The Ninth Gate Review
By Joe Lozito
Reading is Fun Dementia
What is it with reclusive directors? They all seem to have an obsession with secret ritualistic orgies and soundstage representations of Manhattan. First Stanley Kubrick's gave us "Eye Wide Shut", with its all too sterile New York City streets and its metaphor-laced orgy-trial, and now exiled director Roman Polanski seems to pick up on the same set where Mr. Kubrick left off.
In "The Ninth Gate", Johnny Depp plays Dean Corso, a disreputable book detective enlisted by an equally disreputable book collector (Frank Langella) to track down the only two copies of his rarest volume in order to determine its authenticity. If there's not enough in that sentence to elicit a chuckle from you, then you may be able to withstand the first half of Mr. Polanski's plodding take on Arturo Perez-Reverte's "The Club Dumas".
Mr. Polanski's ubiquitous wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, playing the mysterious character The Girl, remarks near the end of the film "You're running out of gas." Unfortunately, the film suffers from the same problem. There are constant promises of twists and revelations that never come and the film itself is chock full of all the standard neo-noir elements that you'd expect: stilted enigmatic dialogue, questionable loyalties, unexplained corpses, and even a platinum blonde stranger who tails Mr. Depp.
Frank Langella turns his slime quotient even higher than usual for his role as the evilly-named Boris Balkan. And Lena Olin, as a widow with some vaguely Satanic agenda, exudes sex and danger from every pore, as she is wont to do. But it is up to Mr. Depp to sell the film, and it's not even clear if he's buying into it. Mr. Depp is one of our finest actors when he's given a smart project, and he - like the audience - puts in a valiant effort. Even at the end of the film it is never made clear what the Ninth Gate is supposed to open, although at that point, it doesn't matter.
