Haggisboy
03-06-2007, 03:15 PM
Kevin Costner as a serial killer? Would never work, you say? Well, you’d be wrong.
In Mr Brooks, Costner’s eponymous character is a decent family man, the CEO of a successful company, and the winner of Portland’s Man of the Year award. But peel away the veneer and Earl Brooks is a tortured soul, so tormented by his inner demon (wonderfully portrayed by William Hurt) that he attends AA meetings, labeling himself an addict, although never disclosing the precise nature of his addiction.
Meticulousness describes Earl Brooks’ lifestyle. From his button-down bowtie and glasses, to the restrained opulence of his home, everything speaks of a man for whom planning and thinking ahead is a lifestyle, almost to the point of obsessive compulsiveness.
Mistakes are not part of Brooks’ vocabulary, so when he does slip up, leaving the door open for a sycophant played by comedian Dane Cook to sashay into his life, Brooks finds himself out of his element, presented with a wild card that his high stakes game of poker potentially can’t handle.
Layered into the film’s onion-like structure, are the stories of Detective Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore) hot on the trail of Brooks’ “thumbprint killer” profile while finding herself stalked by another, far less ingenious psychopath escapee that she once put away, and that of Brooks’ daughter (Danielle Panabaker) who seems to have inherited her father’s bad-ass genes.
Directed and co-written by Bruce A. Evans (who wrote the screenplay for the 1986 classic Stand By Me) and financed entirely out of pocket by Costner himself, Mr Brooks is the perfect example of an uncompromising script brought to life by an actor that believed in it. The end result? A surprisingly original movie that Hitchcock himself would have been proud of.
In Mr Brooks, Costner’s eponymous character is a decent family man, the CEO of a successful company, and the winner of Portland’s Man of the Year award. But peel away the veneer and Earl Brooks is a tortured soul, so tormented by his inner demon (wonderfully portrayed by William Hurt) that he attends AA meetings, labeling himself an addict, although never disclosing the precise nature of his addiction.
Meticulousness describes Earl Brooks’ lifestyle. From his button-down bowtie and glasses, to the restrained opulence of his home, everything speaks of a man for whom planning and thinking ahead is a lifestyle, almost to the point of obsessive compulsiveness.
Mistakes are not part of Brooks’ vocabulary, so when he does slip up, leaving the door open for a sycophant played by comedian Dane Cook to sashay into his life, Brooks finds himself out of his element, presented with a wild card that his high stakes game of poker potentially can’t handle.
Layered into the film’s onion-like structure, are the stories of Detective Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore) hot on the trail of Brooks’ “thumbprint killer” profile while finding herself stalked by another, far less ingenious psychopath escapee that she once put away, and that of Brooks’ daughter (Danielle Panabaker) who seems to have inherited her father’s bad-ass genes.
Directed and co-written by Bruce A. Evans (who wrote the screenplay for the 1986 classic Stand By Me) and financed entirely out of pocket by Costner himself, Mr Brooks is the perfect example of an uncompromising script brought to life by an actor that believed in it. The end result? A surprisingly original movie that Hitchcock himself would have been proud of.