Paranoid, mega-successful Hollywood producer Mike Max (Bill Pullman), has mega-problems. He received a mysterious email from The FBI, his career in exploitative cinema is starting to weigh on his conscience, his alienated wife is leaving him/maybe having an affair, and a stuntwoman in his latest feature might sue him. Then, he is kidnapped, nearly murdered, and chooses to disappear and start a new life. His neuroses appear to have served him well, however, as once he disappears his wife has begins stealing his company from him without so much as confirming his demise, and that email apparently had something to do with a government-controlled mass surveillance operation. He is obviously the film’s protagonist. He even narrates a share of the film in voice-over, film-noir-style, but his enormous slice of the story is only a fraction of the gargantuan, underdeveloped pie-chart of contrivance that is this admittedly fascinating and beautiful Wim Wenders film from 1997.
It would have been nice to see a focused version of what might have begun as a promising script. That surveillance operation I mentioned is the greater concern of a character played by Gabriel Byrne. He spends endless hours in a converted observatory, switching between a series of high-tech cameras strategically placed to allow monitoring of nearly every corner of Los Angeles. Byrne’s character happens to be the one responsible for sending that strange email to Bill Pullman. Focusing on these two characters could have made for an interesting film, and the material involving their conflicted work in these occupations offers the movies finest filmmaking. The shooting is phenomenal, and there are a few particularly intriguing shots of the surveillance cameras, aesthetically unpleasant, dwarfing L.A. skylines, disembodied from whatever holds them so high, indicating the unnatural omniscience they provide their creators. There could also have been some interesting overlap between this concept of a corrupt government and the voyeuristic and objectifying tendencies of Hollywood cinema. The movie might acknowledge these ideas, but it doesn’t dare work with them. It seems to be much more comfortable throwing them at you, then running off to the next thing, like it never intended to examine these ideas in the first place.
To where does the movie run off? Any direction that would lead it into what feels like a completely different movie seems to do just fine. That stuntwoman from earlier shows up and has daddy issues. There is also a young detective obsessed with Mike Max’s case (he is also a film buff). He and the stuntwoman somehow manage to fall in love after a handful of brief flirtations. We spend a lot of time on Gabriel Byrne’s demented father (played by Samuel Fuller!). We watch Andie MacDowell (Mike Max’s wife) doing not much of anything besides look like she is in the midst of fainting. Udo Kier plays the director of Max’s new film and is obviously supposed to be a stand-in for Wenders. There is another manufactured romance between Gabriel Byrne’s character and his foxy Mexican immigrant cleaning lady (that receives a decent justification), who strengthens the films totally out-of-place theme of the role of illegal immigrants working in L.A. None of this really comes together. You can tell when a scene involving Pullman’s character is supposed to have some sort of emotional payoff, as though the character has changed, but the film never bothered to concentrate on any one character long enough to know who these people were, so you never really know when a change in behavior has occurred.
You really can’t call it a good film, but you can understand that The End Of Violence deserves preservation (thanks again, Olive Films!). After all, Wim Wenders has become something of a prolific director, and I don’t think you necessarily need to subscribe to The Auteur Theory to appreciate seeing every film in a director’s career in a high definition rendering (especially if they are all shot as beautifully as this one). It doesn’t make much sense, and it doesn’t even cover the themes of government surveillance or Hollywood corruption as handily as other films, but it is a forgotten movie from the late ’90s featuring performances from a handful of actors who thrived in that decade. Mostly it’s a reminder that a misfire can often be just as useful as a masterpiece in reminding us what makes for great filmmaking.
