Andrew Piddington’s reconstruction of Mark Chapman’s road to the Dakota is carefully made, and Jonas Ball is unsettlingly good as a man rehearsing his own importance. But after nearly two hours of the killer’s own words, we knew exactly what he did and nothing more about why.
Andrew Piddington’s film does what its title says and not much else. It takes Mark Chapman from a security hut in Honolulu to the gate of the Dakota in the first week of December 1980, and it does so almost entirely in Chapman’s voice, which Jonas Ball speaks over the pictures from the opening minute to close to the last. The film presents these as Chapman’s own words, taken from his statements and interviews. We have no way to check that, and the question of whether it matters turns out to be the whole review.
Ball is the reason to watch. He has the soft face and the small, waiting eyes, and he keeps the voice flat and reasonable throughout, as if explaining a parking ticket. He plays Chapman as a man who has decided to be significant and is slightly impatient for the world to catch up. The Honolulu scenes are his best, sitting across a kitchen table from Gloria (Mie Omori) with a secret he is plainly enjoying. Omori has little to say and does a good deal with the silences. Krisha Fairchild, as the mother on the end of the telephone, gets one scene of real warmth and then the film forgets her.
Roger Eaton shoots it grainy and handheld, the Hawaiian light bleached nearly white and New York drained to brown and grey, with Chapman alone and sharp in the middle of the frame while the crowds around him blur. Tora Peterson’s 1980 is done on what is clearly a small budget and done well: the record shop, the hotel room with its one chair, the Dakota’s gate and its lamps. Tony Palmer cuts to the rhythm of the voiceover rather than the action, letting shots run until the words are finished. For long stretches that is the right call, and the walk up Central Park West, on the afternoon we all know about, made us feel properly sick, because the film is patient enough to let us count the steps.
The trouble is the voice. Two hours of a man explaining himself ought to add up to a man, and what we are given is Holden Caulfield recited by someone who has missed the point. Piddington, who also wrote the script, has trusted Chapman’s account of Chapman, and so the film knows what Chapman wanted the world to know and nothing he did not. The encounters along the way, a Scientologist (James Hadde), a prostitute (Vera Felice), a girl called Jude (Sofia Dubrawsky), are presented as evidence and play as anecdotes. They happened, we are told. Fine. What did they mean? The film does not say, and we suspect it does not know.
Around the eighty-minute mark we realised we were bored, and then we were angry about it, because the subject does not permit boredom and the film had found a way. Part of the anger was for Lennon. He is in the film only as a photograph on a sleeve and a figure at the edge of frame, which is a defensible choice, except that it leaves the whole evening to the man who shot him, and that man, on this evidence, had almost nothing to say. The film’s own tagline puts the words in his mouth: he was nobody until he killed the biggest somebody on earth. The film agrees, and then spends 114 minutes with the nobody.
The last stretch moves into rooms we will not describe. It is the one place where the film could have stepped outside Chapman’s head and looked at him from across a table, and it declines, keeping the voiceover going as if it had no other register. Robert C. Kirk’s Detective John Sullivan and Gail Kay Bell’s psychiatrist are given lines; they are not given a point of view.
Films about killers have managed this before. Taxi Driver gave Travis Bickle a diary and then showed us the city that made him. Elephant refused explanation altogether and was honest about refusing. Piddington wants the authority of the record and the intimacy of the confession, and the two cancel out: a man’s own account of why he did something is the least reliable document in the file, and the film treats it as the only one.
See it for Ball, who deserved a script that argued back, and for Eaton’s New York. Do not expect to understand anything on the way out that you did not understand on the way in. It runs 114 minutes and carries a 15.
