“Seems like only yesterday” is, indeed, a cliche. I read Watchmen when they were only available as monthly issues in a 12-issue series, and that doesn’t feel like 23 years ago. Perhaps the reason Watchmen feels so recent is that it remains a rich and entertaining literary epic, its themes so painfully appropriate, its unflinching wit intact and improved with age.
Tonight, as I was watching Watchmen, I was keenly aware of how absorbed I was. I can’t say honestly if that is because Watchmen has been in my life for more than half of it, or because Zack Snyder did such a lovely job of inviting me into his adaptation and being generous to me for saying yes
This movie is an act of love. The Zack Snyder of Dawn of the Dead and 300 is very much present, but it’s become clear, after three fantastic films, that the man knows how to let the gravity of his material seduce him. I listened to him at last weekend’s Wondercon; his admiration for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s gigantic moral chiaroscuro was evident. So was his understanding of the difficulties in adapting such a dense exploration of the things that make us glorious and mad, sometimes at the same time.
I had my doubts going in. How was Billy Crudup going to carry off Dr. Manhattan, a naked blue god trapped between his fleeting humanity and complete detachment from it? How could an actress make either of the Silk Specters seem like real women while wearing ridiculously skimpy outfits? How would Snyder’s highly stylized hand mesh happily with Dave Gibbons’ highly stylized panel art, or, more importantly, with Alan Moore’s deadpan humor and remorseless attack on human ugliness?
That all of these questions were answered satisfactorily is just icing for the cake that lay beneath. As a whole, Watchmen is a thought-provoking and mesmerizing movie. Nearly every scene, even the quiet ones, is packed with small details and earnest moments. The actors seem very comfortable in their superheroic skins, and each of Moore’s characters feels weighty and realistic, even when saying unrealistic things.
Snyder handles the complicated machinery of Moore’s flashback-heavy tale with the ease Francis Coppola exhibited in The Godfather II. That’s not an accidental comparison, for I came out of the screening tonight feeling like I had just watched an intensely violent, intensely thick commentary on human and personal struggles, not unlike those Mario Puzo and Coppola gave us in the 70s. Rorschach’s delicious and wounded persona, brought to exciting life by the “kid” who gave Walter Matthau headaches in The Bad News Bear, was the most fulfilled recipient of this approach. Patrick Wilson and Malin Akerman as Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II were real surprises, turning what could have been melodramatic performances into tender and restrained acts of selflessness. As in the comic, their ordinary passions kept us anchored to an identifiable emotional landscape, an important resisting force against the violent psychological extremes of the Comedian and Rorschach and the ethereal superiority of Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias.
Watchmen is a cerebral movie, steeped in a reverence for its subjects, and rarely succumbs to the Hollywood impulse to push moron buttons. If Zack Snyder and his writers can adapt the presumably unadaptable, then when, I wonder, will we see a film version of Gravity’s Rainbow?