GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/26/08)
NO STARS

Visually ugly, morally non-existent and a complete black hole in the departments of insight and wit, Chapter 27 is quite possibly the most godawful, irredeemable film to yet emerge in the 21st century. This inverted vanity project of pretty-boy actor Leto (he co-executive produces as well as stars), for which he packed on seventy pounds in order to portray John Lennon murderer Mark David Chapman, tries to take the viewer inside the head of the obsessive assassin. As it happens, that's a pretty empty place.

"You know those ducks in Central Park?" Leto's Chapman asks a cab driver on the way into town from the airport. "Where do they go in the winter?" Chapman, who's flown in from Hawaii, later reveals he was born in Georgia, which is in the South, where birds from up North migrate in the winter. When the cab driver says, quite reasonably, "You have got to be kidding me," Chapman dismisses him, in voice-over, as yet another "phony," using the key word from his favorite book, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

The exchange between Chapman and the cabbie takes place about three minutes into the movie. 81 minutes to go. (Boy, and Pauline Kael thought it was a chore to spend time with the main characters of Raging Bull. At least Scorsese's film gave you something to look at.)

After checking into a seedy hotel, Chapman takes his place outside the Dakota, Lennon's residence, and muses on "phonies," Lennon's putative betrayal of some ideals, and such. "I'm too vulnerable for a world full of pain and lies and loneliness," he moans. He tentatively befriends a young Lennon fan named Jude, as in "Hey." (Lohan portrays her with perfunctory naïve sweetness.) He gets all agitated by the Dakota's connection to Rosemary's Baby, and seems to be unaware that "Helter Skelter" was Paul's song. He gets serviced by the most tragic-looking call girl in the five boroughs. He gets into a bit of a tiff with a photographer hanging out at the building (Friedlander, who actually supplies a laugh or two, although one feels guilty about them afterward). In the most repellent scene, he meets little Sean Lennon and his governess. Generally, Chapter 27's Chapman behaves in a way that would have gotten him picked up for disorderly conduct in real life; said arrest might well have resulted in sparing Lennon's life, and sparing the rest of us this grotesque film.

Don't get me wrong — I don't think this or any other subject matter is de facto taboo. True, I'm more attracted to portrayals of the lives of artists and thinkers than of the lives of those who kill them, but then there's Losey's underappreciated The Assassination of Trotsky. And yes, I am personally offended by the very idea of Mark David Chapman. The problem with Chapter 27 (the title, in case you're wondering, is derived from the putative "missing chapter" of Rye, which, according to one writer, has a profound numerological significance linking Lennon and Chapman; none of this is in the film, mind you, which gives you some idea of its overall coherence) — well, one of its many problems — is that it not only does nothing to make me any bit less personally offended by Mark David Chapman, but that it does nothing at all, except luxuriate in Leto's appalling reverse narcissism, which reaches its apogee when his Chapman does his own little Taxi Driver bit in a hotel room.

You want to understand the difference between good and bad acting. Well, to take a probably too-obvious example, look at Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. When he opens his mouth to speak, it's not his voice that comes out — it's his character's. Every time Leto drawls a word, it's not a character named Chapman talking: it's Jared Leto doing a crummy Southern accent. Urgh. This conception of Chapman as some sort of Faulknerian idiot man-child wouldn't pass muster at an acting workshop conducted by Corky St. Clair. Leto's at his best, such as it is, playing self-infatuated petulant creeps (as in his work for director David Fincher in Fight Club and Panic Room). In this film, he's not playing Mark David Chapman. He's being a self-infatuated petulant creep who thinks that temporarily fucking up his body makes him Robert De Niro. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

— Glenn Kenny