It is the actor’s great struggle to take their work seriously without taking themselves seriously. To selectively activate the mechanisms of emotion in order to embody credible human behavior or an aestheticized alternative is no small task, requiring study, training, and respect. Nonetheless, the person forging through this intimate, complex process must bear in mind the underlying absurdity that they are an adult being paid, on some charmed occasions in staggering sums, to play make-believe. When a thespian is labeled “difficult” by their collaborators or the media, the new documentary “Val” suggests, it is because this distinction has been confused.
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The film’s subject Val Kilmer once reigned as an A-lister of sufficient caliber to fill the Batsuit in “Batman Forever,” but has since been laid low by a series of unlucky bets on risky gigs, reports of difficult on-set temperament, behind-the-scenes financial troubles, and health complications. Around the time his celebrity started to decline, the commonly accepted story painted Kilmer as a diva prone to theatrics and mood swings. The deferential, yet frank bio-doc from Ting Poo and Leo Scott begs to differ via the customary nonfiction blend of archival footage (shot over the course of decades by Kilmer himself, a compulsive videographer to the point of pissing off some of his directors) and the camera’s company in the present day. This external repository for his internal monologue exposes him as someone pathologically committed to the work over all else, his rejection of the Hollywood bullshit in art’s way mistaken for vanity. In the same respect that actors get the reputation as “uncooperative” for refusing to put up with idiotic interview questions only to open right up for sturdier inquiries, Kilmer bristled at hit-the-mark paycheck jobs and thrived on challenges to his creative sensibility.
The concept of a man struggling to be one sort of actor despite the world’s demand he be the other — the box-office draw who dreamt of being Marlon Brando with self-destructive anti-commercial impulses and all — usually comes packaged with tiresome politeness, traded here for a refreshing candor. In voiceover delivered by his son due to the post-throat-cancer tracheostomy strangulating Val’s speech, the actor makes no bones about how much he loathed the face-obscuring, movement-restricting costume for Batman and the hustling production schedule that left little room for performance. He’s upfront about his resentment that he must now pay his bills by traveling the globe from one comic convention to the next, capitalizing on the roles of which he’s least proud. The early passages that establish Kilmer’s personal baggage (he lost a younger brother in a drowning incident when they were both teenagers) and his passion for craft (he was a prodigy in the theater, the youngest student ever admitted to Juilliard) give context to this later prickliness, stacking his high hopes against their sobering outcomes.
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These disappointments and hardships ultimately prove a tad thin to sustain feature-length; however, falling into the trap of taking Kilmer more seriously than the playful, antic personality takes himself. A scene in which he must sell off a six-thousand-acre tract of land on which he planned to build a colony loses perspective by conflating a decreasingly rich man’s fiscal adjustments with his devout servitude to the arts. The attention devoted to his vague New Age philosophizing about “healing,” shaped by an upbringing in Christian Science and adulthood steeped in New Mexican spirituality, comes to feel as indulgent as the hideous mixed-media art projects Kilmer now makes to fill his days. At times, it feels like a film built from the trailer outward, never in want for good material to put onscreen — a boyish Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn moon Kilmer’s camcorder in their board-treading days — while looking for a solid framework under which to arrange them.
That search leads the directors to prosaic choices that clash with the loose, form-pushing video collages that offer the most surreal and amusing moments. However uncommon Kilmer’s life may be, the editing and narration conspire to mold it into a more conventional shape, ending tidily with a dark night of the soul giving way to a comeback of sorts. Along the way, musical selections betray an obviousness at odds with Kilmer’s nuance-oriented approach; he wonders where his mind is to the rumble of “Where Is My Mind?” and contemplates his mortality to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in the two most egregious cases. Just as research-based documentaries can’t get away with having a good topic and doing little about it, the arranged archival documentary needs more than just a good backlog of clips.
Scott and Poo have seized on one substantive idea in their portraiture of a singular personality reduced to a caricature of himself by posterity and duly reveal the sensitive artiste who always aspired to more than “Top Gun.” If only they did so with less straightforwardness and more authorial license. Instead, we’re left wondering how the prime-years Val Kilmer would’ve approached the role of himself. [C+]
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