OPINION | REVIEW: A life in parts

Acting ‘poorly’ and ‘bravely’ with Val Kilmer

In the new documentary “Val,” constructed from personal home videos shot by the actor over the past 40 years, actor Val Kilmer, a throat cancer survivor, uses a voice box to speak.
In the new documentary “Val,” constructed from personal home videos shot by the actor over the past 40 years, actor Val Kilmer, a throat cancer survivor, uses a voice box to speak.

For all his prodigious talent -- and, say what you might about him, his star-power was unmistakable -- Val Kilmer's career remains peculiar, pockmarked by scattershot films, with sweeping performance highs ("Tombstone," "Heat," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), and stultifying lows ("Batman Forever," "The Island of Dr. Moreau," "Knight Rider"), and a reputation for being ungodly difficult to work with for several of his unfortunate former directors.

Whatever questions one might have about his career, you aren't likely to find many answers from this engaging but frustratingly inconclusive biographical doc directed by Ting Poo and Leo Scott. Much of the enigmatic nature of "Val" comes from Kilmer himself, whose son, Jack, narrates his own writings, over a great many clips, interviews, and home movies he shot over the course of four decades.

Fortunately, among other things, Kilmer was a nearly obsessional chronicler of his own life and times. From his earliest acting experiences, working with his brothers (including his much beloved younger sibling, Wesley, who tragically died as a teenager), making silly remakes of famous films they loved, to his time at Juilliard, the famed New York acting school at Lincoln Center, to his first big break on Broadway (playing third fiddle behind Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon), to the set of what appears to be nearly every movie he ever made, including his more recent crusade to make a film about Mark Twain, leading to a one-man stage show about the great American writer to finance it, Kilmer was behind the camera, gathering footage.

At one point, the now 62-year-old actor takes us into the massive storage facility where all his footage, scripts, notes, and VHS tapes are housed, and the prodigiousness of his collection is almost overwhelming. This enormous amount of material offers glimpses into his life, as a young, hot up-and-comer, to a box office star, to his slow descent into near-inviability, much of which is interesting, if not particularly conclusive.

Kilmer seems less interested in setting the record straight than presenting himself as a mystic sort of traveler, experiencing a series of spiritual transcendencies within his work, even as his career begins to fade and he suffers throat cancer that leaves his once pliant, absorbing voice a croaking whisper. What the film takes pains to show us is that Kilmer was a devoted husband to his now ex-wife, Joanne Whalley, a loving father, both to Jack and his daughter Mercedes, and an actor who only wanted his films to be the best they possibly could be.

The film isn't entirely self-serving. We do see him on the infamously rancorous set of "Dr. Moreau," getting to work with his idol, Marlon Brando (and a long-suffering David Thewlis), but where the highly contentious nature of his relationship with director John Frankenheimer helped lead the production to wrack and ruin (Kilmer says at one point on-set "Frankenheimer can say 'action' and 'cut' all day long, but that will never make him a director"). In fact, one can imagine that late-career Brando, famously difficult to work with and brutally self-indulgent (just ask Francis Ford Coppola), was exactly the wrong sort of influence for Kilmer at that stage in his career.

But too many of his other films are glossed over and quickly passed by -- including "Top Gun," a film he says he didn't really want to do at first ("I thought the script was silly and disliked war-mongering") -- so that we may see him now, reduced by his medical condition to hobble gingerly along, forced to attend autograph-signing events and conventions (a process he laments is "basically selling my old self, my old career," though he ends up feeling grateful seeing his many fans) to keep his financial house in order.

At the beginning and the end of the doc, Kilmer talks of wanting to tell us a story about acting, but it's pretty clear he's more interested in telling a story about himself in which the sins of his past are washed away by his obvious decent intentions. Toward the end, he tells us the secret of his success and his difficulty: "The truth is, in order to find each character, I've had to put a little bit of me in them and find a little bit of them in me," admitting to behaving "poorly" and "bravely" in service to these characters.

He has no regrets, as it has all led him on the journey he was intended to embark upon (his religious beliefs, strong from his childhood, clearly an influence on his outlook), having "lost and found parts of myself I never knew existed." He might be free of remorse, but it's hard as a lover of film to see some of his sublime earlier work -- his eerie presence, in "Tombstone," say -- and not think about what might have been. He's seemingly at peace, which is genuinely wonderful for him, but, despite what he maintains to the contrary, it's difficult not to lament all that he might have lost in the process.

Two faces of Val: A young Val Kilmer as FBI agent Ray Levoi (shown) in 1992’s “Thunderheart,” and as rock icon Jim Morrison in 1991’s “The Doors.”
Two faces of Val: A young Val Kilmer as FBI agent Ray Levoi (shown) in 1992’s “Thunderheart,” and as rock icon Jim Morrison in 1991’s “The Doors.”
Two faces of Val: A young Val Kilmer as FBI agent Ray Levoi in 1992’s “Thunderheart,” and as rock icon Jim Morrison (shown) in 1991’s “The Doors.”
Two faces of Val: A young Val Kilmer as FBI agent Ray Levoi in 1992’s “Thunderheart,” and as rock icon Jim Morrison (shown) in 1991’s “The Doors.”
For more than 40 years, actor Val Kilmer has recorded himself auditioning and on film sets, giving the directors of the documentary “Val” plenty of material.
For more than 40 years, actor Val Kilmer has recorded himself auditioning and on film sets, giving the directors of the documentary “Val” plenty of material.

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‘Val’

87 Cast: Documentary with Val Kilmer

Directors: Ting Poo and Leo Scott

Rating: R, for langauge

Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

Playing theatrically

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