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movie news
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Fri. 02 23. 2007 10:35 AM EST
'The Number 23': You Do The Math, By Kurt Loder
Jim Carrey, unfunny again, wanders a dark and airless dreamscape.
Jim Carrey in "The Number 23"
(
New Line Cinema
)
Dogcatcher Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) is being driven mad by the number 23. He's been launched into this obsession by a strange little book called "The Number 23," which his wife, Agatha (Virginia Madsen), gave him for his birthday. It's a novel, or
a memoir or something, written by a man named Topsy Kretts (get it?). He was apparently driven mad by the number 23, too.
And no wonder. When you think about it, and start paying attention, the number 23 is everywhere. Like, did you know that William Shakespeare was born (maybe) and died on the 23rd of April? And that Kurt Cobain was born in 1967 and died in 1994, and that each of those years adds up to 23? And that the Latin alphabet has 23 characters? And that the Tool album "10,000 Days" has a track called "Viginti Tres," which is Latin for — that's right — "23." And hey, this is interesting: Add up the total number of letters in the names Jim Carrey and Virginia Madsen and what do you get? Right again! Best of all, if you divide two by three you get .666!
The "23 Enigma," as it's doodled forth in the goof-cult religion called Discordianism, was more famously elaborated in the "Illuminatus!" trilogy published by novelists Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in 1975. The number's usefulness in linking all sorts of things in vaguely conspiratorial webs of coincidence derives from the fact that 23 is a prime number, and that it's composed of two digits that are themselves the lowest prime numbers. I'd go on, but you can Google this stuff as well as I can.
What does it all mean? Not much; nothing useful anyway. But it's fun, in a too-much-time-on-your-hands way. Unfortunately, the same can't quite be said of this movie.
As Walter starts burrowing into the mysterious book, he learns that the author, as a boy, created a crime-busting alter-ego called Detective Fingerling. Soon, in his dream life, Walter starts turning into this character. His shoulders blossom with thick black tattoos. He takes up late-night saxophone. He finds himself in a hot relationship with an S&M enthusiast named Fabrizia (also played by Madsen), and he encounters another woman called the Suicide Blonde, who's obsessed with the number 23 herself, and who soon lives up (or all the way down) to her name. The Sparrows' amiable friend Isaac (Danny Huston) starts appearing, too, in the guise of a sinister Dr. Phoenix. It's all very noir. (The cool, inky cinematography is by Matthew Libatique, best known for his work with Darren Aronofsky.)
There's also a murdered woman named Laura Tollins (Rhona Mitra), whose body has never been found; and an ominous facility called the Nathaniel Institute; and a vicious dog called Ned ("n" being the fourteenth letter of the alphabet, "e" being the fifth letter, and so on). There's also a twist to the book: The story only goes up to Chapter 22 — after that, where Chapter 23 should be, there are just blank pages, waiting to be filled in.
Jim Carrey plays all of this straight, if that's the right word — his tired, 20-million-dollar-man buffoonery is nowhere in evidence. This strategy of setting aside his rubbery comic persona worked for Carrey in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"; but that film had a complex comic structure provided by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. "The Number 23" relies on a script by first-time screenwriter Fernley Phillips, and while it's frenetically inventive in trying to keep all sorts of narrative balls in the air, its complexity bogs down into murky complication. You also start to wonder how crazy someone really could be driven by this number-23 business. A certain sort of person might be transformed into an unusually tedious geek, maybe; but a murderer?
The director, Joel Schumacher, works up a juicy, lurid atmosphere, but the picture feels cramped and airless. You wait for it to really take off, but it never seems able to find its way out of all the artfully claustrophobic rooms and corridors. The plot points sort of connect, eventually (well, some of them do); but after the movie ends, you don't feel like it's added up to much. And you're weary from doing all the math.
This report is from MTV News.
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