FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
DAHMER
DVD Features: Scene Selection. Spanish subtitles. Commentary by Jacobson & Kayàru. Featurette.
Trailer. Full Screen.
Instead of blood-and-guts violence and edge-of-your-seat suspense, Dahmer
mixes the mundane with the unexpected in a successful effort to humanize
serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (Renner). Dahmer, for instance, cares for his pet fish. In another scene, he weeps after his first
kill. And, for the most part, the film merely explores–not answers–how an awkward gay
teenager turned into a murderer. In doing
so, writer-director Jacobson examines interesting issues of race and sexuality.
Two white policemen ignore the warnings of two suspicious black women and instead
trust Dahmer. In another scene, Dahmer tells his pick-up, a young black man (Kayàru)
“You’re pissed at every one because you’re gay. Everyone laughs at you,
shits on you. And you’re black, so it’s worse–the bottom of the bottom.” Renner
delivers his lines with subtlety and is the glue that holds this film
together, even when other performances waver.
The DVD offers Spanish subtitles, but something’s lost in the translation.
In one scene, Dahmer’s father says, “Let’s go to church,” a line most
likely intended to be darkly ironic. The translation: “Let’s go.” And I found
the featurette rather pedantic: I enjoy trying to figure out the film’s many
visual metaphors on my own, without too much help from the commentators.
Both the featurette and the commentary reveal that marketers can sometimes
do the right thing. Apparently Jacobson’s pretentious subtitle, The Mind is
a Place of Its Own (that’s Dante, in case you didn’t know) was wisely cut
by the editor’s pen. Steven Cordova, poet, whose chapbook, Slow Dissolve, is forthcoming
from Momotombo Press in fall 2003
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