Looking the Storm in its Eye

In his introduction to David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest, American writer Dave Eggers likens the book to a "spaceship with no recognisable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny, and has no discernible flaws. If you could somehow smash it into smaller pieces, there would certainly be no way to put it back together again. It simply is."

When the Rain Stops Falling, Andrew Bovell's 2008 play, which already has a Victorian Premier's Award to its credit, and which has just enjoyed virtually simultaneous runs with the STC in Sydney and at the Almeida in London, warrants similar marvelling. I saw the latter production last week. This is a deeply moving piece of writing, realised by a freakishly talented cast. With it, Bovell secures his place as one of our most exciting creative minds.

The story of the play spans two continents and eight decades. As Diana Simmonds put it in her review of the world premiere Adelaide Festival production:

"Essentially, over the course of approximately two hours, WTRSF follows Henry, banished from England in the 1960s to the Coorong and thence to Alice Springs by his wife Elizabeth. At the same time, but nearly 20 years later, the audience accompanies his son, Gabriel, just seven years old at the time of his father's disappearance on his own journey to Australia in search of answers. He doesn't know what the audience knows, however, because as well as having seen him say goodbye to his bitter, prematurely-aged mother Elizabeth, her relationship with her young husband has already been enacted by her younger self. Are you still with me?

"In Australia, separate and synchronous, both Henry and Gabriel connect with a young girl, Gabrielle, and her adult self. Supposedly peripheral but actually central to Gabrielle's life is a local Coorong farmer, Joe. Concurrently and together the small incidents and coincidences of their lives combine to dramatically propel the story into the future—2039—when climate change seems to have taken a grip on human existence even as an older and sadder Gabrielle is losing her grip on her own. What happens in the course of the unravelling of these interlinked lives are the usual nothings and catastrophic everythings that constitute 'ordinary people'."

A fine description of an at times bafflingly complex plot. Equally important are the parentheses in which the story's framed. WTRSF’s is a world inverted: one in which the sky is a "carpet of stars", in which snow falls on Uluru, in which fish fall fortuitously from the heavens, in which the future screams at the past. A world in which men teach their fathers how to be sons, and fathers discover that, in fathering, they unwittingly bequeath their own shadows.

Forgive a dual filmic analogy, but it puts me in mind of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men and PT Anderson's Magnolia. The former for its denial-spiked vision of an apocalypse nigh, a future dumbstruck with grief at its own passing; the latter for its parallel narratives, its insistence on meaning in coincidence, and its ominous mantra: "we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us".

WTRSF shares tendencies with Bovell's breakout 1996 piece, Speaking in Tongues, which he later adapted for the 2001 film Lantana: the fugue structures, the ostinato'd aphorisms, the blinkered lives passing by truth in history's narrow, coda'd hallways. WTRSF, however, is a far more mature work. Bovell's technique, at times cutesy-clever in SIT, is now put to earnest work on an investigation of guilt and regret, of time's heavily overstated ability to heal wounds, of history's will to repeat itself, of the way our families both create and destroy us, of the slow rot of secrets kept; of the tyrannies of a certain kind of distance, and of how our dire need for change is goose-stepped by our inability to know how we must. His writing is incandescently intelligent. And it kicks you in the heart.

Perhaps my only criticism, born of this very praise: Bovell sometimes overcooks it. His line-by-line cleverness, his ear for that defining phrase, sometimes reminds us more of his presence than perhaps he realises. And while I enjoy these belletristic engine-revs, and want very much to annoy the woman next to me by trying to scribble them down in the dark, I don't for a moment believe they came from any other brain than Bovell's, and, as a result, they occasionally risk making mouthpieces of otherwise exceptionally rounded, painstakingly developed characters.

In this vein, you can almost always feel when a monologue's coming on. No matter how erudite these prove (one leans heavily on Diderot), or to what lapidary gleam Bovell’s polished them, they’re often prolix and almost always disruptive to the play’s BPM, and their threat to becalm the plot is averted only by the actorly chops of the cast. Point being, he might do better to lay off the urge to be ingenious once in a while, as these moments account for few of play's most satisfying—or, indeed, cleverest—, which are usually those more subtly executed; those in which we're beguiled by rhythm, disarmed by seeming effortlessness.

A number of the London reviews have commented on its length. The Independent's Michael Coveney, giving the play a mean-spirited two stars, complained that it "runs for a bladder-bursting two-and-a-quarter hours", with no interval. Which it does. But firstly (and with due respect to the unknowable health of Coveney's kidneys), it didn't feel like two-and-a-quarter hours to me.

Secondly, it strikes me that, as a formal choice, the absence of an interval is designed not simply to serve the pace and elegant musical structures at work. Bovell knows far too well how theatre works not to have considered that, unbroken, even the most entertaining two-plus hours is an ask of the old tookus and lumbar. It's my belief that he, like David Wallace, to at least some degree wants the show to feel long and hard, because what he's trying to get at is difficult to understand and takes place over long, hard-to-conceive-of periods of time. He wants his narrative vault to be exactly as unbreakable as the mysteries of his characters' lives; as inescapable as the inevitabilities to which their actions speed them.

This goes, too, for the initial difficulties the audience must face in establishing the connections between characters, decades: just as the recognitions with which the play is concerned elude us to the ruin of our own lives, so too do the connections that define us resist easy limning: connections between people, between places, between generations, between crimes that exist always inches outside our field of vision, or on the tips of our tongues.

Coveney, in that same review, said, "There isn't much in the way of light relief, unless you count the repetitive and significant remarks about rainfall across the world". It's true. There aren't too many jokes. But who wants them? The cycles and symmetries that Bovell creates lend themselves to a far more adult humour. Think Kafka by way of Kushner. Bovell always puts his audience in the know ahead of his characters, without ever descending into melodrama or suspense for its own sake. The ironies of which this position grants us a view, from which everything as if it must happen thus, are a rare kind of gift: he makes of his audience an Olympus, complicit by premonition and bound spectatorship in the fates of those mortals living onstage. This is perhaps Bovell’s greatest strength as a writer, his greatest compliment to us as an audience: he knows how to entertain, but means not once to baby us.

Director Michael Attenborough moves the action around a single table and set of chairs (design: Miriam Buether). Colin Grenfell's lighting is subtle and consistent, helping draw together into a single universe the disparate periods in which the action is set. Rain falls in a fine, ethereal mist at several points during the show, to really eerie effect. If there's any real wizardry going on here, however, it's in whatever measures have been taken to avoid cast members slipping. Stephen Warbeck accents the scene changes and heralds woes to come with a haunting and increasingly discordant piano score.

Perhaps it's a case, though, of the production team having done their work too well. The absence of technical flash leaves us to focus on the players.

Simon Burke is revealed as a really seriously world-class actor. His performance is both muscular and sensitive as the appropriately named (i.e. average) Joe, who is by design a nonentity; less, in some ways, a character in his own right than a vector for another. There's a scene in which Gabrielle, Joe's wife of 25 years, appraises his development as a lover: having, at the start, come at her as if "shearing a sheep", he has now grown "tender". Both capacities are expressed in Burke's performance, each bubbling just beneath the surface of the other. His range aside, though, what really distinguishes Burke here is his deep understanding not only his character's pains and joys, and the compromises they demand, but also of where they fit in the story's topography. Rare to see a performance of this intensity not, whether by necessity or intent, elbowing everything else out of the spotlight.

Similar praise must go to Phoebe Nicholls as the emotionally hermetic older Elizabeth Law. This is really the character with whom we go on the biggest rollercoaster, and Nicholls has the goods to keep us with her every inch of the way. She has poise uncommon even in mature actors; a dignity whose backbone is in not caring a damn if we like her. As a result, her turn is totally uncompromising and scarily believable. Elizabeth's peripeteias are the play's most shocking; all the more so for Nicholls' near-feline ability to provoke an audience to do the hard work to access her.

Jonathan Cullen, as the doomed Henry Law, has one absolutely shattering scene midway with Lisa Dillon as the younger Elizabeth Law: characters tearing themselves and each other apart. This is the first moment in a lengthy sequence that finds careful plot setups efflorescing, the first domino in the chain to tip. It's a long, dynamic and demanding scene whose performance made my palms sweat. Tom Mison, an English actor who plays the younger Gabriel, is altogether too handsome and talented and tall and apparently likeable to not loathe utterly and immediately. He was playing a guy whose last name is Law, and he looks not unlike Jude Law, and his performance was impeccably crafted, and heartbreakingly authentic, and I wish him only all the ill in the world.

What's really interesting to consider is whether—or, better, to what extent—Bovell intends WTRSF as a work of allegory. I'm not sure how concerned he is with the slew of actual-factual cataclysms currently pending (e.g., I don't believe the aforementioned bladder issue is a cunning attempt to make us consider our emissions), but nor do I think the catastrophe to which WTRSF points is a purely personal one.

One theory: chuck out the specific ends—Armageddon in general will suffice—and we might read it as a cautionary fable directed not so much at people, but at citizens. At nations. Something at which no British critic has thus far been game to point, no Australian has likely bothered to think up, and whose fact Bovell himself has explicated only in the most oblique ways, is the striking manner in which WTRSF seems to refer to deep and old wounds in the relationship between Britain and Australia. So perhaps: a suggestion that whatever large and new problems the world has to face, they always abut its oldest ones, and these must be faced first, at last; a reminder that every apocalypse is a personal one.

I'd be willing to admit this is an imaginative overreach—the product of searching, like Bovell, for the best hidden and most significant connections—if I thought he believed in accidents. If he weren't in such control, and didn't seem so committed to encoding his work with clues—or things that damned well look like clues—at every level. If not for that non-sequitur in his writer's notes about being ashamed of England and Australia sharing a head of state. If not for his frankness in same: "our ancestors are, for some, those whom you sent away or those who sought to escape the constraints of British society. We are a nation of exiles. And like all exiles we yearn for the place from which we have been sent whilst regarding it with a degree of suspicion because on some deep level we know that it has rejected us".

Whether I'm even getting warm with this or not, there's a synchronicity at work in the dual Sydney/London productions that would not be out of place in the universe of the play itself, and it's one that sees WTRSF doing that to which all theatre ultimately aspires. Ironically, beautifully, the rules and signs that define its fictional world have transcended themselves; the play has grown into dialogue beyond its four walls, longer than its two-and-a-quarter hours. Its simultaneous appearance in the two countries its story inhabits, the two at which it might well be aimed, has rendered its text synecdochic of its own contents. It has become just what it describes and aims to incite.

WTRSF's characters keep telling us that having nothing to say is just another way of having so much to say that you don’t know where to begin. “In the end”, however, Bovell concedes in his notes, “the play must speak for itself of course and be responded to accordingly by its audience… without whom there is no theatre”.

Bovell has found a place to begin. If you didn't catch it, don't worry—you'll get another chance. When you do, go listen. Be that audience.

When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell, Almeida Theatre, London, 14 May-4 July 2009.

A Star is Born Again (Again)

This article, which concerned Nikki Webster and her new single Devilicious, has been removed. It may reappear in some form or other in the future.

Fiction: Tragedy at the Snow

Before I moved back to the city and met your mother, I lived for a while in a town out west, past where the towns sit next to each other on the train line like stalls at a carnival, out where, if it were a movie, the town's people would hear the trains passing through from their kitchens and just shake their heads. I won't say the name of the place. I knew a girl there.

I rented a basement room from an older man who lived alone and kept dachshunds, one young, one old, and the dogs never got used to me in the whole five months I lived there. I’d come around to the front door each Friday to pay the man his rent in cash, and they’d bark at me. My landlord never apologised for the way that his two dogs barked, but I always did, always said sorry, which even at the time didn’t make sense if I thought about it, but then neither did being in this town in the first place, or parting weekly with the small amount of money I had to be so angry so far from earshot. I think sometimes your reasons are your reasons, what works isn’t the same as what makes sense, and thinking through the whys of doing some things, and what the alternatives might be, almost always takes more time than you’d like.

I won’t make it a mystery why I was there. Your grandmother had died suddenly and without dignity and your grandfather who I didn’t care to understand had married again quickly to a woman I didn’t care to know. I had enough saved to go overseas for a few weeks or go somewhere else nearby for who knew how long. A lot of my friends would have opted for the romance of the former, but my life was quite small at the time, and the latter seemed a bigger gesture. I think it’s important to note the circumstances behind the choice, though, because they meant I knew all along that my life in this town was only going to be temporary, only could be, and I always had it in my head I’d go home eventually. Maybe not to my father and his wife, no, but to the city, yes. Once I had everything worked out and wasn’t so angry any more. I never had a job while I lived in that town, and I’d taken every penny I had with me in cash, which was also a gesture of some kind, and I counted the money almost every day, which meant almost every day I was reminded that this couldn’t last forever. That the vision I had for how it would all pan out would eventually have to become more vivid, cross that line from vision to plan. I think when I met this girl that, as much as anything, it was a good excuse for putting that off. But I allowed myself, and her, to believe it was a much larger deal, with fewer hard edges.

•

I met her at the supermarket, which is trite in a big city like this, sure, but in a town where the supermarket is the only public place anyone really has an excuse to go to, it felt like a blessing. And it didn’t take any lines or tricks or even courage like it would in a city either. No hanging out in the health food aisle or purchasing impressive condiments. She just came up to me and said, Hello, and I said, Hello, and that was that. We’d met. She had black hair and fingertips stained brown with nicotine and she was two years older than me.

She was living by herself in this house, if you could call it that. It was a couple of blocks from the supermarket. She had an uncle who lived somewhere nearby, who owned this house, and at different times she told me different versions of what exactly the arrangement was. It didn’t seem important to me what the arrangement was, or even if there was one, but I suspected all along that her uncle might have known even less about it than I did. I didn’t want to talk about why I was there, at least not very specifically. Being around a girl changes things like that. My reasons were of the sort that sounds stupid if said straight out, and righteousness is, as you’ll learn, a fragile thing. Snippets, though, just dark little moments where I’d cloud up and reveal what my mother’s eyes looked like before they closed or what the sky had looked like the days after or how I’d felt when I went shopping for a tie for the service stood in for the kind of depth young men lack, even when bad things have happened to them. So I was happy for her lies. They let me be mysterious.

•

The first time I went there, to her house, I thought that I was going to go straight through the floorboards. There were rusted nails sticking out everywhere, holes in almost every wall. There was one working tap, in what she called the kitchen, which ran cold water clouded with rust. The ceiling in the entire front half of the building had collapsed. She had all her possessions in garbage bags.

And only one room in the house had any carpet and any warmth, and that was her bedroom, so that’s where we sat and talked. And what happened was what happens when people sit in bedrooms and talk. I was quite handsome when I was young.

•

She had jokes she told.

What’s better than winning gold in the paralympics? she would ask.

What’s better?

Arms and legs.

•

I had things that I did.

Whenever I kissed her hello I would cradle her face in my right hand, which I would warm up in my pocket before I arrived. If she had an eyelash on her cheek I would carefully wipe it off with my fingertip and tell her to make a wish, and she would never tell me what the wish was, and she was one of the only people I ever met who could do that without the unspoken being obvious.

Once, filling in time, I bought her a purse at the St Vincent de Paul’s in town, an old purple vinyl thing, and she quietly put the small amount of money she had inside it and then carried it in her hand whenever we left the house. 

•

We spent a lot of our time together.

When I’d come around I’d buy cheese and bread and cheap ham that tasted like sweat and we would eat dinner together, or lunch, and that seemed very civilised in the absence of a hotplate. The days I wasn’t there she would just eat bread toasted grinningly with a cigarette lighter, or sometimes nothing at all. I would arrive to find the house empty of food and she would shrug off my questions and suggest we just go get something now. And that didn’t annoy me in the beginning. It made me want to be there even more, as much as I could, to make sure she was okay.

When I’d stay over I would sleep behind her, naked, my arm around her waist, or slung over her small hip, and I’d think, This is how men lie with women. And in the beginning I would ignore the fact that she always smelled and tasted of cigarettes and woke up coughing and hacking and always got into bed with feet blackened from the filth on the floor. She didn’t own any make-up, and I genuinely believed she didn’t need to. Her skin was perfect, her eyes were dark, her yellow smile perfectly shaped.

•

My landlord never asked me about the nights I didn’t come home, which ended up being frequent. I paid my rent on time, every Friday, dogs barking their arses off, me apologising for causing such a ruckus. These weekly, senseless apologies came to be the first of my outlets, I suspect now, for a general sense I had, that I have still, that I owe an apology to someone, I don’t know who, for something, I don’t know what.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’d say, and hand him some cash. And he would simply take it and say, Thankyou. All well?

And I’d say, Yes, I’m sorry.

I was being honest when I told her, the girl that is, that it was for his sake I didn’t want us to go around to my room, because he was really quite unbelievably old.

And so whenever we spent time together, it was at her house, which was a shadeless twenty-minute walk from mine. We never had anywhere to go except the supermarket. We’d walk there and browse the cereal aisle. We never spoke out in public, only at home, and we never held hands if there were people around. I don’t know why. We never discussed it. It was just a rule we had.

I think that could have been the only way it started to feel like we were married. 

•

One morning in March I picked up the newspaper from the recycling bin, where my landlord had put it. On the front page was the word Tragedy and then, smaller, the words At the snow, and beneath that a picture of a young man’s face. I recognised him. I’d gone to school with him as a kid. He’d stayed at my house. I remembered being stirred from sleep one night by my mother shuffling around, putting new sheets on his mattress, as he stood watching with a look on his face which, to this day, I don’t know the word for.

In the picture he was wearing ski goggles on his forehead and he had stubble on his chin and a smile on his face, and I thought he looked older than I would have expected. The article said he’d been killed in an avalanche and that his sister had been there and seen the whole thing and dug around in eight feet of snow calling his name for hours and hours until they finally found her, exhausted, and that he had just graduated from university and taken up employment at a sports management company.

That night, when the girl climbed into bed with me, she had cold hands and she placed one of them between my thighs and for some reason I felt very angry.

Can you wash your feet, I said.

She got up and left and I could hear the tap running in the kitchen, the pipes shuddering somewhere under the floor, and then the noise stopped. But she didn’t come back. I then heard the clicking of her cigarette lighter out in the front room. I heard it again a few minutes later.

I must have been asleep when she finally came to bed.

•

Sometimes, in the afternoons, I would walk to her place to find her sitting on the crumbling paved area out front, her eyes red and a cigarette in her hand and her thighs sticking out pale from a pair of shorts, ants crawling across her lap. Just watching the road as if waiting for something to arrive. Which could only mean me. She would say nothing was wrong and that she was just enjoying the sun.

Or I would get there and hear banging noises from the street and come inside to find her shifting a pile of broken tiles from one side of the front room to the other and she’d say she’d just been trying to get the place in order, which could almost have been funny had it only happened once.

•

It was autumn now. The gutters in the streets were filling up with leaves, and every now and again the sun was disappearing behind clouds long enough for you to notice the breeze.

I was counting my money more regularly. There was less and less of it.

•

We were on our way back from the supermarket the day her uncle finally turned up. He was waiting out front, leaning against a beat up old station wagon, smoking. He was gaunt and wore a beard and had a blue teardrop tattooed here, under his left eye. He began smiling when he saw us but I could tell from the way her steps slowed next to mine that I shouldn’t smile back.

Fancy seeing you here, he said. Mind if I come in?

Your house, she said.

Yeah, he said. My house.

She led him inside. I followed a few steps behind.

We moved silently through the house and, without any kind of negotiation, towards the bedroom. Maybe in her fear she was trying to be hospitable. Maybe she wanted him to see the pitiful amount of space she was taking up, see the ragged carpet and the mattress without sheets and the windowsill she kept her toothbrush on.

We stood a moment. Me by the door, her out in open space, him between us, flexing his wrists.

You know, he said, I might fix this place up. 

She didn’t say anything.

Get some tenants in, he said. Wouldn’t take much. Splash of paint. Bit of carpet. Bit of Ratsak. Move all the rubbish out. I always like this house when I visit. I always think, I should put some money in it. Make something of it, you know?

She still said nothing. Stared at him.

Then he punched her.

He didn’t slap her. He punched her. The way you could never imagine doing to a girl. Closed fist. No clapping noise to suggest it might sound worse than it looked, but a brief, factual thud as his knuckles connected with her face, and a louder one as she stumbled back against the wall.

Don’t, I said, regretting it instantly, before he’d even turned to me, which he did very slowly, taking his time. In almost a whisper I said, Stop.

He moved towards me and I glanced across at her and she was holding her hand to her face and looking stunned.

He stood over me and I tried to hide the way my weight was shifting onto my back foot, which was ridiculous because my palms were already up, facing him, fingers splayed.

He breathed and I looked into his eyes.

You’re just a fucken kid, he said.

We all stood silently for a moment and thought about that. Then he looked back and forth between us, then around at the room, up at the ceiling, down at her garbage bags.

Look at how you’re living, he said. Look at this fucken place. Then, to me, he said, I’d tell her to get out again, but she never listens, this one. Stupid little cunt, aren’t you? Bitch? Tell you what, he said. Stay. It’s yours. Be winter soon. It’ll be a palace. You can fucken freeze.

He cast his eyes around the room again and they settled on the purse I’d bought her, which was sitting on the floor by the window. He walked over and picked it up and opened it and counted its contents and then looked up at us. Then he walked slowly towards the door, taking the purse with him. He didn’t shut the front door after him. We heard the car start.

It must have been a few minutes after he was gone that I stopped staring at her and asked if she was okay.

•

Days later I finally turned up and we talked a while, like normal, like nothing had happened, and then we kissed each other and she took off her clothes, and I saw that she was cut to ribbons down there, half her hair missing. I asked her what in God’s name had happened.

Trying to make myself nice for you, she said.

I wanted to cry, wanted to feel like wanting to cry, but nothing came out. In the bathroom, I considered bashing my fist against an exposed beam in the wall, but thought better of it. The beam was splintery and I wasn’t going to hurt myself. It took me a week to figure it out for sure, but that was the moment, the moment I saw her slashed to pieces with a cheap razor blade, that I began deciding it was over and time for me to leave.

She was such a nice girl, so ruined.

And over the course of that week, the only full week since meeting her that I didn’t see her, I convinced myself to hate her for being such a ridiculous mess of a human being, for being such a fool as to care for someone who was only passing through.

When I told her I was going, she asked, Where to? I didn’t answer. Then she asked, Why? And I said, Because I’m going to be bigger than this, which is an astounding and very cruel thing to say to anyone, and is never true, and is a brand of cruelty of which, unfortunately, not only the young and stupid are capable. We don’t outgrow people. We get sick of who we were when we decided to fall in love with them in the first place.

•

That same afternoon, as I arrived back to my boarding room, I went and knocked on my landlord’s door and told him I was going to leave the next day, but I’d give him a week’s rent in lieu. It was the first time he said more than three words to me since the first time we’d met.

I don’t know what I’m going to do, he said. Not many people come through here wanting to rent, not that you’d want in your home, at least. I don’t know how I’ll make up the money.

Half-joking, awkwardly, I suggested he breed dachshunds, since he liked them so much, but he shook his head and said to me, We’re bachelors.

You seem happy enough, I told him.

He said, We keep ourselves to ourselves. We don’t hurt anybody and nobody hurts us.

In that moment, hating and feeling sorry for myself, it seemed like a very sensible way to live, and my landlord with his two loudmouth dogs seemed less like a lonely old man than a wise one.

•

A year later I met your mother. Not in a supermarket or anywhere so necessary. We met through mutual friends at a dinner. She wore dresses and had a few pieces of jewelry and her hair was combed straight always and her father shook my hand when I met him and when she kissed me she made a noise that, at the time, I found very appealing. For these reasons I quickly willed myself to forget all about my landlord and the town I lived in and the girl I knew there, because your mother was a good match for me, someone I never meant to be bigger than and so wouldn’t need to leave, and it wouldn’t have done to talk about those things with her. That kind of stuff isn’t very charming. And I suppose I wanted to have you, and I knew going in that some things would have to be left out.

Watchmen (2009) MA15+

When it was originally published in 1987, the graphic novel Watchmen, by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, was hailed as possessing a sense of psychological realism without precedent in the form, and lauded for its incisive portrayal of the effects of the Cold War on the American understanding of heroism. Among its many distinctions, it was the only comic book honoured with a place on TIME Magazine’s list of the All-Time 100 Best Novels. While it’s unlikely to achieve comparable honours, the film adaptation of Watchmen, the latest effort from director Zack Snyder (300), makes a deadly-earnest attempt on the meaty themes and self-reflexivity of its inspiration. If only the film could be judged by its good intentions.

When The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Grey’s Anatomy) is beaten to a pulp and thrown from his high-rise apartment window, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, Semi Pro) sets out to discover the assassin’s identity. Whether he does it out of self-concern or superhero solidarity is never really clear but, figuring they’ll share his alarm, he appeals for help to his erstwhile colleagues: a gang of misanthropic and dysfunctional vigilantes including the irradiated Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous), his long-suffering girlfriend, Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman, The Heartbreak Kid), the mild-mannered Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson, Angels in America) and the preening genius, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode, Match Point). They’re all too concerned with their various personal problems to commit to Rorschach’s whodunit (at least until very late in the game), but his arrival sparks a series of digressions and flashbacks through which we learn these characters’ troubled backgrounds, and watch them confront their uncertain future.

These trials of the superheart couldn’t come at a worse time. While President Nixon was, in the Watchmen universe, able to secure a third term by winning the Vietnam War, his luck in negotiating brinkmanship with the Russians has been less favourable. The so-called “doomsday clock”—whose function as a moderator of public sentiment seems roughly as efficacious as Fox News in the War on Terror—has just been set to “five minutes to midnight”, meaning nuclear trigger fingers on both side of the Pacific are getting extremely itchy.

As you can sense coming from about twenty minutes in, the paths to The Comedian’s murderer and the foiling of the impending holocaust will converge fortuitously in the end. The ethical double bind in which this lands our heroes is somewhat harder to see coming.

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While the likes of The Dark Knight and Sin City have done much to reinvigorate the comic book/superhero genre, both in terms of the canvas size and emotional terrain available, none has taken us as far into the heart of darkness as Watchmen. It renders the familiar push-pull of its heroes’ public responsibilities versus their guy/girl-next-door domestic tribulations with an unusually careful hand, and develops in its characters the kind of complex emotional problems and self-awareness at which Hancock’s attempts were so cringe-worthy. The Watchmen are concerned about their media profiles. They are variously sell-outs and stoics. They act heroically as much out of a need to feel alive and needed as any higher moral imperative, and they know it. They are confounded by their Sisyphean duties in a world perpetually at war. They are beholden to the good opinion of a reliably unappreciative citizenry, whom they never truly meet. They are faced with evils they elect not to act upon, and they are forced to wonder why.

Which sounds great. But where the Batman films work and Watchmen, despite the great earnestness with which it pursues this stuff, does not is in the pleasure of watching. In Batman, we are willing to brave the darkness because, somewhere, there'll be light. Perhaps because of the intensity of its thematic ambitions, Watchmen ends up taking itself far too seriously. In its relentless examination of superheroic ennui, it often loses sight of the fact that brooding is not the same thing as being thoughtful; that nostalgia is not the same thing as reflection. The result is that what is intended as sprawling and epic becomes meandering and ponderous; what is designed to be complex ends up opaque; and the handful of riffs intended to be fun are, by the time we get to them, simply too few. Darkened throughout by the shadow of Armageddon, the dank, crumbling world of Watchmen becomes too joyless to like and reveals its characters as too damaged to redeem it.

Given which, it’s ironic that where the film further lets itself down is in its seeming disinclination to treat its context as seriously as its characters. Latent in the third act are perhaps the timeliest questions Watchmen might have asked: Does the need for heroes disappear when politicians assume their mantle? Does individual heroism become obsolete when most people’s problems are inherently political, their solutions likely macroeconomic? And, perhaps most importantly, should we presume that God, if he exists (which he does here, in the form of Dr Manhattan), cares enough about the world to prevent its destruction, let alone take sides? It was on this ground that Watchmen might have staked its claim to greatness, or at least justified its wearyingly anhedonic tone. Sadly, it’s ground the filmmakers seem bashful to tread. Instead they content themselves with glib broadsides (television referred to a “super weapon”—zang!) and music hall prosthetic gags (Nixon’s nose has grown in step with his tenure—kapow!). In this sense, the ending is also hackle-raising: test-audience-approved denouement meets undergrad Nietzsche. This structural bow-ribbon doesn’t just feel at odds with the rest of the film, it does nothing whatsoever to address the character dilemmas with which the bulk of the story is concerned. The net result is a similar brand of pyrrhic moral victory as ended 300. However much the swelling soundtrack endeavours to make it seem otherwise, the characters are in fact left with far bigger problems than they had going in.

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Will fans of Snyder’s trademark balletic violence and slow-motion gore have fun? Some. Whether or not the belabouring of this aesthetic makes him—as has been so incessantly billed—a visionary is another question. The claim seems a little grandiose given his short list of credits, the two best-known of which have been adaptations of successful graphic novels, much of the “visionary" legwork having already been done by someone else.