Sundance ’07: Chapter 27

****/****
starring Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan, Judah Friedlander, Ursula Abbott
written and directed by Jarrett Schaefer

by Alex Jackson Chapter 27 is creepy and possibly even unhealthy. I've been wondering for a couple of days now just how long writer-director Jarrett Schaefer stared into the Nietzsche abyss in researching and helming this aggressively subjective look into the mind of Beatle assassin Mark David Chapman. He purports to share Chapman's adoration of The Catcher in the Rye, The Beatles, and The Wizard of Oz and in person comes off as shy and somewhat withdrawn. What I find particularly disturbing is how he praised the Salt Lake screening I attended as being "where the real people are." When Hounddog auteur Deborah Kampmeier did the same, the compliment frankly dripped with condescension; from Schaefer's lips, especially in light of the Holden Caulfield-isms Chapman sprinkles throughout Chapter 27 concerning "phoniness," it seems to blur the distinction between filmmaker and subject. Maybe his hyping up of his similarities to Chapman is consciously designed to drum up publicity, but that only deepens the irony of a filmmaker coming virtually from nowhere to make his name with a film about a man who made his name by murdering a pop icon. Chapter 27 isn't smarmy or smartass in the least, but it's covered with meta layers and filled with post-modern games–in particular, it's heavily structured around the J.D. Salinger novel, sort of making it the long-awaited, if unofficial, film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye. The picture brings up some of the same feelings I felt when I first began reading said novel at age 16: knowing that some apparently normal people (such as Chapman) read it and eventually went insane, it became less like a novel and more like a tab of potentially bad acid. It's necessary to mention Jared Leto's performance as Chapman. Leto gained sixty pounds for the role, but he doesn't use the weight as a prop–the weight is a means to accentuate certain aspects of his screen persona. Said persona is, of course, that of a cookie-cutter pretty boy metrosexual; looking at his bit parts in American Psycho and Fight Club, we can more easily see how he fruitfully exploited these apparent weaknesses. Leto brings his anonymity, prettiness, and latent homoeroticism to the Chapman character and succeeds in developing a genuine counterpoint to De Niro's Travis Bickle. But where the violence in Taxi Driver was expressive, cathartic, and bluntly orgasmic, when Leto's Chapman executes John Lennon, he is, to borrow a phrase from Tyler Durden, as calm as a Hindu cow. What's so disturbing about the film is that there isn't any moral dimension or purpose to the violence: it's a foregone conclusion, conducted by an overgrown man-child who simply pointed a gun at the idol he felt let him down and pulled the trigger.