Right from the start, the intentions of Andrew
Dominik's highly stylized and provocative >
movie
Chopper are clear. The film, based on the
real-life story of Mark 'Chopper' Read, the most infamous Australian criminal
of the 20th century, starts with an explanation that the story is not a
biography, but a dramatisized interpretation of Chopper's life.
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This distinction was wasted on the movie
audience of Australia, where it received rave reviews and was a box-office
hit. Most people saw the movie Chopper as a biopic, especially because
some scenes are based on true events. For instance the horrifying scene, in
which Chopper hears in prison, that there's a price on his head and he charges
a fellow prisoner to cut off his ears, with the intention to be transfered to
the relatively safe psychiatric section.
By taking the life of a real person as a
starting point, screenwriter and director Dominik creates an intriguing
tension between truth and fiction. The result is a movie on Chopper's world of
thought, his inner world, which is miles away from reality.
And that even the
truth in Chopper's world has a bizarre character, is evidenced by his remark
"I already cut off my ears, before anybodyn had heard of Quentin
Tarantino".
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Myths
'Never sacrifice a good story on the truth' is
Read's motto. This recalls the famous line from John Ford's Western The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), "When the legend becomes fact, print
the legend". Just like Ford's movie, Chopper comments on the role
of the media in creating myths.
The film begins and ends with a scene in which
the protagonist watches on television, with visible pleasure, an interview he
had with an admiring female journalist. This also sets the tone on how the
media is portrayed. All media people fall for Chopper's charismatic appearance
and are eager to make him famous.
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Eric Bana as the charismatic Mark
"Chopper" Read
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Psychotic
The thematic resemblance with Oliver Stone's >
Natural
Born Killers
(1994)
is evident, but Dominik approaches his subject much more personal and
subtle than Stone, whose vehement movie almost becomes a sociological
treatment on the symbiosis between infamous criminals and the media.
In his
movie Chopper, Dominik does't look for external causes for Chopper's
crimes, but he wants above all to visualize the explosive mixture of doubt,
quilt and the obsessive egocentrism that drives his protagonist. Chopper is
torn between psychotic, exhibitionistic and paranoid behavior.
He maltreats
fellow prisoners, his girl-friend and his enemy Neville Bartos, but shortly
after he apologizes and promises to make everything right.
Expressionistic
The movie Chopper is divided in two
parts. The first part covers the period from 1978 and takes place in prison.
Chopper becomes embroiled in a power struggle when he tries to become the
leader of the prisoners of the most heavily guarded prison of Australia. This
period has a cool atmosphere, with minimalistic settings in clinically blue
light, and ends with the ear-slicing scene. Next the movie makes a leap to the
mid-eighties, after Chopper has been released from prison. This is the
beginning of another visual, expressionistic tone, with restless framing and
explicit colors (predominantly dark-red), which symbolizes the abundance of
stimuli to which he succumbs. The confusion and disorientation is underlined
by the strong music of Mick Harvey (of The Bad Seeds).
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| Just out of prison
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Eric Bana
The leading role in the movie Chopper is
performed with amazing ease by >
Eric Bana. At that time a well-known stand-up comedian and talk-show host in Australia
. Besides the script and the sleek design, it is the way Bana plays his
character that provides the viewer Chopper's inner experience. The production
of the movie was stopped temporarily so that Bana, like De Niro in Scorsese's Raging
Bull , could put on the necessary weight to play Chopper in later life. He
looks just like the man about whom producer Al Clark once said: "He
thinks he's a Goodfella, but in reality he's the King of Comedy".
Chopper, who seems to be very pleased with the >
movie
Chopper ( he is on one of the
commentary tracks of the DVD ), could not have said it better.
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