USA 2003
Director: David Jacobson
Stars: Jeremy Renner, Artel Kayaru, Bruce Davison
Everyone’s pretty familiar with the basic story of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee serial killer who lured 17 young men to his home, drugged them then poured muriatic acid into holes he’d drilled in their skulls, ate parts of their bodies, had sex with their corpses, then boiled their heads and stored them in his refrigerator. A Gay Public Relations Department nightmare, Dahmer served two years of a 936-year sentence before a fellow inmate bashed him to death with a broom handle on November 28, 1994 (at 9.11 am, incidentally).
This film by David Jacobson is sensitive and interesting, if a little too subtle for its own good. Jacobson meditates on Dahmer’s motivations, ideas and emotions without delving too much into the Grand Guignol of the storyline. This is an interesting decision but ultimately a mistake, as Dahmer’s story is macabre, and so when Jacobson underplays the gore he lobotomises the material. Though we are treated to a session or two of skull-drilling, the film drifts vaguely from one artistically staged scene to the next before finishing with a unsatisfying question mark. Subject matter this inscrutable and scary shouldn't be left hanging on a vine of existential ennui and arty-farty lens work.
Jeremy Renner is a bit too spunky to play the nerdy, introverted Dahmer, as though it’s good to spend time with a sexy maniac, Renner’s obvious charisma is at odds with the black hole vacuum he’s trying to play. Jeffrey Dahmer aimed to disable his victims until they became automata, concubines in a zombified harem that wouldn’t talk back or ask any questions. Renner does his best, and is clearly a gifted actor, but is too sexy to be convincing in this role. Plain Henry Thomas would have been a better choice, and he would have carried weirdo screen memories from the pre-teen erotica of his performance as alien-besotted misfit Elliott in E.T.
So the film’s outstanding sequences, such as a strobe lit scene inside the back room of a gay disco where Jeffrey rapes guys he’s drugged at the bar, don’t fit together to make any kind of cohesive whole. They look great, and they facilitate the movie’s commendable reluctance to draw neat psychological lines, but the overall result is inertia and a frustrating lack of commitment. The movie dips in and out of Jeffrey’s relationship with his father (Bruce Davison) but doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing there, and eventually abandons this plot line. Jeff’s casual boyfriend (Artel Kayaru) is in almost every other scene, but doesn’t do much but urge Jeffrey to be a bit more emotionally open, and realise his wider potentials. Kayaru resembles Glenn Plummer, and his role here is almost identical to Plummer’s “dancin’ ain’t fucking’” role in Showgirls.
Dahmer is really owned by actors like Dion Basco, who plays a victim who tried to escape before being sent back into Dahmer’s apartment by police who believed Dahmer’s story that the non-English speaking youth was his drunken lover. Sedated then dead on Dahmer’s bed during several later scenes, Basco plays a poignant sort of silent witness.
