost incomprehensibly quaint to viewers born after (or just before) Lennon was killed. The contrast with today’s Fox News Alert, stalker-aware society is as jarring as seeing an old 1940s movie nonchalantly insulting “Japs” and “Chinks”, or watching a rerun of a classic TV show like Laugh-In or The Match Game, with their pre-political-correctness jokes about black, Hispanic, and gay stereotypes.
A fellow FilmStew critic who has been one of my closest ace friends for over four years told me he thought Chapter 27’s first failing was that it didn’t delve deeply enough into the twisted psychology of Chapman’s descent into madness. While I’ve never failed to respect his wise counsel, on this one I have to disagree.
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Peace Arch Films
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Providing an apt connection to today's greater awareness of celebrity stalkers
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The movie is fairly saturated with subtext – the scene where Chapman parades around in nothing but his dirty briefs, gut hanging over waistband, while toying with the idea of shooting two young gay men he listens in to “going at it” through the walls of the flophouse he first stays at, could inspire volumes from an armchair shrink. When Chapman takes a taxi for an insomniac ride through the city, complete with pimps, ‘hos, and talking-to-themselves homeless people, it recalls another (considerably superior) late ‘70s taxi ride courtesy of Robert De Niro. The Grand Canyon between expectation and reality is starting to stretch farther than Mr. Chapman can hold it.
Indeed, Chapter 27’s best – and, at the same time, most clumsily handled - psychological insight comes from the pseudo-religious approach it takes to the murder. There’s a scene where Chapman defaces a Bible writing “Lennon” after “The Gospel According to John”; Chapman refers to the literary classic A Catcher in the Rye as his personal “gospel” – the killing being the self-styled “27th chapter” to the 26-chapter novel.
What happens to a star – and his fans – when he becomes, as Lennon once infamously joked, “bigger than Jesus?” More than that, what about a post-religious society that treats pop stars, actors and politicians as our new secular saints, as tabula rasa “American Idols” for us to project all our wishes and fantasies on? When Mark David Chapman figures out that John Lennon wasn’t a saint, that he had hypocrisies and double standards and broken promises (just like the rest of us mortals), he takes the affront personally, like a jilted lover. And what other fate is left for Lennon than a spectacular martyrdom?
Chapter 27 is by no means a perfect movie, or one for all tastes and viewers. Its almost pornographic shadowing of a scumbag assassin will make some queasy. Still, the film is worth the price of admission as long as you remember that this is a movie about Mark David Chapman, not John Lennon. The latter’s image and persona reverberate simply as the film’s cannon fodder, with the movie wisely avoiding the maudlin play of saturating itself with Beatles songs or “Imagine” and “Woman.” Except for news footage of the assassination’s aftermath, we only experience the meaning of Lennon’s life through the unfocused lens of his killer.
Leto’s performance is as great a physical, if not emotional, transformation as Charlize Theron’s “hagging it up” for her Oscar-winning role as a Monster in 2004. Until his character’s very end, in the state mental hospital, with hard close-ups on his cerulean blue eyes (recalling the posters for his other essay in mental degeneration and despair, 2000’s Requiem for a Dream), Leto is virtually unrecognizable. To play the raging Beatle fan, he gained over 60 pounds and adopted the mother of all bad-hair days.
| Lindsay Lohan’s casting as an enigmatic young woman named Jude (as in “Hey Jude”), who’s also a Beatle-maniac and tries to make friends with the quirky, seemingly-harmless lug, is especially appropriate. She was there for the assassination that helped define the flower-power era in her last serious role, as a Mary Richards-type, all-American girl marrying her high school sweetheart to get him out of Vietnam combat in Bobby – and now she brings things full-circle with this final victimization of ‘60s icons.
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Chapter 27 is burdened with the fact of trying to make interesting the life of a man who is worth noting only for the cold-blooded murder of one of music’s greatest artists. But that surely isn’t how Mark David Chapman saw his life. Like most psychopaths, he and his fetish objects were the only “real” people in the world. One gets the feeling he probably lived his life very much as seen in the film, as though an imaginary spotlight or camera were on him, as though he really were the star of his own movie or reality show.
Armed with a pistol and the will to use it, for that moment at least, he made himself “bigger than John Lennon.” And of course for some, the most disturbing aspect of German-born writer-director J.P. Schaefer’s debut is that Chapter 27 gives him exactly what he always wanted.
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