All Dressed Up
Joel Schumacher, a Hollywood player, directs his latest thriller in the dark.

8MM
With Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, Catherine Keener
Written by Andrew Kevin Walker
Directed by Joel Schumacher

IT MAY BE TIME to give up on the career of Joel Schumacher, the costume designer-turned-director whose skill at overproducing a movie is virtually unparalleled among A-list Hollywood filmmakers. For a while in 8mm, it almost seems like he's on to something efficiently entertaining and palatable. Then he begins to dress things up, and before long you have a fashion emergency.

Schumacher is one of commercial cinema's great conservationists: 8mm looks so dark most of the time, he must be saving the world millions of kilowatt hours of electricity by not turning on the lights. And why waste time on an actor whom you need to direct when you can just hire Nicolas Cage and let him do his lumpish torment thing.

You didn't really mind Schumacher's breathless style in movies like St. Elmo's Fire, The Lost Boys or Flatliners. Those movies were as much about watching pretty young Brat Pack stars as anything else. Things changed for him when he made Falling Down, the Michael Douglas potboiler, at which point he seemed to have developed the notion that he had something to say. After that came The Client, the last two Batman movies and the racially conscious drama A Time to Kill, which gave sweat a bad name.

In 8mm, Schumacher takes us into the world of sicko pornography and the haunts of the very rich. It's the story of Tom Welles (Cage), who supports his wife (Catherine Keener) and infant daughter through his work as a highly moral private investigator and surveillance expert. He's the private dick to politicians and stars, and when he gets a call from the wealthy widow of a recently deceased steel magnate, he takes on his most troubling case.

Seems the old woman found a short 8mm film in her husband's private vault that depicts a young woman being beaten and murdered by a masked, leather-clad hulk. The widow needs to know that the film is a lie -- that the girl's death was only simulated, and thus that her beloved husband did not take part in a teenager's grisly demise.

So through a fusion of technology, logic, legwork and wiles -- and with the help of Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), a droll, streetwise, pierced-and-tattooed young man in tight leather pants who went to Los Angeles to be a musician and ended up working in a porno shop -- Welles makes his way through the bondage-and-snuff worlds of Los Angeles and New York underground filmmaking, trying to discover what actually happened to 16-year-old Mary Ann Mathews, whose destitute mother still wants her little girl to come home.

The writer of 8mm, Andrew Kevin Walker, also wrote the exceptional 1995 thriller Seven. Both movies pose the same central notion: What happens when a loving, decent, ethical man witnesses such consummate evil that he develops a crisis of conscience in his struggle to eradicate it? But Seven had a better plot, a much better director (David Fincher) and a stronger cast (Brad Pitt as the young hero, Morgan Freeman as his partner). Cage, who's best suited to comedy and farce, swallows his heavy-handed dialogue and doesn't give Welles (talk about cheesy irony in naming a character!) a speck of an inner life.

In an early scene between Cage and Keener (Your Friends and Neighbors) -- who is just as wrong for her role -- the two actors seem to improvise a bit, but the brief hope that Schumacher is loosening up proves false. The movie's highest acting kudos go to Phoenix, who has a dirty, roguish charm in 8mm and a quavering voice unlike any of his contemporaries.

Somewhere in 8mm, I think you can dredge up some themes about the creeping degeneracy of a sex-crazed society that seems to have no respect for anyone or anything. At times you find yourself hoping that Walker made up this world of basement porn warehouses and sleazy brothel orgies. Schumacher is subtle enough in visualizing the sex and death, usually cutting away from the smut and gore -- although if he'd made a smarter film, he could have shown us what he was talking about without risking a charge of exploitation.