Chapter 27
“I knew I was gonna do something big, I just didn’t know if it was gonna be good or bad.”
“What do you mean by that?”
I guess this movie had me at Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan and the Lennon connection … but my expectations couldn’t have been lower considering. Leto’s Mark Chapman falls somewhere between Travis Bickle and Seymour Hoffmann’s Capote, and I don’t know whether to muck the movie as a whole in with the real-life psycho killer genre (The Assassination of Richard Nixon definitely comes to mind as another double-bill option) or with generally creepy/quirky biopics, in particularly the Truman Capote ones.
Since I’m a Lennon fan, of course – and, it must be said, a “Catcher in the Rye” fan for that matter – there’s another level comes into the fray too, much like, say, the whole Diana issue of The Queen; and that’s that, cinematic quality aside, this was bound to be an emotional ride. With the title cards constantly reminding us of the date and the inevitability of the movie’s end, it’s kind of foolproof movie-making in one way, and its 85 minute runtime doesn’t hurt either.
In the end, this movie almost feels like it’s by-the-numbers, we’ve heard snippets of the story in all kinds of other places (the first time I heard of the “Catcher” thing was I think, unfortunately, the Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory lol) so many times before – but to have the whole thing collected so precisely with such care and consideration, around such a fantastic central performance (and Lohan’s support deserves mention, too, it’s the best thing I’ve seen her in since Mean Girls) ... I just found it almost crushingly brilliant. I think anyone who’s a fan of Lennon and/or Catcher will be equally affected. BTW, kooky point, weird how the guy who plays Lennon is a Mark Chapman too (*edit*: oh yeh, not to mention his middle name being Lindsay, lol) ... it kinda fits in with that whole backwards feel of the legend that was.