The Million Dollar Hotel (2000)

122 Minutes, Color, USA, 2000

Written By: Bono & Nicholas Klein

Directed By: Wim Wenders

Dramatis Personae:

Jeremy Davies is Tom-Tom, mentally challenged inhabitant of the Million Dollar Hotel and our narrator.

Milla Jovovich is Eloise, troubled young woman and object of Tom-Tom’s affection.

Mel Gibson is Skinner, humorless FBI agent investigating murder at the Million Dollar Hotel.

Jimmy Smits is Geronimo, radical and paranoid Native American artist.

Peter Stormare is Dixie, Beatles-obsessed delusional ad-hoc leader of the Million Dollar Hotel residents.

Harris Yulin is Stanley Goldkiss, media mogul and Skinner’s employer.

Donal Logue is Charley Best, Los Angeles police officer and reluctant ally of Skinner.

Charlayne Woodward is Jean Swift, local TV reporter.

Commentary:

I have to say that Bono is one of my favorite celebrities. Besides being the front man for U2, the GREATEST BAND IN THE WORLD PERIOD SHUT UP DON’T ARGUE WITH ME, he’s also a decent human being and a sincere and dedicated humanitarian. He donates time and resources to worthy causes, and uses his fame to promote awareness in the general populace. He evokes a lost ideal: the powerful man who uses his power to further causes bigger than his own self-aggrandizement. That’s a rare thing in powerful people, and rarer still in entertainers. Sure, plenty give lip service to ending hunger or improving education or curing epidemic illnesses, but Bono is one of the few who genuinely care and try to do something about it. If there were a couple more like him and John Mellencamp around, maybe Rock and Roll really could save the world.

That being said, every artist, no matter how great, has their limitations. And it’s often when they move into a new area that we as audience become aware of them. And this is where we see Bono’s feet of clay as an artist, in the film Million Dollar Hotel, which he made along with his frequent creative collaborators Nicholas Klein and Wim Wenders. He’s a great songwriter. He’s a great humanitarian. As a filmmaker…well, he’s a great songwriter.

Million Dollar Hotel opens with a strikingly artistic image. We see our protagonist, the childlike Tom-Tom, pacing the roof of the eponymous Hotel (while U2’s “The First Time” provides background music). After a few moments of contemplation, he smiles, waves to someone off-screen, then takes a running start and jumps off the roof. As he falls, we hear his narration, talking about how only now, as he faces his death, does he finally understand life…

And then we flash back to two weeks previous. Through Tom-Tom’s narration, we are introduced to the scene. The Million Dollar Hotel is a decrepit flophouse in a bad part of Los Angeles, and its denizens are people who have fallen through the cracks: recovering drug addicts, mental patients who no longer have health insurance, and assorted other eccentrics. As Tom-Tom explains, his friend and fellow Hotel resident Izzy has just died – fallen off the roof of the building – and Tom-Tom has found himself smitten with the newest resident of the Hotel: the damaged and distant Eloise. Madly in love with her but unable to articulate how he feels, Tom-Tom merely hovers around her, while the rest of the residents of the Hotel treat him like a loveable mascot or pet.

The status quo changes later that day, as FBI Agent Skinner arrives on the scene. “Izzy” was in fact Israel Goldkiss, the troubled runaway son of the wealthy and powerful Stanley Goldkiss. Convinced that his son’s death was the result of foul play, Goldkiss has hired Skinner to investigate the Hotel and its residents, and find out which one of them had a hand in the murder. Skinner’s arrival puts him immediately at odds with the radically-minded Geronimo, Izzy’s former roommate; and with Dixie, a Liverpudlian-accented nutjob who clams to have been the fifth Beatle (only the other four didn’t know it). Tom-Tom, on the other hand, is enamored of Skinner’s square take-charge attitude, and starts emulating him like a little brother. When the media ultimately descends on the Hotel to cover the death of Izzy, Geronimo introduces TV reporter Jean Swift to his avant-garde tar paintings. Unfortnately, due to Geronimo’s crazy artist ramblings, Swift mistakenly reports that they were Izzy’s paintings. At first Geronimo is upset by this…but then he comes to realize that, as the artwork of a fallen high-society figure – and a recently-deceased one at that – the paintings could actually have some real monetary value.

Meanwhile, Skinner is getting frustrated; his tough-cop routine proves to be ineffective against a building full of loonies who see things scarier than him in their hallucinations. So he takes the direct approach: he breaks the building’s water main and informs the gathered company of the Hotel that he will do much worse if he has to. He tells them he will continue to watch them and sabotage their lives in little ways until someone gives up a suspect in the murder of Izzy Goldkiss. Meanwhile, Dixie and Geronimo conspire to get an art dealer to sell the tar paintings and make them all wealthy. And the innocent Tom-Tom finds himself a pawn in both Dixie’s and Skinner’s plans to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the Hotel.

Even if I didn’t know Bono co-wrote the script, I would have pegged it as a work of his. So many of his artistic earmarks are present. What one must understand is that Bono is very much in love with America. Or rather, in love with the IDEA of America. American culture, American society, American values…and of course, the POTENTIAL of America. The good it has done in the past, and COULD do again, if we ever come to our senses. It’s a very Irish sentiment, actually. The United States has always held a particular significance in the Irish imagination: the new homeland, where a man might make his fortune and be free of the debts and allegiances of the old order. Like those first immigrants, Bono has looked for that potential, that fabled freedom and opportunity, and found traces of it in the trendy enclaves of the great cities. So in a sense, Million Dollar Hotel is his love poem to that idealized America. The film is beautiful to look at, as somehow the dying slum where the film takes place takes on a beautiful, almost mystical air. As if this is some crumbling Roman ruin, that evokes the memory of a long-lost age of light and reason. There’s a quiet beauty in the melancholy it creates. Again, a very Irish sentiment; we’re a melancholy race.

Million Dollar Hotel also delves into the human – and perhaps, uniquely American – capacity for self-delusion, as it explores the line where individuals start to create their own realities in defiance to a difficult truth they cannot accept. And of course, how that delusion can be amplified by mass media. As evidenced by Tom-Tom’s rhapsodic excitement at the presence of news vans around the Hotel – his childlike brain can’t seem to grasp that anything could possibly be better than being on television (which comes back to haunt him later). As also evidenced by the rest of the Hotel residents’ quick embrace of the prospect of quick money and fame by selling Izzy’s artwork. They never liked him much anyway, apparently. Stanley Goldkiss himself is a shining example of the extent to which self-delusion can take a person. He has no evidence that his son was murdered; he simply refuses to accept that any child of his could possibly commit suicide, so therefore he MUST have been murdered. Skinner is very much cut from the same mold, although his self-delusion comes in a different form. Skinner is quite literally a stiff: his body is held rigid by some strange back brace, the purpose of which is not revealed until late in the film. His movements are jerky and mechanical, as is his manner, because he has forced himself to be so. Skinner is as much a freak as any of the residents of the Hotel – more so, in fact – because his efforts to make himself normal have made him into something less than human. His interactions with the Hotel residents take on a different air once his backstory is revealed; they make him uncomfortable because they remind him of what he really is, and what he tries to be but never can become. In a sense he and Goldkiss are more delusional than the crazies who inhabit the Hotel; at least they have mental illness as an excuse.

That’s the good stuff. Unfortunately there’s plenty of bad stuff too. When I say that this has Bono’s artistic stamp written all over it, I mean it as a double-edged sword. It’s very much like a U2 song in its construction: it’s very beautiful and very evocative, but it doesn’t necessarily tell a coherent story. Bono and Wenders’s creativity seems better suited to short bursts than feature length; what works in a three-minute song or music video doesn’t work in a 2-hour movie. The plot of the film is unnecessarily complicated, and a great many last-act plot twists and revelations go completely unexplored. Million Dollar Hotel seems to be a film suffering from an identity crisis; it can’t decide if it’s a whodunit, a character study, or a piece of magic realism. I hesitate to call it “pretentious;” like U2’s musical output in the 1990’s, there is a sincerity behind its lofty aspirations that separates it from mere pretension. It’s more a flawed piece of artistic expression. It has its shortcomings, but at least it was a sincere effort.

In retrospect, Million Dollar Hotel is very much a child of its time. Coming as it did in 2000 – the last year of America’s golden age, really – it draws heavily on the zeitgeist of the late 1990’s. A lot of people accuse the 90’s of the decade without a personality of its own, but I disagree. That was American culture’s introspective period. The Cold War was over, and the country was looking inward to redefine its identity. The Internet was taking shape, new subcultures were developing, and new ideas were bearing fruit. It was the kind of navel-gazing that comes with reaching a plateau, and being forced to take stock of one’s identity. As a culture we did that…or tried to, before it all came crashing down. Appropriate, then, that a movie like this would come along when it did. Something pretty to look at, without a clear idea of what it really is, but evocative nonetheless. Not unlike U2’s music between Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

Things To Look For:

- I’ve known a few damaged people in my time, and I will say that the portrayals of the Hotel residents are pretty good approximations of the behavior of such people. Milla Jovovich is disturbingly good at playing unstable women (though most of the time she’s playing an unstable woman who can kick your ass), and she’s very good as Eloise. She drifts through the movie, devoid of any sense of self, at once ethereal and subhuman, only capable of showing emotion in short violent bursts. That’s some authentic trauma there. Jeremy Davies is a convincing mentally challenged young man, and to the movie’s credit it does not portray him as a stereotypical saintly disabled person. Tom-Tom can be annoying and frustrating as much as he can be loveable, and proves to be capable of some shocking levels of darkness toward the end. Oh, and Peter Stomare’s John Lennon impression is pretty darn good.

- There are a whole lot of recognizable actors in small roles to be found interspersed throughout the movie, and I think that’s to the film’s credit. It’s always good to have good actors, even in small roles. And it’s fun to pick them out. Amanda Plummer. Tim Roth. Julian Sands. Bono himself. And of course, Gloria Stuart as a cantankerous old lady. Yes, the sweet little Titanic lady plays a foul-mouthed iron-sided old broad. It’s great. What is it about little old ladies with mouths like drunken sailors that’s so funny? I can’t put my finger on why it’s entertaining, but her performance is easily on par with Betty White’s turn in Lake Placid.

- With the exception of the opening and closing credits, there’s very little U2 music to be found on the soundtrack. And I think that’s to the movie’s credit. It certainly avoids accusations of being a vanity project, and lets the movie speak for itself…for better or for worse.

- Hardcore U2 fans probably already know this, but look very closely at the Hotel roof. Yes, that’s the same rooftop that U2 used to shoot the video for “Where The Streets Have No Name.” Apparently Bono’s had the idea for the story of Million Dollar Hotel in mind ever since they shot that video. Which is both gratifying and disheartening at the same time. Gratifying, because it means that Bono hasn’t forgotten his roots. And disheartening because…well, with two decades to think about it, you’d think he’d come up with a better story. Oh well, at least he can sing.

Date Posted: September 27^th, 2007

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