Movie review: The Mask

Originally published August 26, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1084

Some years back, author Gary K. Wolf wrote an offbeat mystery titled Who Censored Roger Rabbit? It told the story of a down-in-the-mouth detective named Eddie Valiant, and his involvement with cartoon-strip actors… i.e., “characters” who posed for comic strips and spoke in word balloons that materialized over their heads.

It was fairly hard-boiled stuff, considering the subject matter. The titular rabbit was pretty pathetic, and even became pretty dead (hey, how big a spoiler can that be? It was in the dust jacket.) Most of the supporting characters were unpleasant, including Roger’s wife, Jessica. Ultimately, although the book was good reading, it was fairly bitter and kind of depressing.

Then the story was made over into Who Framed Roger Rabbit (no question mark, as if Doctor Who were the culprit). Roger became framed rather than dead, the characters became more accessible, Jessica became a doting wife rather than a literally one-dimensional bìŧçh. The entire story, in short, became family entertainment.

Now history repeats itself, as The Mask opens at a theater near you.

The original Dark Horse series focused on a loser of a guy who got his hands on a bizarre ancient mask. Compelled to put it on, he became–in essence–the Mask. A berserker entity, utterly amoral, who went on a killing spree before being brought to a halt through fairly brutal means. The humor was black, the violence was genuine, and the character frightening and unpredictable. One never knew on whom he was going to turn.

But, like Roger Rabbit before him, the Mask has been toned down. “Disneyized,” although Disney is not the film maker.

In this version, Stanley Ipkiss (Jim Carrey) meanders through life as the quintessential nice guy who finishes last. He gets great concert tickets for himself and a bank co-worker after whom he lusts, only to give them to her so that she can go with a girlfriend (and you just know… just know, although it’s never said… that there is no girlfriend and she is, in fact, going with a guy. Odds are, Stanley knows it, too.)

He brings his car in for an oil change and learns it “needs” a brake job and new transmission. His landlord is a harridan who howls at him if he blinks too loudly. He lusts after a nightclub singer named Tina (Cameron Diaz, in her motion picture debut) but it’s never going to go anywhere.

He keeps trying to flash a smile through it all, which is easy enough for Carrey. The man is a set of teeth with a face and body attached. (If there’s ever another live action Alice in Wonderland, Carrey must play the Cheshire Cat.) But you can sense that he’s tiring of having the world’s foot prints on his face, and is, in fact, a walking timebomb. It’s the kind of mental attitude that led to Michael Douglas wigging out in Falling Down.

Douglas, however, did not acquire the green wooden mask that Ipkiss happens upon. Something compels him to don it and, just as in the comics, he becomes the Mask.

Whereas the comics portrayed the Mask as pretty much unstoppable, the film takes it one step further. The Mask is, quite simply, a cartoon. The justification is that Ipkiss himself is an animation buff. He has decorations from Merrie Melodies and Tex Avery cartoons strewn throughout his apartment. Rather than unleashing a closet homicidal maniac, the Mask turns him into the animaniac of his secret heart.

He pulls props from nowhere, he can survive any impact. When we first see him he’s just pulled out of a spin on par with the Tasmanian Devil, turns to the camera and hisses what will likely be the summer’s new catch phrase: “Sssssssmokin’!” Five minutes later he’s crashed to the street, copping the flat-as-a-pancake riff from Judge Doom in Roger Rabbit. He reinflates and goes off to paint the town weird.

But this is a watered down Mask, an amiably antic Mask. Gone is the unpredictable homicidal madman, and instead we’ve got the cuddly, family-safe nutcase. Sure he causes havoc, but it’s only aimed at those people who did Ipkiss dirt (and, by extension, representatives of the types of people we have encountered in our own every day lives) and thus it’s “okay.” It’s cathartic. No “innocent” bystanders are injured, no lines are crossed.

Nowhere is the difference between comic and film more clearly delineated than the Mask’s confrontation with the police. In the comic, the Mask simply mowed them down with a variety of hardware. In the film, the Mask transforms himself into a Spanish singer and belts out a rendition of “Cuban Pete” (sung sprightly by Carrey) that literally becomes infectious. The police are unable to refrain from joining in (due to the Mask’s apparent ability to change the world around him into a cartoon environment) and within minutes have formed a conga line.

One depicts the unfunny slaughter of cops. The other gives us a showman. The Mask has gone from Bugsy Segal to Bugs Bunny.

The comparison to Roger Rabbit is never more apparent than in a cabaret where the Mask watches Tina in action. What we’re seeing here is the reversal of Eddie Valiant laying eyes on Jessica Rabbit for the first time. Jessica is now the human being whereas Eddie is the toon, right down to changing into a Tex Avery wolf’s head and howling. He does a wild eye take, plus his tongue rolls out of his mouth.

The Mask’s interest in Tina, however, brings him into a collision course with would-be crime lord Dorian Tyrel (Peter Greene). The Mask swipes both Tyrel’s intended money and intended girlfriend, Tina, and Tyrel targets Ipkiss for the fall guy and the mask itself for his ticket to power.

Director Charles Russell, known for other such low-key films as Nightmare on Elm Street III, appears to keep matters under control… no easy trick when one is doing, basically, a live action cartoon.

The problem with producing a cartoon, though, is that when all is said and done, one winds up with just that. No more, no less. Being a cartoon brings both advantages and disadvantages. Because the outrageousness is so out there, so over the top, ideally the need for grounding in humanity becomes that much greater. If we’re going to have a balanced film, then the extreme of one type should be matched by the extreme of another.

Doesn’t happen. Doesn’t come close. The characters in the Mike Werb screenplay (story by Michael Fallon and Mark Verheiden) are largely one-dimensional. The Mask himself is rarely quite as zany as he imagines himself to be (one wonders what Robin Williams would have done in the role). The police are uniformly incompetent, with the exception of Peter Riegert’s “Lt. Kellaway.” The creeps are creepy, the bad guys are bad, the good guys are good (although there’s some nice playing against expectations with both Diaz and Amy Yasbeck, who plays reporter Peggy Brandt.)

Oh, Carrey does an excellent job. His body seems to be held together, not by tendons, but by wishful thinking. He mugs, he slithers, he slinks in a manner reminiscent of Buster Keaton or, of more recent vintage, Ðìçk Van Ðÿkë. When the boys from ILM work to wildly distort his body, there are times where it seems almost unnecessary. Carrey’s limber enough to make virtually any contortion believable, no matter how warped. Greg Cannom’s special effects make-up does nothing to hinder Carrey’s mugging, and actually accentuates it. It’s a visually arresting film.

Carrey faces stiff competition from two supporting characters. One is in the small but pivotal role of an expert on masks, played by noted columnist Ben Stein. Stein made an indelible mark on the psyche of America’s youth for his role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, portraying with teeth-gnashing perfection the teacher everyone had… sometimes repeatedly. The one whose monotone is so deadly that the brain goes into vapor lock (his intoning “Anyone? Anyone?” as he would ask and answer his own questions because the students had gone into intellectual cardiac arrest was priceless.)

The other, greater problem is Carrey’s genuine co-star. Never work with kids and dogs. No kids here, but Ipkiss’ dog, Milo (played by Max, like we care about the name difference) plays more and more of a role in the proceedings, eventually displaying intuition and ability rivaling, if not surpassing, Lassie.

Ultimately, though, when it comes to The Mask–as Dorothy Parker said–there’s no “there” there. We’re entertained, we have a good time watching the characters go through their paces. But they’re never more than just characters. In terms of screen nice guys, Ipkiss never comes alive for us the way that, say, Kevin Kline’s Dave did, or any Jimmy Stewart character… or even Rob Petrie. We’re rooting for him, because we want the good guys to triumph. But the whole film is too goofy, too silly, to get really worked up over.

This seems to be a recurring problem in the genre of comic book related films. The emphasis is on visual, visual, visual… and visually, The Mask looks sensational. Just as The Shadow did. Just as Batman and Batman Returns did. No one has quite managed to take us beyond the look into the heart of the characters. To make us care about them as human beings, striving to overcome odds. The film to come closest to doing so was The Crow, and it’s impossible to determine how much of that comes from the sheer melancholy attached to the fate of that movie’s star.

Then again, it’s not like comic books themselves are immune from this problem. Characters no longer need a coherent storyline or an interesting, or even original, characterization, in order to succeed. As long as they look good and divert us, audiences are more than happy to take that as sufficient.

In a way, it’s ironic. Several hundred years ago, this country was founded by settlers. And now here we are, and we’re “settlers” once more; we’ll “settle” for something that captures us visually, even though it doesn’t come close to challenging our emotional core.

Paddy Chayefsky, in his groundbreaking screenplay Network, saw it coming. Saw the embracing of the visceral reaction, the easiest means of stimulating audience attention as the be-all, end-all of entertainment.

“We are in the boredom killing business!” declares Peter Finch’s visionary newsman in a euphoric epiphany. And so he was, and so are today’s producers of films and comic book. If it diverts, if it entertains, then the emotional depth need not be so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door. ‘Tis enough. ‘Twill serve.

The Mask is a film that literally could not have been made a few years ago. The advancements with seamless computer animation have made it possible. They’ve substituted for effects that would have been far more elaborate, more expensive, and quite likely, unconvincing and unmanageable. All hail the computer, the movie maker’s newest friend.

But although the computer can give us the Mask’s heart literally leaping out of his chest, it cannot produce something that touches the heart. That’s left for the writers and actors to do, and in that respect The Mask–for all its energy and eagerness to please–comes up short.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, (who can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705) saw a trailer for a film with Carrey and Jeff Daniels called Dumb and Dumber. It looked moronic. The audience was cheering. A nation of settlers are we.)