‘I’VE KEPT EVERYTHING’
Warts-and-all doco paints intimate portrait of veteran star, writes Mark Kennedy.
IN HIS LATEST FILM, Val Kilmer gets an unusual screen credit for a bona fide Hollywood movie star: cinematographer. That’s because the documentary Val is built on thousands of hours Kilmer filmed since he was a boy – growing up, on movie sets, in cars, in hospitals. This is a lifetimein-the-making cinematographer’s credit.
Thanks to Kilmer’s relentless drive to document things, Val is a remarkably intimate film and a moving one, too. For a performer who has come off as chilly and difficult, this doco doesn’t counter those perceptions as much as explain them.
“I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely. I have behaved bizarrely to some. I deny none of this and have no regrets because I have lost and found parts of myself that I never knew existed,” he says toward the end. “And I am blessed.”
Actually, he leaves much of the talking to his son. The elder Kilmer’s voice has been impaired from throat cancer treatments and Jack Kilmer narrates the majority of the film using his father’s words, naturally while being filmed. “Now that it’s more difficult to speak, I want to tell my story more than ever,” says the elder Kilmer.
Valwould not be the film it is if Kilmer hadn’t been an early adopter of hand-held video cameras, giving us home movies, audition tapes and live auditions. “I’ve kept everything,” he confides.
Kilmer’s screen credits include Batman in Batman Forever in 1995, brash fighter pilot
Lt Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky in the 1986 hit
Top Gun, and rock icon Jim Morrison in the 1991 Oliver Stone film, The Doors.
The film lingers on each of those roles but perhaps the most intriguing parts are Kilmer’s earnest auditions for roles he never got. For Full Metal Jacket, he filmed himself using multiple voices to try to seduce director Stanley Kubrick and also made an audition video to play Henry Hill in
Goodfellas. He got neither part.
Directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott have spun a mostly chronological profile, starting with Kilmer’s childhood and then giving us an unvarnished look at the star’s career, marriage and fatherhood, and ending it postsurgery as Kilmer struggles to be heard.
The filmmakers have a tendency to bring Kilmer to the scene of a favorite place – say, a former school or family home – and then melt back in time by using the old movies. They’ll show images of Kilmer’s family hiking in the 80s and then revisit the same area with the middle-aged Kilmer.
This is no glamour project. He and his estranged wife bicker over custody of their two children, he is shown laconically swatting bugs poolside in middle age, and looks fragile at a Comic-con, puking at a signing station, a towel over his head as he’s rushed out in a wheelchair.
Kilmer – enigmatic to the rest of us – is portrayed as a quirky soul but he is much funnier than we expect and forces us to question why we thought him difficult at all.
In one of the rawest scenes, Kilmer attends a fan event for Tombstone, signing photos and memorabilia. “I don’t look great and I’m selling basically my old self, my old career,” he says to the camera.
Tune in to see backstage video from
Slab Boys on Broadway, with co-stars Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn slowly mooning the camera. He’s such a method actor that he constructed a backstory for the arrogant Iceman in
Top Gun. When he played Doc Holliday in Tombstone, he filled his bed with ice for the final scene to mimic the feeling of dying from tuberculosis. To play Morrison, he wore leather pants and blasted The Doors for a year, neither of which helped his marriage.
The film is bookended by tragedy: the loss after Kilmer’s younger brother Wesleywho died accidentally at age 15, and the loss of Kilmer’s voice means he must grapple with legacy and death in his 60s. Even so, a relentless optimism comes through, especially his relationship with his adult children, who clearly adore their dad. “I’ve lived a magical life,” Kilmer concludes. It’s hard to argue back. —AP