Genre Index

Home

Synopsis: In the London of 1888, someone is murdering prostitutes in the Christchurch-Spitalfields district of Whitechapel. The murders are grisly, ritualistic crimes apparently commited by someone with an extensive knowledge of human anatomy--a doctor, perhaps. Inspector Abberline has been assigned to the case. Abberline is something of a wreck. His wife died giving birth to his stillborn son. Addicted to opium, he drowns his sorrows in laudanum and absinthe. Under the influence of these drugs, he has visions. Premonitions, if you will. He sees the crimes in his head, but never the shadowy killer. The killer is a black silhouette against the blood red sky or a dim shape lurking in the shadows. But he has a name: Jack the Ripper. Meanwhile, the prostitutes in the slums of Whitechapel are scared--and well they should be. They are being shaken down for "protection" money, which is more than they can afford, they are hungry and homeless and riddled with disease. The Ripper's murders are merely the most extreme aspects of what is already a horrifying existence. One of their number appears to have made it off the street: Annie Crook has a rich husband named Albert, who says he's an artist. Albert and Annie have a new baby, who Annie has given into the care of fellow "unfortunate woman", Mary Kelly. One day, Annie and Albert are taken from their love nest by "official-looking" men. Annie is confined to an insane asylum, where she is diagnosed as "a danger to herself and a danger to others." The cure is the new technique of lobotomy. The Ripper, it seems, is an instrument of cover-up. Albert is actually a Prince, Edward Albert Windsor, the Duke of Clarence and in line for the British throne. Albert has contracted syphillis from his consort, much to the distaste of the queen. The instrument of the cover-up is Society of Freemasons, who have selected one of their number as their enforcer. Unfortunately, their assassin has gone more than a little around the bend and beyond murdering the witnesses to Prince Eddy, he is enacting a Masonic revenge ritual. Meanwhile, Abberline is closing in on the truth of the matter. During the course of his investigation, he meets Mary Kelly and begins falling for her. With the information she provides, Abberline sets his sights on the Prince as the prime suspect. This theory is quickly quashed by the Royal Physician, Dr. William Gull, who points out that Prince Eddy has begun to show the symptoms of syphillis, including weakness and nervous trembling. He also has no knowledge of anatomy. Abberline figures it out in the end, though, but before he can bring the case to a close, the secret service steps in to halt his investigation. While Abberline is detained, the Ripper kills the fifth of the five prostitutes--a woman he mistakes for Mary Kelly--in a grisly ritual. He places her heart in the fire, where it explodes. The ritual complete, the Masons take care of their own. Abberline cannot tell anyone that Mary is actually alive, nor can he go to her. The case remains unsolved...

Pedigree: From Hell began life as a comic book. I've seen some reviews of the movie that note that, in its compositions and visual sensibilities, From Hell betrays its origins on the printed page. If you run across these reviews on the internet or elsewhere, ignore them. They don't know what they are talking about. They are written by people who haven't actually READ From Hell. The graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell is one of a handful of works in the medium that set a benchmark and demonstrate that graphic storytelling with words and pictures is a uniquely powerful medium capable of profound art (other examples include Art Spiegelman's Maus, Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Dave McKean's Cages, and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Signal to Noise). The comic (we'll use that descriptor, even if it isn't particularly accurate) began life in Stephen R. Bissette's Taboo anthology and ran for ten years in a number of different forms until it was complete. The end result is an exhaustive picture of The Ripper and his times overlayered with a withering feminist critique of both Victorian England and (allegorically) its modern decendent, as well as a deeper symbolism of the effects of such concentrated and savage violence on the world at large. The collected edition includes more than forty pages of footnotes. It's a heady work that really defies the ability of a two hour film to encompass anything more than just the bare bones of the original item. I'm not going to claim, as another reviewer claims, that the film version of From Hell resembles one of the Ripper's victims--gutted, as it were. That's too easy. There is something profoundly out of sorts with this film, though.

There is a ferocious intelligence behind the graphic novel that the movie not only doesn't match, it doesn't even understand it. For example: I've seen criticisms of the graphic novel claiming that it is better written than it is visuallized. This is untrue and does an injustice to the genius of Eddie Campbell, one of the comic medium's more restless experimentalists. From Hell looks the way that it does for a reason--one that writer Alan Moore surely took into account when he approached Campbell about the project. One of the peripheral characters in The Ripper's circle is an artist named Walter Sickert. Sickert was an English post-impressionist whose work resembles Whistler. He lived in the East End at the time of The Ripper's murders (and, later, perpetuated several myths about The Ripper, which eventually formed the basis for The Lodger). A large portion of Sickert's output consists of drawings and etchings depicting the denizens of the Whitechapel slums. Campbell's art for From Hell is deliberately rendered to look like the work of Walter Sickert.

Sickert Drawing

From Hell panel

This aspect of the comic is jettisonned by the Hughes Brothers (with some justification, I might add) but they don't find a suitable substitute for the comic's visual style. The film itself is handsome--to its detriment, actually. It looks more than a little bit like a Hammer film on steroids.

For further example: Both the graphic novel and the movie feature cameo appearances by John Merrick, The Elephant Man. In the graphic novel, the Ripper drives his coach by the home where Merrick lives and instructs his victim to turn to Merrick and say, "All hail Ganesh." Ganesh, for those who are unfamiliar, is the elephant-headed god in the Hindu pantheon. He is the god of beginnings. This incident forms a part of the Ripper's ritual. In the film, The Elephant Man is there for his value as a freak. I suppose it could be argued that the depcition of The Elephant Man is consistent with the film's vision of the medical profession, but that doesn't wash. The most striking and subversive element of the graphic novel is the explicit complicity of Queen Victoria in The Ripper murders. The Hughes brothers omit this, although there are still hints around the edges.

Instead of the savage critique of both the society that spawned The Ripper and the society to which he gave rise, the filmmakers have substituted a whodunnit-style police procedural and a wholly unconvincing love story. And here, the film begins to get weird. Despite the omissions mentioned above, enough of the text of From Hell is preserved to make it recognizable, including several central scenes: the abduction and mutilation of Annie Crook, the Ripper's ghastly final ritual and the deranged visions that go along with it, and the trial of The Ripper by the Masons and his eventual fate; as well as some minor, but telling leitmotifs: the obsession with Egyptian architecture and the hideous Hawksmoor churches, the reluctant participation of John Nettly, the Ripper's coachman, and the preponderance of psychic visions on both sides of the fence. The oddest instance of fidelity to the source material occurs during the Ripper's final blood frenzy as he disects "Mary Kelly's" body in the Miller's Court room. The Ripper is given dialogue here, but the dialogue isn't taken from the comic (nor is the hallucination--but that's another matter), but is rather drawn from the FOOTNOTES!

This is, in all honesty, more than I expected, but all of this is in the background. The Hughes brothers have actually made From Hell in a partially faithful version, but they have overlayered ANOTHER film on top of it. This other film, complete with hackneyed stereotypes, overworked genre conventions, and a happy ending is designed, one presumes, to give a mass audience their money's worth, but it's simply dreadful. And then...the Hughes brothers do something even more bizarre: Having provided a "happy ending" to the movie, they subvert it with a further ending that renders the "happy ending" practically meaningless.

Formal Particulars:Having established that the actual text of the movie is and isn't the From Hell one finds in the graphic novel, what IS From Hell? I mentioned above that the film resembles a Hammer film, which is accurate enough. The presence of Johnny Depp causes the film to resonate as a Tim Burton pastische--particularly of Sleepy Hollow, another Hammer Film wannabe starring Depp as a detective. Depp's performance is radically different in From Hell, despite a similarity of characters, but he is at the mercy of screenwriters who have combined Aberline with the psychic, Robert Lees, and made both of them opium addicts (perhaps as a reference to Sherlock Holmes's cocaine addiction). Robbie Coltrane's Godley takes on some of the functions of Lees's character, but the subtraction of Lees from the film harms the tone set in the later part, once the mystery has been resolved. Lees gets the book's closing lines, lending it a disquieting melancholy at the end. Depp's Aberline merely gets pennies for his eyes.

Both Depp and Heather Graham look too good for the setting and struggle with accents (Graham more than Depp). The rest of the cast is spot-on, though, especially Robbie Coltrane as Abberline's minder and Jason Flemyng in the thankless role of Nettly, the Ripper's reluctant coachman and accomplice. The remainder of the film is populated by actors who actually seem to inhabit the world the film presents.

The film is certainly over-designed in the same manner as a Tim Burton movie. The Whitechapel depicted in the film is one of the best-looking slums in film, even if the film opens with a shot of a man pissing on a wall. The disparity between the opulence enjoyed by the upper crust and the slums isn't stark enough.

The best scenes in the film are those played between Depp's Aberline and Ian Holm's Dr. Gull, while the best setpieces are the various crime scenes. These bear some comment. The Hughes brothers have staged the crime scenes using the acutal forensic photography from Scotland Yard. They've made a great deal of noise in the press about how they wanted to make the film even bloodier than it already is, which just goes to show that they don't understand their native talent and they don't know when to shut up. The scenes layed out in this movie are grisly indeed, and match the crime scene photos in almost every detail. If the Hughes brothers had filmed these more directly, they would have overwhelmed the movie--Eddie Campbell's drawings in the graphic novel were far easier to take for being in pen and ink. As it is, viewed obliquely, the crime scenes function exactly as the film needs them to function. They are horrifying--moreso than any sequence in any previous filming of The Ripper's crimes--but serve the overall ambience of squallor to which the rest of the film aspires.

The Hughes brothers also defend themselves in the press for making this film. It's a far cry from the urban, "black" movies for which they are best known. Not so, they say: From Hell is exactly the sort of film they are best known for: it's a ghetto movies. The authorities are racists and are conspiring to put the poor people down. The Ripper, it seems, is The Man in a waistcoat and cape...

Think of THAT what you will.

Unsolved: So what does it all add up to? As a literary adaptation, From Hell has to be counted as a failure--it dwells forever in the shadow of its forebearer. But, since the lion's share of the audience probably doesn't even know the graphic novel exists, the question becomes: does it satisfy in its own right? It is handsomely mounted--an excellent Hammer movie pastiche--and it certainly provides some thrills along the way. But the ending of the film remains the sticking point. It simply doesn't work and serves as an abject warning to actors seeking a "no death scene" clause in their contracts. After all, death scenes used to win people Oscars.

The main appeal of the film, an appeal that even the cack-handed writing can't entirely erase, is the legend of The Ripper himself. And the legend of the Ripper is something that no fictional account can possibly get to the bottom of. Writing in "The Dance of the Gull Catchers," the concluding epilogue to From Hell, Alan Moore predictably had the last word on the subject:

" The idea of a solution, any solution, is inane. Murder isn't like books. Murder, a human event located in both space and time, has an imaginary field completely unrestrained by either. It holds meaning and shape, but no solution. Quantum uncertainty, unable to determine both a particle's location and its nature, necessitates that we map every possible state of the particle. Its super-position. Jack's not Gull or Druitt. Jack is a super-position....

"Five murdered paupers, one anonymous assailant. This reality is dwarfed by the vast theme park we've built around it. The truth is, this has never been about the murders, not the killer nor his victims. It's about us. About our minds and how they dance. Jack mirrors our hysterias. Faceless, he is the receptacle for each new social panic. He's a Jew, a doctor, a Freemason, or a wayward Royal. Soon someone will notice the disturbing similarities between the Ripper crimes and recent cattle mutilations, from which they will draw the only sensible conclusion..."

Amen to that.

*Note: the bulk of this review was written, curiously enough, on November 9th, 2001--the 113th anniversary of Jack the Ripper's last murder.  

The film that the Hughes Brothers seem to have overlayered over the graphic novel is Bob Clark's Sherlock Holmes pastische, Murder By Decree, which has so many scenes in common with From Hell, I'm surprised that lawyers aren't talking. There IS some justification in the text of the graphic novel for the movie the Hughes brothers have made, expecially the radical departure from from the historical record at the end, but what they do with it has no precedent in the text. Back.