Domino

Ok, so here’s the deal with this movie. My opinion of it changed no less than three times during the course of the movie and the Q&A afterwards. That doesn’t happen very often. But I’ll get to that.

Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley) is a bounty hunter. But it wasn’t always like that. Once she had a good life. She was the daughter of a popular actor (Laurence, star of The Manchurian Candidate) who grew up to be a model. Then, one day, she decided that she wanted to have a little fun. She had always been good with knives and nun-chucks. Now it’s time to learn how to use guns and chase people down.

She goes under the wing of Ed (Mickey Rourke—actually recognizable this time) and his sidekick, Choco (Edgar Ramirez) and becomes a very good bounty hunter. She has the advantage of being a beautiful young girl, so she can use that as well as the big guns.

As the three of them start to get a slightly higher profile, Domino’s mother (Jacqueline Bisset) puts them in touch with reality TV bigwig, Mark Heiss (Christopher Walken). He and his assistant (Mena Suvari) start following them around with celebrity hosts Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering in tow.

Then there’s a mix-up with some money, a mob boss and his kids, Dabney Coleman, Macy Gray and the First Ladies. Things don’t go well.

The opening scenes with Domino and her crew giving a woman her son’s severed arm to decode a lock’s code were awesome. And then there were the opening credits, which were done in a really cool style with music that used snippets of each actor speaking when their names popped up. That was awesome.

But here’s the problem: the whole fucking movie ended up being like that. It was non-stop, Oliver Stone editing and it started to piss me off about half way through the movie’s nearly three hour length. (At least, it started to feel that long. I really don’t know if it was much over two hours.) I was tired of hearing every other line repeated in an echo. It was like I had taken a wrong turn into some room of Hell that was decorated by a schizophrenic MTV editor who had decided to take a few too many hits of mescaline before going to work.

Then the ending came. It’s a shoot-out that’s reminiscent of director Tony Scott’s own True Romance. But it was really, really good! And emotionally driven! It was weird. It was like I was suddenly in a different movie. One where I almost cared about the characters! Well, almost.

But by the time screenwriter Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, the forthcoming Southland Tales) came out, I decided that I really didn’t like the movie. It literally had the attention span of the aforementioned ferret and went on for WAY too long. But there were a lot of funny parts that made it worth seeing. At least at a matinee.

Then people started asking questions about it. And Richard, in his shy sort of way, started to kind of explain things.

First off, it’s a satire of biopics. The opening title card says, “Based on a true story…..sort of.” And Domino says at the end something along the lines of, “If you want to know how things really happened, fuck off. It’s none of your fucking business.” This isn’t the way things went down at all. It’s a totally fabricated version of Domino Harvey’s story.

Second, it’s all a fever dream. (No, Domino doesn’t wake up in her Beverly Hills house having dreamed the whole thing. That would REALLY suck.) The whole movie is told from the point of view of someone who is telling an FBI agent (Lucy Liu) the whole story. But that story is seen through the eyes of about a pound of mescaline. (You’ll see.)

Then things started to make sense. Well, a little more, anyway. Richard said that, if you see it more than once, you start to pick out little clues that things aren’t as they seem. This isn’t Domino’s real life. This is her version of it. And it’s really fucked up because so is she. The editing? The echoed voices? All part of the weird-ass dream that she is telling this agent. That’s why those scenes are always shot pretty normally. It’s the story that’s all fucked up, not the movie. (And, being written by Kelly, it’s definitely fucked up.)

There are a lot of little meta-jokes and self-reflexive bits that point to this, too. There’s a character that shows up towards the end that may or may not exist. (His songs certainly do exist on the soundtrack, though.) Macy Gray is in the film and her song plays towards the end while she’s on screen. There’s a reference to Charlie’s Angels. There are references to “Beverly Hills 90210” all through the film. And, of course, the shoot-out at the end.

So, in the end, after having the whole thing explained to me, I actually kind of liked the movie. It’ll be interesting to see how people take it without the explanation.

And, it’ll be interesting to see how people react to the “Japanic” scene.