Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #125 The Ninth Gate (1999)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
The #MeToo movement casts a long, dark, troubling shadow over pop culture and entertainment history. This is true of Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 as well. Not too long ago I wrote about Michael Jackson’s long-form video Moonwalker and the fascinating, complicated era of Jackson’s life and career it embodies.
Just last month I wrote about Kevin Spacey’s performance as a man of power and means with dark secrets in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and now I am turning my attention to the work of another real-life villain in the form of 1999’s The Ninth Gate, a collaboration between convicted sex criminal Roman Polanski and suspected domestic abuser Johnny Depp.
Like seemingly all critics and cinephiles, I used to hold Depp in high esteem. He was one of my favorite actors. Then he was accused of domestic abuse of Amber Heard and my opinion of him changed instantly and dramatically. Then all sorts of conflicting information came out about Depp, Heard and their relationship and now I don’t know what to believe about the troubled actor and lost soul.
Our anti-hero examine a pristine first edition copy of Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be a Redneck If…
That is not true of Polanski. The facts are pretty damn clear with him. Polanski is on record as drugging and raping a 13 year old girl, a crime a horrifying number of people have no problem excusing, dismissing or contextualizing in a way that makes Polanski the victim and not the child he sexually assaulted.
It’s a testament to my strong feelings about Polanski and men like him who get away with committing unspeakable crimes against vulnerable, powerless young women because people enjoy their films that during the opening credits I found myself thinking that everyone associated with The Ninth Gate should be ashamed to have worked with a known sex criminal and predator.
During opening credits in which the camera zooms through a series of ornate doors while the names of the cast and crew fly at the screen I found myself thinking that the opening was awfully derivative of the iconic opening credit sequence of Tales From the Crypt.
That’s not the only way in which The Ninth Gate resembles Tales From the Crypt. If Roman Polanski were to direct a subpar episode of Tales From the Crypt that inexplicably lasted over two hours it would feel a lot like this ostensible guilty pleasure that skimps on the pleasure something awful.
Depp somehow manages to both sleepwalk and overact through the role of Dean Corso, an unscrupulous rare books dealer with terrible, incriminating facial hair whose greatest joy in life comes from fucking over clients.
Dean works with wealthy degenerates like Boris Balkan (Frank Langella), an obsessive collector whose desire to amass the world’s largest, most extensive collection of books about and also, strangely enough by the devil isn’t anywhere near as innocent as it initially appears.
The Ninth Gate revolves around a mad quest for The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, an exceedingly rare book with a unique creative team: it was adapted by a heretic named Aristide Torchia from a book written by, you guessed it, Satan himself.
This Satan-derived tome has the ultimate value-added bonus: in the right hands, the book has the power to resurrect the Prince of Lies, to bring the devil roaring back into this sick, sad, beautiful world for a Q&A, signing and/or world domination.
In The Ninth Gate, the devil is of course the very personification of evil and the Great Deceiver but he’s something else as well: an author. Like me!
Polanski’s pulpy potboiler never acknowledges the ridiculousness of Beezlebub getting into publishing, nor does it mine the abundant humor inherent in the Prince of Darkness dipping a tentative toe into the book business so it never stops being unintentionally funny.
Throughout the film I kept imagining the devil promoting his book, going on WTF and telling his story to Oprah. I enjoyed by imaginary movie about the Devil trying to score a best-seller considerably more than the movie I was watching, but it had the benefit of being theoretical.
Our scuzzy, rumpled anti-hero travels to Europe in search of the truth about The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows but everywhere he goes people end up dead, the victims of suspicious suicides.
Dean encounters something else as well: the mysterious presence of a beautiful woman credited only as “The Girl.” Instead of casting an actress or a movie star in the role like Angelina Jolie, Polanski instead cast his wife, Emmanuele Seigner.
As always, Seigner single-handedly drags the film down with her lifeless, wooden presence. In order for The Ninth Gate to work, The Girl has to be a magnetic, wildly charismatic presence, an otherworldly sexpot at once angelic, demonic and positively volcanic in her sexuality. Instead she emerges as an empty cipher, a blank void devoid of danger, energy or excitement.
The Ninth Gate is of course not the first time that Polanski has made a film about a creepy cadre of Satan worshippers trying to engineer a comeback for El Diablo.
Polanski’s campy late nineties horror-thriller resembles Rosemary’s Baby just enough to suffer terribly by comparison, in part because the director perversely chooses to go easy on the horror and ghoulish imagery so he can really invest himself in the literary mystery element of the plot.
Heck, it somehow takes Polanski a full 100 minutes to get to the Satanists in black robes doing Satanic rituals and shit. Late in the film, a dandified Langella returns after a long absence in which he is heard on the phone regularly but never seen to dress down a gathering of occultists for being a bunch of sad, pathetic, desperate losers who are unworthy of calling themselves Satanists.
He’s not wrong! The devil worshippers in The Ninth Gate are a sorry lot. They’re less a powerful and terrifying force for evil than a bunch of sad fanboys and girls pining for their hero’s return yet unworthy of his black bounty.
The devil deserves better than a flimsy bit of baroque nonsense like The Ninth Gate. I don’t mind that The Ninth Gate is vulgar, lurid pulp. I like that about it. What I don’t like is that it’s vulgar, lurid pulp devoid of energy and momentum.
The Ninth Gate aspires only to crackerjack entertainment but falls far short. For better or worse, The Ninth Gate did not put me in the uncomfortable position of having to write positively about someone I consider a monster in order to remain honest.
Polanski has certainly made movies whose brilliance is so undeniable that even his fiercest detractors have to concede his genius. The Ninth Gate is not that kind of a movie. It’s not even in the same ballpark as Rosemary’s Baby or Chinatown.
Since it is not a Tales From the Crypt spinoff, The Ninth Gate does not, sadly, end with the Crypt-Keeper quipping that if Dean really wanted to find a bone-chilling book, he should check out one out from the Die-Scary, or that it looks like he was building a KILL-ection to die for but it might as well.
Forget art: The Ninth Gate isn’t even fun trash.
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