If you haven't seen the new Will Smith movie Hancock, then you probably don't want to read this review, because as far as I'm concerned, this is the most surprising film of the year. It's a great surprise, especially for people who think they're too mature for Will Smith movies.
The surprise is that it's a love story, and a great deal more tender than anybody attracted by flying whales is ever likely to imagine. It's the kind of story that I think has all kinds of resonances in multiple dimensions. They're not blatantly blurted as one might think in such an entertainment, but the thoughtful moviegoer must be impressed wit.
Hancock asks the fundamental question, what do you do with extraordinary talent if you don't know your destiny? What if you were born to be a hero but make a hash of your heroics? What do you do with your life if you're not sure where you belong? You waste it of course. You wander stumblingly through society amidst the people you know deserve you, but you're not sure that they know it. Smith's abrasive alcoholic superhero is a walking existential crisis. He never hurts a soul, and only saves human lives, but gets on everybody's nerves and every insurers blacklist, a cursing human tornado. He works like a reverse neutron bomb who spares no property catastrophe and it's all over YouTube.
Why? Because he is alone, physically invulnerable, immortal even, and yet plagued by amnesia. He doesn't know who he is or why he is here, but then until the movie is halfway over, neither do we. And so, if it is possible for alcohol to send an otherwise superhuman into oblivion, that is where he spends his days, until..
He meets an idealist who wants to change the world by getting corporations to give products away for free. Smith saves his live in spectacularly reckless fashion, literally causing a train wreck in the process, the idealist takes him home for spaghetti and meatballs. There's something about his wife. She says she knows men like Hancock. He breaks things. There is a strange electricity going on and it's heating up things. We know this is part of the premise, Hancock is about to fall for this woman - another disaster waiting to happen. And then the surprise.
If I was what some pundits pejoratively think of the average American in a racial context, then I would think a bit more about what's about to happen when black Will Smith kisses blonde and blue Charlize Theron. It's surely not the kind of thing you see everyday in film, but of course it happens all the time. The question is, when it does happen in film or it's about to happen, what do we expect? OK. Black man kisses Becky, black man gets in trouble. Reasonable expectation, especially for this boozy brother who makes everybody uncomfortable with his advice about kicking bullies in the pisspump. By this time in the film, we can rest assured that Smith's Hancock has enough ball swagger to out-Mandingo Superman and George W. Bush put together. He has no compunction against smashing evil-doers. He is completely, totally red-eyed bull black man and Theron cannot resist a taste. They get real close in the kitchen while hubby is passed out upstairs. What do I expect? Well I sure the hell didn't expect that she would grab him by the wrist and throw him through the wall and 100 yards down the block. She tells him to get away and never come back and let her husband know or she will kill him. Huh? What?
Hancock is an anti-material film. Even in the hyperbolic chaos of the awesome superhero-type special effects, there is little satisfaction. Maybe that's because I was in a theater without the booming system, and yet (especially in the Spiderman-3 style knockoff construction site battle) there's something missing. The thing that is missing is purpose, and following Smith you never find it until Theron and he have it out. He comes back of course and they destroy half of Hollywood, including the building the idealist husband was pitching his old idea to newly found 'friends'. You see, the idealist has got some newfound fame now being the erudite handler of the beast-hero, who now with a newly remapped image has finally gotten some official goodguy status. But it's too late to save his marriage - he discovers, as we do, that Smith and Theron have a history. In fact an ancient history.
It is revealed that the two are essentially wonder-twins of a sort, sent from the Gods to guard over the earth, like Hercules and Athena. But there's a catch. Just like a dalmation couple in Howard Beach, they become extremely vulnerable when they are together. And so the scars on Smith's dark body are revealed to be testaments to the times when the enemies of goodness have used her as bait to get to him. That's a sweet twist for your garden variety summer blockbuster, and defies the terms of endearment and of revenge so typically the arcs of such predictable action flicks. Instead of one simpleminded set of baddies, we are faced with dirty-faced angels who have faced down the evil of the ages, with Jim Crow Florida being the latest and greatest challenge the duo faced, whose denoument left Smith's Hancock in the devolved state he finds himself in since the opening of the movie.
I don't need to tell you the allegorical richness of such an American hero, whose symbols of eagles and pyramids dig at archtypes deeply embedded in our own myths. John Hancock is elevated beyond his brooding and damaged past into heriosm for the benefit of all only when the ugliness of the past is finally revealed. Nothing short of that cures him. He is a hero nevertheless but has no reason to do anything more than the barest minimum, and his self-destruction is only metaphorical because his underlying invulnerability is always maintained. He is his own worst enemy and needs to be completed for anything to work. His completion is his self - his seeming opposite. It is a love which cannot be consummated for the benefit of the two, but only for the marriage of idealism, of pure altruism.
There's a lot of ways this story can spin off a number of analogies, but there it is. A new American hero, a purposeful masculine wedded to a wise and idealistic female half but complimentary halves which must be kept vital by distance. Omnipotent apart, vulnerable together. Each needing what the other brings.
Like I said, it's a surprising movie. It is a love story - an anti-material, altruistic selfless love story. One that must put faith in sacrifice and independent interdependence. A good story for this weekend.
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