Ray Pride

Universal Pictures hid "Hulk" from but a handful of reviewers until the last minute.

Were they fearful because it had only been finished on film a couple of weeks earlier? Or that it's unfeasible to preview such expensive products to an audience because of Internet gossip? Were they afraid reviewers would videotape it and post it worldwide to the web? Or were they--most likely--fearful of the fact that its emotional balance ranges from dark to darker to black?

"But Hulk's the superhero whose powers are a curse!" all too many grown-large comics geeks were keen to marvel to me over the next several days, begging for a clue. You mean, like post-adolescence and adulthood, as it's usually seen through the Stan Lee prism? I'd ask, getting big smiles in return.

Taiwan-born Ang Lee's first film since the worldwide hit "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is a vigorous and persistent attempt to commandeer the summer-movie format to broaden Lee and customary co-writer (and producer) James Schamus' lasting fascination with emotional repression. The opening hour of "Hulk" (reportedly trimmed at the studio's suggestion) patiently lays the groundwork for the later explosions of id; the slow, seething simmer suggests "Raging Lull" more than the every-ten-minute blow-`em-ups expected during this season. (One quiet, affecting visual element: Lee shows fungus and mold surrounding Banner's childhood home, which later matches the blotching of his transformative skin, and later still, the texture from sky-high of a desert seen from satellites.)

Eric Bana (the estimable chameleon at the sociopathic center of "Chopper") plays Bruce Banner, a driven scientist who has problems with relationships, who's just broken up with co-worker Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly). They're experimenting with "nanomeds," working with molecular-sized machines that parallel some present-day real-world testing. A laboratory accident exposes him to a megadose of lethal rays, which he survives, but which also activates something awry in his blood stream. Enter bad dad Nick Nolte, who unpremeditatedly passed on the disfigured pedigree. "Emotional damage can manifest physically," someone deadpans later in the story. (Doh!)

Banner's like Kurt Cobain without a guitar: there's rage in his belly, and modern chemistry cannot help. (To flip through the pages of Cobain's agonizing and near-intolerable journals is to witness a range of inner fury and desolation that the Lees Stan and Ang can only compose the most distant metaphor for.) Lee and his collaborators, particularly able cinematographer Frederick Elmes ("Blue Velvet," "The Ice Storm"), often break the frame into comics-like panels, and the effect is more dreamy than kinetic, a kind of mega-consciousness that traffics in transitions made of spatially impossible digital wipes and sweet, dreamy susurrations that psychologically "freeze" a frame composed of several bits of motion. There are a couple of shifts that suggest a kind of freedom within narrative time frames I'd only ever seen before in movies by Shohei Imamura, such as his time-loosening "Vengeance is Mine."

A number of older critics have taken Lee's dark dream about rage and power and freedom to task for this recurrent tic of spatial-temporal swooniness, using it to swat the 49-year-old director for being more esthete than action gorgon. While watching the movie, a deeply unhappy and sorrowing mood was more apparent to me than any sort of narrative suspense, and it may be the contemplative and lyrical instants that offended some of these early reviews. (I won't even address the senselessness of experienced writers trying to explain their personal vision of what a "plausible" skyscraper-tall green id monster ought to look like.)

Aside from many knowing allusions to other pop and pulp, there are sneakier lifts. Producer-co-screenwriter James Schamus is a man who wrote his doctoral thesis on austere Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, and there's an iris-in where black consumes the entire widescreen frame except for Bana's face, straight out of a silent Dreyer film I'm struggling to recall. How does a director follow that? Lee cuts to an onrushing shot of vast desert salt flats that could even keep Michael Bay from cutting for a few seconds. The film's second hour kicks in as Banner is taken to the desert to be confined and exploited for "national security" in the bowels of a secret research lab, surrounded by teams of doctors 24-7 as if he were as important (and fragile) as Dick Cheney. When the most pissed incarnation of Hulk erupts, the planet becomes a mere trampoline, and in pursuit, the military levels part of Monument Valley as if it were merely Mesopotamia. The look on that computer-generated face is timelessly gentle, expressing, "I'm capable of this? The wind feels this way on my cheeks?" (Lee tops himself with a scene high above San Francisco Bay that tempts the stars and heaven.)

But forget the beast for a moment and focus on the beauty who can tame him, and even collaborate with him: Connelly's Betty Ross, shot mostly without filters in wide-eyed close-ups, engaging her features, fierce smile-lines, blemishes, freckles, pocks and all. Golden light on her aquiline nose? That's cinema to me, even amid the clatter of two families' generations of Oedipal bedlam. And the lovers' reuniting echoes one of the classics of climactic grace: "You found me," Bruce, de-Hulked, murmurs. "You weren't that hard to find," Betty says, smiling. "Yes, I was," he says. It's a paraphrase of the ending of Robert Bresson's overwhelming "Pickpocket." "Hulk"'s coda does not attain the purity of that masterpiece, but at least strains toward it.

"The Hulk" is now playing.

(2003-06-25)

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