“The horror, the horror!” Kurtz’s last words evoking the unspeakable reality of the Congo during the reign of Belgium’s King Leopold, were brought home to Europe by the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. They meant to convey the infernal visions of what he had witnessed in a distant and exotic land. Kurtz, as both witness and perpetrator of the horror, embodied white man’s greed and brutality in foreign soil.
Who is narrating for us the unspeakable things that are taking place now in Iraq? Is art echoing the drums of war beating frenetically in a different, faraway continent? Perhaps, surprisingly, a small unpretentious Hollywood film seems to be the latest signal from commercial cinema acknowledging that there is a horror extending beyond our pruned lawns. Written and directed by Bruce A Evans, “Mr. Brooks”points out indirectly to the horror that we have to live with while we go on with our orderly lives. It takes note of the social malaise, the psychic uneasiness of our shared responsibility in another horror taking place in a distant, exotic land.
Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) leads the perfect life. He is an affluent executive whose beautiful, symmetrical house is analogous to his life. He has a gorgeous wife and lovely daughter. He also has a secret: Nothing turns him on as much as the murders he ritualistically perpetrates every couple of years egged on by his alter-ego (William Hurt). Two films come to mind in relation to this theme. They are both, like “Mr Brooks,” dark comedies and directed by European masters during. or right after the Second World War: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943) and Charles Chaplin’s “Monsieur Verdoux” (1947). The violence and madness of war is represented in the two main characters of those films. The suave and charming uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in “Shadow of a Doubt” and the impeccably mannered gentleman, Verdoux (Chaplin). While they both lead seemingly innocent lives, they are unrepentant killers, who exterminate women in order to inherit their money. Earl Brooks does not need the money: he needs the thrill.
Verdoux exclamation at one point: “It is a blundering world and a sad one,” was hard to believe for audiences at the time. In 1947, the Western world was still congratulating itself with the triumph over evil in Europe. Verdoux talked about a “monoxide world of speed and confusion,” Earl Brooks never gets to utter similar sentences, but present day audiences are certainly most familiar with their meaning. “Mr. Brooks”comes at a time of great uncertainty, in a world were the moral landscape is not as clear. It is in this indirect manner that “Mr. Brooks”seems to capture the same irony of Chaplin’s film in very different times: A man with a seemingly perfect life, devotes himself to carefully planned murders.
Verdoux marries rich women to kill them for their money (to support an invalid wife and child). For him, murder is a matter of necessity: he refers to his victims as “dumb animals.” Uncle Charlie also despises his female preys, whom he marries and murders for their money. Uncle Charlie represents the evil that intrudes the seemingly perfect small town America that his sister and her family represent in a sort of ridiculous Pollyanna way. The expert in small town America, Thornton Wilder, wrote “Shadow of a Doubt’s” screenplay.
Verdoux loves beauty. He recites poetry before he mercilessly kills one of his victims. Earl Brooks is also an aesthete. He designs ceramic pots and places his victims (naked couples) in aesthetically balanced positions before he takes pictures of them. The love of the macabre is part of the joke in both films. However, even though Chaplin indirectly holds society responsible for Verdoux’s acts, in the end the writer/director makes the character pay for his crimes. Hitchcock also punishes Uncle Charlie, but Brooks gets away with it. Here is the main difference and the motive for wondering whether “Mr. Brooks”has taken a step further in a world where nobody can really be innocent anymore.
In spite of the mainly bad reviews that “Mr. Brooks” received, the film is interesting because it is a very rare example of black humor ant the macabre. And because perhaps it reveals a psychological environment that differs from the one of the Greatest Generation. No one in a globalized world can ignore the horrors that exist in far away places. No one after 9/11 could believe that life in an isolated, beautiful place is still possible without having evil permeating it. Maybe, just as in prewar Germany, we live in a time when the murderer is not only among us, but it is, us.