Review: The Killing of John Lennon

The Killing of John Lennon puts the viewer squarely inside the mind of Mark David Chapman -- you should know that before going in, since many reasonable viewers might consider that a completely useless journey to take. The choice of director Andrew Piddington is to treat Chapman as though he's important enough to not only have his own biopic, but one that uses his words exclusively and takes its visual and dramatic cues from Chapman's own insane mental tics, such as fancying himself a modern day Holden Caulfield who can't stomach phoneys and has a personal date with infamy. In Piddington's defense however, the assassination was so meaningless that going down this path is probably the only way to film this story, unless you want to do it like Emilio Estevez's Bobby and focus on a lot of non-Chapman characters who just happen to be there when the maniac tornado blows through. Come to think of it, that might have been the more interesting choice, since The Killing of John Lennon is ultimately something of a bore.

Piddington has gone on the record to point out that he directed this film without seeking out Chapman's involvement -- I'm sure Chapman had the free time to be interviewed -- so that further muddies the question of exactly what Piddington was trying to accomplish with the project. Did he delude himself into thinking that making an exhaustive portrait of the inner workings of Chapman's mind would somehow come across as less celebratory of the man's life if he didn't consult Chapman himself? And when I use the word exhaustive, I'm using it from my perspective. This film's understanding of Chapman's inner world is fairly narrow -- his hatred of John Lennon is more or less summed up in his (Chapman's) assertion that Lennon "told us to imagine no possessions, but he has yachts and country estates." The bastard! His other musings on life are sometimes nothing more than quotations from movies he's seen, such as when he tells us "I don't think one should devote oneself to morbid self-attention. One should try to be a person like other people."

The psychopath is played here by Jonas Ball, an untried actor who does the best he can to elicit some humanity and try to come up with an emotional motivation for what Chapman does. The pressure is certainly on, since Piddington almost never takes the camera off of Ball from the opening credits to the closing credits and doesn't shy away from putting his actor through the most invasive close-ups or asking of him several 'big' emotional moments packed to the gills with experimental camera bravado. Ball is also tasked with shouldering an unusually long epilogue. This isn't a film that leads up the killing of Lennon and ends -- it goes on and on, showing us Chapman in police custody, being examined by and sparring with a psychiatrist, and resigning himself to the fact that he's now stuck in prison for the forseeable future. Again, I can only repeat my earlier query about why this is necessary. I'm reminded of Patton Oswalt's comedy routine about the Star Wars prequel triology focusing on Darth Vader as a little boy -- no one cares.

One interesting and more or less successful choice of Piddington is to hire models, not actors, to portray Lennon and Ono for their inevitable scene of confrontation with Chapman. As ruthlessly as Chapman's private life and private thoughts are plumbed for the grist of this film, Lennon and Ono are left relatively alone until they just happen to cross paths with the killer on that fateful evening. That's the right choice -- you can imagine a film like this posturing their eventual meeting as a 'rendezvous with destiny' and following the minutia of their preceding days with as much leaden exactitude as Chapman's are chronicled, but Piddington wisely sidesteps that. When Lennon and Ono are seen, approaching the Dakota in a limo, they are kept mostly in shadow and the dialogue is pretty non-existent, all in the service of selling the illusion of these two models as the iconic faces in question. I think you'll agree that the scene of the assassination, restrained, carefully shot and jarring as it is, is by far the best-handled scene in the film.

What else is there to say about a delusional psychotic who robbed the world of a great artist for impenetrable reasons? I've deliberately avoided relating the film's plot developments, since they are completely inconsequential -- Chapman travels to Hawaii, he hangs outside Lennon's building freaking out the security guards, he walks around hotel rooms, and so on. It's almost as if he didn't have a personality at all and he needed the moniker of assassin in order to create one for himself. The one time that Chapman seems to come to life is during the extended epilogue when a psychiatrist attempts to diagnose him and he takes the opportunity as an excuse to engage in a sparring match. He found a role he can play. Andrew Piddington's film is being shuffled into theaters during what may be the most barren cinematic week of the entire year, and there's something appropriate about that.