A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

The Kevin Costner vehicle Mr. Brooks offers an interesting new take on the serial killer genre — something we should all be grateful for after years of being assaulted by the same tired old knockoffs that seem to stagger out into theaters by the dozen — but it’s also a case study in contrast, or rather, in the unfortunate lack thereof.

Perception is a funny thing. People like to think in absolutes (saved or damned, black or white, good or evil, etc.) but in fact the way we see things is largely relative. Here’s a classic art school exercise to illustrate the principle: put a light grey square of paper next to a deep black one and it’ll look white, but place it next to a genuinely white square and it’ll appear to be dark grey, closer to black than white. The same is true of characters. Put a chubby guy by a morbidly obese man and he’ll look thin, but move him over so he’s next to a skinny beanpole type and suddenly he’ll seem like he’s seriously overweight. Nor is this phenomenon limited to appearances; it also applies to deep character. Consider Die Hard. Alan Rickman’s character, Hans Gruber, is everything John McClane is not: refined, well-dressed, European, materialistic, pseudo-intellectual, and convinced of his own essential superiority to everyone else in the human race. McClane is a regular-joe blue-collar cop with marital problems and garden-variety fears (he’s a white-knuckle flyer, for example) and the profound contrasts between him and Gruber underline his everyman qualities and make it easier to relate to him and emotionally invest in his character. For a great illustration, check out this exchange:

Hans: But who are you? (scornfully) Just another American who saw too many movies as a child. Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne… Rambo… Marshal Dillion.

McClane: Actually, I was always partial to Roy Rogers. I really dug those sequined shirts.

For more examples of contrast in action, think about any of the great buddy movies or unlikely-partner pictures, like 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, Midnight Run, and of course The Odd Couple. In every case, the two lead characters are as different from each other as it’s possible to be. Hollywood calls this technique “cornering” — making sure that your characters occupy opposite corners of the continuum in every single dimension — and it’s an essential one to learn if you want to be a great screenwriter.

What does this have to do with Mr. Brooks? Everything. There’s a problematic lack of contrast between Earl Brooks and his two main antagonists, Detective Tracy Atwood, played by Demi Moore, and amateur photographer “Mr. Smith”, played by Dane Cook. Brooks is a wealthy, determined businessman who won’t let anything stand in the way of a deal; Atwood is a wealthy, determined detective who won’t let anything stop her from catching her perp. Brooks is a serial murderer; Smith wants to be one. Brooks’ essential nature as a killer makes family life difficult; Atwood’s dedication to her job helped end her marriage.

Perhaps the authors were deliberately trying to explore the similarities between antagonists. Though trickier to employ than contrast, that technique is a fascinating way to externalize internal conflict by making a protagonist battle someone who is in some ways essentially himself, and it can ultimately force the protagonist to finally acknowledge and deal with what’s really wrong with him by making him see it in someone else. For a great example of this type of character design, look no further than Raiders of the Lost Ark. The dynamic between Indiana Jones and Dr. Belloq is crystallized in a single exchange of dialogue:

Belloq: You and I are very much alike. Archeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the pure faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am but a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light.

Indy: Now you’re getting nasty.

So what’s wrong with doing this in Mr. Brooks? In Raiders (and in other movies which make successful use of similarity) there’s no danger that our sympathies will fail to rest with the protagonist, let alone that they might wander off and settle on the antagonist. Indiana Jones is a charismatic, likeable guy with a tremendously exciting job, he’s regularly thrust into mortal peril, and he has a number of appealing everyman qualities, like his fear of snakes. Moreover, there are other ways in which Belloq and Jones aren’t so similar after all. Belloq is more refined, better-dressed, he’s European, more materialistic… shades of the Gruber-McClane relationship in Die Hard, in fact! In Mr. Brooks, by contrast, Earl Brooks is a serial killer. There are very few kinds of people we’re less likely to sympathize with than those who murder for pleasure, and so it becomes very difficult to arouse and maintain audience investment in him. Considered by himself, Brooks is an extremely dark grey square of paper.

The authors do make some effective choices. They largely externalize his killer persona in the form of Marshall, played by William Hurt; they show him going to AA meetings to combat his addiction to killing; and in a brilliant twist, he figures out that his daughter may have just murdered someone, and he agonizes over the possibility that he’s passed his sickness on to her.

The single most effective thing they could have done, though, would have been to surround Brooks with even worse people, with completely black squares of paper that would have made his dark grey one seem much closer to white. They took a stab at this (ho ho ho) with the Smith character, someone who wants to kill even though he isn’t driven by any obvious mental illness or dark compulsions, but because Smith never actually does anything himself, he fails to deliver more than a fraction of his contrast-enhancing potential. And they completely dropped the ball with Atwood by trying to make her sympathetic, giving her a gold-digging ex and the sort of serious job stress that everyone can relate to.

Instead, Atwood should have gotten off on hounding people, much like predators enjoy toying with their prey. In fact, she should have been so driven by the ego trip of catching perps that she didn’t care who she hurt (or even killed!) along the way. And imagine if Smith had gotten off on torturing his would-be victims — and Brooks, who always kills quickly and painlessly, had to step in and save them! Then we would have been really invested in Earl Brooks, because his square of paper would have seemed much whiter next to the pitch-black squares of his evil antagonists. But by making Smith an ineffectual villain and Atwood an overly sympathetic cop, the authors failed to invest us in their protagonist as deeply and effectively as they should have, and though interesting, the movie wasn’t the critical and commercial hit it could have been.

It’s fashionable in some circles to beat up on Spider-Man 3, but while there’s no question that it fails to live up to the standard set by its two predecessors, it’s actually a moderately entertaining and partially satisfying movie. The problem is that its authors tried to cram too many characters, too many narrative threads and too many different themes into the story. There’s not enough time to adequately dramatize and satisfactorily resolve them all — but simply making the movie longer wouldn’t have helped, because some of its themes have nothing whatsoever to do with the others.

Part of the movie concerns Peter Parker’s internal struggle with the arrogance that can easily come with power. This dilemma is magnified by his infection by the Venom parasite, which makes him a stronger Spider-Man but also strips away his inhibitions and heightens his negative emotions, making him more selfish, more arrogant and more likely to act on his anger.

The foundation of his character arc also could have meshed extremely well with his ongoing external conflict with Harry Osborn over Peter’s role in Harry’s father’s death. Harry is rich and has some of the selfishness and arrogance that often come with wealth, particularly inherited wealth, and his emotions drive him to take bloody revenge on Peter. The two characters, therefore, had the potential to dramatize one of the basic themes of the Spider-Man mythos — namely that with great power comes great responsibility — and to organically explore the internal tension between selfish arrogance and selfless nobility. When Harry imbues himself with super-strength and sets out for revenge without care for the consequences to anyone else (to the city in general, which would lose its protector if Harry succeeded in killing Peter, but also to any innocent bystanders caught up in the whirlwind of their combat and to Mary Jane and Aunt May, two people he ostensibly cares about) Peter could have been given a rude awakening, seeing his own Venom-exacerbated but nonetheless real selfishness and arrogance reflected in Harry, and deciding to renounce both his unhealthy emotions and the extra power offered by the parasite.

Unfortunately, neither this theme nor the effect of the Venom parasite are adequately dramatized. Yes, Peter Parker does cavalierly injure and defeat Harry while wearing his black suit, and yes, there are some extremely funny scenes involving his stuck up behavior towards women, but we never really see the appeal of the parasite — its upside, the reason Peter wouldn’t just throw it away immediately — because we never actually see the extra power the black suit grants him, and instead of serving as a dark mirror for Peter’s newly dark self, Harry suffers from amnesia and meanders out of the story for awhile.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that the movie throws an additional villain into the mix: Sandman, whose thematic nature is utterly at odds with the rest of the story. The Sandman material is about feeling the need to do bad things for good reasons (Flint Marko, who becomes the Sandman, attempts to steal money to save his daughter’s life) and learning to see the shades of gray in life when people want everything to be either black or white. In the end, Marko renounces his criminal ways, and rather than obeying the letter of the law, Peter lets him go. This is fertile ground for a story and could have made a fantastic Spider-Man movie by itself, even potentially tying into the Harry Osborn storyline, as Harry too has done things that require forgiveness, and forgiving Marko could have enabled Peter to forgive Harry — and Harry to forgive Peter. But that would have been a very different movie, one that didn’t involve Venom or Peter’s struggle with his personality and with unhealthy emotions.

The schism between the two disparate themes and narrative threads is most evident in the scene when Sandman and Venom form an alliance to take down Spider-Man. This is entirely in character for Venom, who is driven by the petty emotions of rage, jealousy and vengeance, but utterly out of character for Sandman, who just wants to be left alone so he can try to help his daughter. The Flint Marko whom we’ve gotten to know simply wouldn’t actively seek to kill Spider-Man, let alone deliberately endanger the life of an innocent woman in order to accomplish that goal. The authors of the film try to use this development to merge two fundamentally incompatible story lines, but that simply cannot work.

So that’s the lesson of Spider-Man 3. Both stories it tries to tell are intriguing and partially dramatized, but the movie as a whole is thematically scattered all over the place instead of being tightly focused. Every movie, whether it’s a blockbuster or an aesthetically challenging micro-budget indie, needs one fundamental theme underlying the entire story. Every scene, every character and indeed every subsidiary theme is just an aspect of that single foundational master theme, and a movie requires that all the relevant aspects of that theme be dramatized if it’s going to be complete, just as all the colors of light are required to combine to form true white.