I always admired the work of William Hurt. He was one of the most subtle actors in the history of the medium. I was deeply dismayed when he passed away earlier this year at the relatively young age of seventy. Ever since, much like I did when Ray Liotta passed away earlier this year, I have been trying to find a work of his to pay tribute to this superb performer.
I considered his work as the inspector in Dark City, the visual masterpiece that Roger Ebert almost immediately compared to one of the great films in history. I considered paying tribute to his one major TV role – his work on Damages a series I have paid tribute to in this column on multiple occasions and which deserved earned him an Emmy nod. But strangely enough, I think the films which I think have the most respect for Hurt’s performance is in a movie that very few people saw in the theaters at the time.
To be clear, it is not a masterpiece by any definition; I think even going so far as to call it a guilty pleasure is giving it too much credit. But for reasons I have never been able to comprehend, every time I see Mr. Brooks on cable, no matter where it is in the action, I invariably stop and watch it. It is one of the grimmest movies ever made by a studio in the 2000s; one you often wonder how it managed to get greenlit in the first place. It has the hallmarks of a noir, a procedural, a thriller and even horror, but it’s not really any of them, and truthfully it doesn’t do a good job defining what it is during its two hour plus runtime. Yet paradoxically, that’s why I find it so fascinating. This is a film that has the make up of an independent film, but if it were made for a cheaper budget with smaller names, I don’t think it would have the effectiveness it does. Because it rises and falls with the performances of the four leads, all of whom are very much cast against time. Two of them are among the best actors in history; one is a 90s movie star who never quite got her potential realized in that era; and the fourth is a standup comic giving what may be the only quality performance in his blessedly short film career. It’s not like the script gives them a lot to work with; there is a story to be sure, but it never quite follows the basic premise of the shocking opening minutes.
What Mr. Brooks is, fundamentally, is the character study of a real-life Jekyll and Hyde. It tells the story of Earl Brooks, glassmaker, millionaire, husband, father, pillar of the community in Portland, Oregon. The opening seconds show the subtitles that define the movie: “The Urge Has Returned to Mr. Brooks. It never truly left.” We hear the tormented voice of Kevin Costner, frantically saying ‘The Serenity Prayer’. Over it we hear the voice of William Hurt: “Why do you fight it so hard, Earl?”
We then see Earl accepting the prize for Man of the Year, calm, orderly and perfectly maintained. But we can hear the inner struggle going through him on the drive home as he talks to his wife, and they have desert at an ice cream place. Then in the back seat, we see a figure that Brooks refers to as Marshall (Hurt) Marshall is the voice we heard, and he keeps baiting Brooks. “You’ve already got them picked out.” Brooks tells his wife he’s going to his workshop. He changes out of his suit into an all-black ensemble. Then for the next five minutes, we watch as he enters the apartment of a neighboring couple who are busy, enthusiastically making love. At the moment of their climax, he shoots them both. We then watch him clean up, go home and burn his outfit. “Now go and make love to your wife.” Marshall says in a satisfied tone.
We get answers to some of our questions in the next segment when two detectives, Hawkins and Tracy Atwood enter the crime scene. From the way they talk to the techs, they make it clear that these are the actions of the Thumbprint Killer, and this is his first murder in two years.
We expect we know how this movie will go now: that Atwood’s pursuit of the Thumbprint Killer will lead her to pursue Brooks. In fact, not only does that not happen, for the lion’s share of the movie, Atwood and Hawkins are not dealing with their investigation into the killings at all. Instead, the ‘threat’ to Brooks comes the next day when a man who is only calls himself Smith, shows up at his office with photographs of the night before. We now expect there to be blackmail, and there is – but Smith has no interest in money. Smith has a death and murder fetish and he wants to Brooks to help him kill someone.
Brooks knows that Smith is a threat, but barely one. The next night, he shows up in his apartment and says he’ll help him, but only if he hands over the photos and negatives. Smith instantly complies, and they spend the remainder of the movie with Brooks showing him how to stalk a victim, and Smith increasingly becoming impatient with his lack of progress. Marshall constantly mocks Smith from the back seat of the car/
It is clear that Marshall represents Brooks’ psychosis, but he also seems to recognize the rational part of his brain. Brooks’ conversations with Marshall are constant acts of denial; Marshall is smug throughout knowing that this is part of a cycle; that he has said and done all of these things before, and will continue to do so again. The only threat that clearly does disturb him is the arrival of Jane, Earl’s daughter (a young Danielle Panabaker) who has just dropped out of college ostensibly to help her father with her business. This turns out to be the first of several lies she has told him; the first is she is pregnant. The second and more horrible one comes to their doorstep when police from her college town come to ask her questions about a boy she knew who has been found dead. Both Earl and Marshall are more unsettled by this then anything else in the movie, but not for the same reason. Earl believes that she has inherited from him whatever sickness that possesses him to kill, and it depresses and rages him towards suicide. Marshall is more practical. First, he is concerned as to how good a job she did covering her tracks, and then starts talking to Earl about whether they should let her go to prison for what she has done…and what it might mean if she doesn’t. One of the last images of the movie demonstrates just how deeply that fear has entered Earl’s subconscious.
Costner spent the entirety of his career playing nice guys and it was only until the mid 2000s, with his career on a downswing, that he began to take more risky roles. It seems bizarre to learn that Brooks role was written with Costner in mind, and even more bizarre to watch him and not be able to imagine a single other actor playing him. Any actor can play a good man; some can play a milquetoast hiding a monster. It’s hard to imagine any actor showing cold efficiency in some scenes and utter depression minutes later.
Hurt is good as the subconscious because he is doing something he almost never got a chance to do in any of his major roles: chew the scenery. Hurt spent so much of his career as the ordinary man that even the villains he played seemed that way, people who you wondered how they came down this path. Perhaps because he knows that Marshall is a literal demon, Hurt felt free to give it his all in a way he almost never did before.
Demi Moore plays the role of the lead detective, hunting the Thumbprint Killer, except she spends most of the movie divided her time between a messy divorce from her ex-husband (she’s from money and her husband wants alimony) and hunting another escaped serial killer named Thornton Meeks, aka The Hangman. At one point in the film, the Hangman actually grabs her off the street and she almost miraculously escapes with her life. The next scene sees her dealing with her talking to her attorney. These scenes seem utterly unconnected to plot involving Brooks, but in the final half hour, we see that the writer has been making connections to them, and reveal a different plot.
Dane Cook plays Smith. In his film career, Smith mostly played cocky and arrogant people. In this role almost unlike everything else he ever did, this is revealed to be a façade very quickly, and we see the brutal impulses that control him – fear, ego, and exultation – all of which show him working at a level he never could manage again.
It’s hard to imagine anyone wading through Mr. Brooks and coming through feeling satisfied: this is a movie that goes out of its way to avoid any aspect of closure or even resolution. The thing is that’s the point: if you listen to the last twenty seconds of voiceovers, you realize you are listening to the exact lines that opened the movie: Earl frantically saying the Serenity Prayer, Marshall mocking him. I don’t normally like any kind of art that ends with the indication that what we have just watched is part of an endless cycle, but this isn’t science fiction or fantasy. Mr. Brooks is a man who doesn’t have the serenity to accept the things he can not change, the clarity to change the things he can, and doesn’t know the difference. And because of that, he will never know peace.
Addendum: Six years after Mr. Brooks debuted, Scandal premiered on ABC.
Huck, the assassin played by Guillermo Diaz, is frequently seen in the opening episodes, attending AA meetings, referring to the killings he has committed so often as ‘his addiction.’ In the opening minutes of Mr. Brooks, we see Costner attending AA meeting not long after he has committed his first murders in two years. Is it possible Shonda Rhimes saw this movie, and thought the concept – the urge to kill being as powerful an addiction as drugs or alcohol – too good not to use? If so, given the road Huck ended up taking as the series progressed, I think we all know how Earl Brooks eventually ended. (Unless of course someone found a use for his skills.)
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