Sinful pleasure? Robert Rodriguez re-creates Frank Miller BY PETER KEOUGH
	Frank Miller’s Sin City Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller. Written by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller based on Miller’s graphic novel series Sin City. With Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Carla Gugino, Brittany Murphy, Rutger Hauer, and Elijah Wood. A Dimension Films release (126 minutes). At the Entertainment, Flagship, Opera House, Providence Place 16, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.
	Spin city LOS ANGELES — If there’s something in Frank Miller’s Sin City that offends your sensibilities, don’t blame Robert Rodriguez or anyone in the cast. For better or for worse, the movie is 100 percent Frank Miller’s work, an exact film reproduction of three volumes of his comic book of the same name. And you can’t ask Miller about it, because he’s "sick" and couldn’t make it to the junket promoting the movie. "The best thing about this movie," says Rodriguez, "is that I felt really free to go into this world and create what I loved about the book, and also, at the end of the day, I can say, ‘Hey, I didn’t come up with it. It was Frank. I wash my hands of that.’ " In other words, what happens in Sin City stays in Sin City. Not that Rodriguez finds anything in the movie too extreme. Not the multiple castrations, the beheadings, the backfired gun lodged in a person’s skull, the limbless torso tied to a tree and devoured by a dog. Goya-esque images rescued from exploitation by . . . what? "Tone," says Rodriguez. "Tone is everything. You could have the same scene with someone in agony on the ground and dying and you’d be like . . . I can’t watch this. Whereas the other way it becomes dark comedy. It becomes very stylized, and if, say, Jackie Boy has blood spurting out of him, it becomes quite beautiful actually. When he’s lying in a pool of white blood and the camera pulls back and it’s like, that’s beautiful, very interesting and abstract. So it didn’t bother the MPAA at all." Actually, I confess, I found the white blood, of which there is a lot of in this stylized monochrome universe, almost more disturbing than if it had been red. It looked like . . . some other bodily fluid. "Really?" Rodriguez seems pleased. " It’s just how it looked like in the book, and I thought, ‘It’s really strange. You don’t see white blood.’ Sometimes I used red to highlight the white. It is a way to make it show up in black and white. But you’re right, it does look like another bodily fluid." Other elements of the film are disturbing not just because of their graphic nature. Like the depiction of women. That’s what I ask Rosario Dawson, who plays Gail, the dominatrix head of an army of killer prostitutes, and Brittany Murphy, who plays Shellie, a barmaid who gets slapped around a lot. The adolescent fantasy outfits, the violence against women, the emphasis on big-busted bimbos and hookers: is this misogynistic? Au contraire, says Dawson. "This is the reason women will want to see the film. All the women who are living in Old Town take care of ourselves, we’re very in control of what we are, we know what our assets are, we make money off of them and we call the shots, which is very powerful. So I think it’s a very even-keeled sort of strength between the men and the women. The guys get their balls ripped off, the girls threaten to do so. And will." "I thoroughly agree with what Rosario just said," says Murphy. "If you look at the undertones of Frank’s writing, there’s a balance to everything." An undertone I couldn’t help reading into the episode where Bruce Willis rescues an 11-year-old-girl from a pedophile is incest. What does Jessica Alba, who plays the victim grown up into a 19-year-old stripper still smitten with her incarcerated rescuer, think? "She doesn’t think of him as him as her father," Alba insists. "He’s a knight in shining armor. I was coming at it from that point, and she’s strong enough to be in love with him and have that relationship. But she always looks at him as her soul mate." "That’s a great love story," says Rodriguez. "Where he doesn’t realize that she’s growing up while she’s waiting for him to get out of prison and he comes out and suddenly sees her. Frank got that idea when he was at his mother’s house once and this beautiful woman walks in and he thinks, ‘Oh my God,’ and she says, ‘Hi, Uncle Frank,’ and he thought, ‘Oh my God, I feel like such a pervert for looking at her.’ " Rodriguez turns to Alba. "I kind of had some of the same feeling. When I first met you a few years back, you were 16, 17, kind of dorky, but cute. Now she’s like . . . it’s almost like that feeling, I remember her when she was just a little girl, and now she’s like, ‘Oh my God!’ " — PK Sin City's official Web site

While watching the repetitive, artfully composed sado-masochistic imagery of Frank Miller’s Sin City, I couldn’t help distracting myself by making comparisons between Robert Rodriguez and Lars von Trier. Farfetched, perhaps, but bear with me.

Trier’s Zentropa and Rodriguez’s Sin City are both shot in monochrome with arty color highlights. Trier’s Dogville and Sin City both tell tales of brutally abused women who are even more brutally avenged. Dogville was shot on a studio set empty but for actors and minimal props; so was Sin City, though it was backed by a green screen onto which all the effects were projected post-production. Both filmmakers create a solipsistic, imaginary space in which to enact dark, adolescent fantasies.

In Trier’s case, the fantasies are at least his own. Rodriguez re-creates those of someone else, so much so that he’s given Frank Miller co-directing credit, despite objections from the Directors Guild, and just recently Miller’s name was added to the title. Rodriguez’s precise rendering of every page (those deleted from the film will appear in the DVD version) of three volumes of Miller’s comic-book series recalls Gus Van Sant’s frame-by-frame re-creation of Psycho, though it’s not as self-consciously pointless.

There are some deviations, and they provide much of Sin City’s interest. Since the original text doesn’t work as a flip book, Rodriguez and his cast have invented some often funny business to fill the spaces between the frames. Also, in integrating the three story lines, Rodriguez engages in some chronological sleight-of-hand similar to that of Quentin Tarantino (who is "special guest director" for one brief segment) in Pulp Fiction.

Not that he needs to. It’s the same basic story in each case, with a hard-boiled nihilist/romantic knight errant saving an innocent (almost always big-breasted, or soon to be) from the depraved powers that be or, failing that, killing as many of the bad guys in graphically inventive ways as possible. These heroes also sound alike, and their voiceover narrative, Raymond Chandler crossed with Heavy Metal comics, conjures a suffocating subjectivity. My favorite is Marv in "The Hard Goodbye," maybe because Mickey Rourke is almost unrecognizable under the make-up and prosthetics. Marv isn’t a pretty guy, so he’s amazed when Goldie (Jaime King), a beautiful dame he eyes in a bar in "Old Town," the red-light district in the LA/Las Vegas/Manhattan/Chicago amalgam Basin City, takes him up to share a heart-shaped bed in a cheap hotel room. He falls in love, but the next morning she’s dead. Murdered, and he’s been framed.

Marv is not just ugly, he’s also an idealist, and like the Thing in The Fantastic Four, his evil looks come with superpowers, such as stopping bullets and wiping out SWAT teams with his bare hands. His vow to kill those responsible for Goldie’s death is no empty threat. But when it comes to taking down the omnipotent Bishop Roark (Rutger Hauer) and his ninja cannibal nerd Kevin (Elijah Wood), even Marv needs help from the warrior prostitutes of Old Town, who are led by Goldie’s lethal twin sister, Wendy (King again). "I guess she was the nice one," says Marv as Wendy pistol-whips him in an S&M-style getting-to-know-you session.

His demented vigilantism ("He spurts and gurgles and life is good," Marv notes as another victim bites the dust), aside, Marv, with his deadpan wit and battered innocence, is the nice one in this trilogy. That despite gaudy scenes of a dog eating the stumps of a limbless torso or of severed heads of women mounted as trophies on a wall. The other episodes seem like recurring nightmares, and the relentless carnage grows numbing and unwholesome. (The comic came out every month; this is like getting two years’ worth in two hours.) In "That Yellow Bastard," Bruce Willis brings iron-jawed righteousness to Hartigan, a cop compelled to tie up one last loose end — rescuing an 11-year-old girl from a "drooling lunatic" — before retiring. But it’s pretty obvious that the culprit is a projection of his own repressed desire, especially when the years pass and the girl grows into Jessica Alba as a lasso-spinning dancer in a topless club.

In "The Big Fat Kill," the good intentions of Clive Owen’s shadowy Dwight drown in a gruesome massacre orchestrated by Rosario Dawson’s army of heavily armed hookers. "The Valkyrie at my side is shouting and laughing with the pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter," observes Dwight. "And so am I."

In short, the kids are going to love it. And neither should Sin City, unlike Dogville, be subject to adult condemnation. Dogville leaves its worst horrors blank, open to the imagination of the viewer. Rodriguez re-creates images that are graphic but contained by their frame.