Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
The
World Without Us
(I Am Legend, 12/24/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It's
one of those egghead culture critics—Slavoj Zizek, perhaps—who
has talked about how popular culture (and its audiences) have any easy
time conjuring the End of the World, but can't imagine a small change
in our nation's politics. Want to see the eastern seaboard scoured flat
by a three hundred-foot tsunami? No problem! Contemplate getting rid
of the electoral college, though, and we worry that the audience would
never buy it. Need to visualize New York City as a ghost town infested
by hairless, flesh-eating albino zombies? Certainly! Imagine our system
reformed so corporations aren't considered legal "persons,"
or a universal, single-payer health care system, or a clean-running
electric car in every garage? Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Our puzzling taste for self-defeating,
apocalyptic visions accepted, we can at least hope for good ones. Francis
Lawrence's I Am Legend is yet another in what seems like an endless
supply of zombie-pandemic flicks (e.g., 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later
and, going further back, The Omega Man [1971] and George Romero's
Night of the Living Dead [1968], along with its legion of remakes
and spoofs). Yet it also packs surprisingly intensity and humanity.
Even more than Tom Hanks in Cast
Away, this is a piece for a solo instrument. Will Smith is Robert
Neville, an army pathologist who, after Manhattan is abandoned to a
man-made epidemic, chooses to stay behind alone to find a cure. And
alone he is through most of the story—when he isn't experimenting
on rats in his basement laboratory, he's out hunting for antelope in
Central Park, shopping for DVDs in abandoned video stores, or driving
golf balls off the deck of the USS Intrepid. He and his only
company, Samantha the German shepherd, squat in the kind of roomy, elegant
luxury most Manhattanites only dream of, in a historic row house on
Washington Square. The dream goes sour at night, though, when legions
of infected zombies come out of hiding in search of live flesh. "Wait,
I can still fix this," the ever-buoyant Neville declares.
His optimism is tested when he and
Samantha aren't able to retreat to their apartment before nightfall.
In this role Smith proves himself to be more than a box office rainmaker—his
performance as an increasingly crazed soul who has lost almost everything,
who has given up on life but not the cause, is his strongest yet.
Anybody who's lived in New York
can relish the double-sided irony of all this, as Manhattan is reduced
to a reverse variant of a gated community. If I Am Legend falls
short of poetry, it's due more to a script and a director (a former
maker of music videos) who sometimes go more for spectacle than consistency.
Is it really plausible that the mere 1% of humans immune from the virus
would include one of the top pathologists in the world? And sure, it's
spectacular to watch the Brooklyn Bridge blown up to keep the undesirables
confined to Manhattan—and perhaps ironic from a race/class point
of view. But did nobody think the infected might swim or float over,
at a spot where the East River is just a few hundred yards wide? Indeed,
what self-respecting uptown zombie ever go south of Houston, even to
eat somebody's flesh?
Quibbles aside, I Am Legend
is a rare holiday gift from Hollywood: a cineplex spectacle that lingers
longer in the mind than the butter-flavored topping on your popcorn.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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