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Weak script undermines horror in latest Polanski film
By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service
(Mar. 10, 2000) -- It's been a long, long time since Roman Polanski made a good movie -- a solid 20 years, since Tess, released after he fled the United States to avoid jail on charges of having sex with a minor.
Yet The Ninth Gate starts so well and holds up so strongly for almost an hour that you get the feeling Polanski has found his touch again. That sense of corruption and palpable creepiness -- the feelings that permeated Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and Repulsion, among others -- makes it seem as though The Ninth Gate is actually a film that will deliver the goods.
Even the strongest Polanski loyalist, however, must acknowledge that, in the final hour, Polanski loses his way. The action begins to huff and puff with effort, as the wildness of these goose chases becomes apparent, culminating in an ending that is both confusing and anticlimactic.
Certainly Polanski is on familiar ground with this script, based on a Spanish novel by Arturo Perez Reverte. But Polanksi and his two co-screenwriters (Enrique Urbiz and John Brownjohn) dwell on action to the exclusion of character, particularly with the otherwise intriguing figure at the center of this story.
Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is something of a book detective. An appraiser and hunter of rare books, he traffics in what appears to be a shadowy underworld devoted to valuable, obscure old volumes. First glimpsed juggling his employers' interests and his own while offering an estimate on an elderly businessman's collection, he quickly gets down to business with a client named Boris Balkan (Frank Langella).
Balkan collects books about the devil and demons -- and owns one of three remaining copies of a book allegedly dictated by the devil himself. But Balkan has heard rumors that only one of the three books is authentic, that the other two are forgeries. So he hires Corso to track down and examine the other copies, comparing them to Balkan's to decide which is real.
The book in question supposedly lays out the steps one must take to summon the devil and gain unlimited power. As Corso takes his search from New York to Spain and then Paris, he discovers that a certain satanic violence seems to dog his every step. People around him keep turning up dead and Corso is sure that someone is stalking him as well.
He also has frequent encounters with a seductive young Frenchwoman (Emmanuelle Seigner), who keeps turning up to help him out of jams. As suspicious as he is of her, Corso doesn't seem to notice that the woman appears to have supernatural powers.
The plotting is both obvious and frustratingly obscure. It becomes readily apparent what the gimmick is here, but the ending is neither satisfying nor particularly clear. The film keeps lurching forward long after it has run out of story, like the body of a chicken whose head has just been severed. Polanski's point about the seductive nature of evil ultimately is lost because his hero is such a cipher.
Which is a shame, because Depp works hard at capturing just the right note of jaded world-weariness. At one point, Balkan says of Corso, "There's nothing more reliable than a man whose loyalty can be bought for hard cash." Yet Depp is missing the scene that gives us some sense of what this man stands for. As a result, he becomes the plot's juggernaut, moving inexorably forward out of inertia, rather than need.
Roman Polanski made some of the watershed films of the 1960s and 1970s. With The Ninth Gate, he reminds us what firm grip he has on his filmmaking skills -- but also how desperately he is at the mercy of mediocre scripts.