Film Review: ‘Million Dollar Hotel’

BERLIN — The Million Dollar Hotel continues German director Wim Wenders’ deconstruction of American culture. In this instance, the view is that of a seedy, decaying hotel filled with lost souls manipulated by forces of the police, government and media.

As with his 1997 The End of Violence, to which this bears stylistic resemblance, this film has little chance to work outside of art house venues. This despite an impressive cast headed by Mel Gibson and Milla Jovovich and the musical and literary involvement of Irish pop star Bono, who also produces.

Overseas, the film is more likely to find appreciative adult audiences, certainly among those delighted that such an anti-Hollywood movie was made in the very heart of Los Angeles. Shot last spring by Wenders’ Road Movies, the less than $20 million production was financed by selling non-U.S. rights with Gibson and Bruce Davies’ Icon Entertainment handling global distribution.

For the trade, the chief novelty here is the extensive use of digital processing (roughly 30 minutes of the two-hour film) for what is essentially a non-visual effects film. But from an artistic point of view, Hotel represents a disappointing opening night launch for the 50th Berlin Film Festival.

The film witnesses a host of well-known actors engaged in outrageously self-indulgent performances — with little connecting one to another — and a static story line whose metaphors are wholly banal.

Writers Nicholas Klein (The End of Violence) and Bono locate virtually the entire movie in a downtown L.A. hotel crawling with mentally dysfunctional characters. The death of one resident, a junky artist, a briefly glimpsed Tim Roth), that may or may not have been a suicide, attracts inordinate attention when it’s revealed that his father is a media tycoon (Harris Yulin).

Gibson plays an FBI agent, his head in a neck brace and his manner abrupt and ruthless, who is determined to turn the death into a murder case. He is every bit as much a freak as any hotel resident. (Indeed, he will later claim that scars on his ruined back came from surgery to remove a third arm.)

Gibson puts pressure on mentally fragile “suspects” ranging from Dixie (Peter Stormare with a perfect John Lennon accent), who believes himself to have been a member of the Beatles, to Eloise (Jovovich), an ethereal streetwalker. The film is narrated by a skateboarding idiot named Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), who is all jumpy nerves with a heart full of love for Eloise.

The dead artist, who created works by mixing paint with tar, is suddenly the focus of a local TV station’s news department, which is determined to this pathetic death into the tragedy of a “painter saint.”

As art dealer (Julian Sands) even turns up to declare his works to be garbage — but highly salable garbage. One crafty resident (Jimmy Smits), who claims to be an Indian chief, hatches a scheme to sell the tar paintings and split the money with the hotel’s denizens.

Wenders takes a hallucinogenic approach to this madhouse tale, filling it with dissolves, slow motion and cross-fades, signaling that we are not to take what happens on the surface too seriously. Only the film never digs any deeper than that hyperkinetic surface.

Sequences relentlessly repeat themselves, and the actors appear almost trapped within thinly conceived roles. Their only way out, seemingly, is to play the neurotic mannerisms. The critique of American society as overmanipulated by media spin and political necessity is both self-evident and extremely tired.

Performances vary. Gibson and Jovovich anchor the freak show with a certain steadiness, but Davies is almost too jumpy for the movie to contain him. And distressingly, Smits, Bud Cort and Gloria Stuart (whose dialogue is filled with four-letter obscenities) are wasted in one-note caricatures.

  © 2000 Hollywood Reporter. All rights reserved.