After oily-abbed Spartans (the spartanly-titled 300), superheroes (the unwatchable Watchmen), and owls (what joke can I really make that would add any humor to the title Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole?), director Zach Snyder has turned his camera/CGI effects team to women in his new film Sucker Punch. The results aren’t as bad as you’d think. Synder wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay — a sparse affair, where actual lines are like oases in a desert of spectacle. The main character, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), only speaks about 10 lines — the rest she communicates via blinks and flutters of her enormous fake eyelashes. Yet as an assemblage of tropes and filmic clichés, Sucker Punch is maximalist. Snyder must know we’ve seen a lot of movies about insane, institutionalized (wrongly or not) women; sexually exploited women; and women who enjoy wearing skimpy skirts who are good at dancing sexy for our viewing pleasure. But most likely, we’ve never seen a film combine all of those plus steampunk zombie Nazis, undead machine gun ninjas, planes versus dragons, and bullet train robot shootouts.
After the death of her mother — who left everything to Baby Doll and her sister — our heroine is sent to an asylum by her money-hungry, abusive stepfather, who makes a shady deal with a crooked orderly (Oscar Isaac as Blue Jones) to not only admit her illegally, but also have her lobotomized by the end of the week. In the film’s first scene, she resists her father’s rage with a handgun, but throughout the film there’s something disturbingly passive about Baby Doll. Maybe it’s how the camera plays up her diminutiveness or her combination of blow-up doll makeup with pigtails and pre-teen outfits. Soon, though, all she’s wearing is bustiers and short skirts — it turns out the all-female asylum doubles as a burlesque club/brothel, and its patients provide a cheap (free) workforce. Baby Doll, everyone soon discovers, is the hottest dancer in the entire loony bin, driving men to distraction with her supposedly raw, orgasmic shaking to Björk’s “Army of Me,” and a bunch of other songs that aren’t nearly as listenable. Since the mustachioed, bowler-hatted men who run the asylum aren’t able to concentrate on anything else when Baby’s in motion, she whips up an escape plan, distracting the guards while her fellow strippers/prisoners steal the supplies they need to break free.
The male audience in the film is goofily dazed after Baby Doll’s dances, and the orderly salivates at the thought of how much money this new commodity will make him once he can pimp her out. But in one of the film’s more clever touches, we ourselves are denied the pleasure of ever getting to see Baby Doll’s hips shake. Whenever her body’s gyrating, her mind’s imagining she’s completing fantastical missions as part of a talented fighting team made up of her fellow dancers, though it’s unclear if the dancing frees her mind to fantasize or if the fantasy provides a needed escape from sexual exploitation. Instead of sex, we get frantic CGI episodes that are, like lust itself, pretty much nonsensical, featuring Baby and pals killing undead Nazis, dragons, and robots. What’s Synder trying to say by denying us our chance to objectify, by swapping sex with violence? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure that blowing shit up on fancy computers was a hell of a lot easier than thinking up some fully-clothed dance routine that could turn on the real-life audience as much as the one in the film while maintaining the film’s PG-13 rating.
These escapes aren’t the only narrative layers in Sucker Punch. There are moments in the film when we’re unclear what’s real and what’s imagined, much like Inception or Shutter Island. Unlike those films, though, Sucker Punch doesn’t have the attention span or the pretense to marvel at its own narrative complexity. Instead of trying to pass off narratological acrobatics as intellectual depth like those films, Sucker Punch recognizes that it’s just another kind of spectacle. Its narrative ripples — like the pointlessly ornate camerawork that in one scene dances around spent bullet casings and squeezes through a gun’s scope — are just there to entertain.
I’d talk about the acting, but there really isn’t any. Synder’s approach to the tension between warm-blooded actors and CGI’s plasticity isn’t to make the CGI more lifelike, but to make the actors more synthetic. Like its nods to narrative layers and feminism 101, characters and relationships are pretty superficial, fleshed out just enough so that we’re not distracted by their absence. For the film’s purposes, it works, especially in light of its preoccupation with exploring women as objects to gaze upon. In one of the final scenes, the equation is even reversed to good effect: the surgeon (played by John Hamm, who’s great at playing lovable, on-the-fence misogynists) who lobotomizes Baby Doll is taken aback by a “look” that she gave him, which he is unable to describe, and which we, her back turned to us, are unable to witness.
But don’t read too much into any of that. Like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports or Danish furniture, Sucker Punch is a functional work, whose utility is inseparable from its art: if you want to watch something but are worried you might fall asleep in the theater because your brain is tired, this is your film.
