The comic book movie that “offended” Jodie Foster: “So painfully cartoonish”
Over the years, Jodie Foster has starred in several films that have had critics and audience members run out for their heirloom pearls to clutch.
Foster has never shied away from potentially controversial topics, with the most obvious examples being her breakthrough as a teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver, and of course her turn as FBI agent Clarice Starling nursing complicated feelings for Hannibal the cannibal in The Silence of the Lambs.
While these films generated a lot of column inches in their day and were lightning rods for controversy in certain quarters, they were also extremely well-made pictures that resonated with critics. Foster landed two Oscar wins and a nomination from the lot, which speaks to an underlying element of sensitivity and/or maturity of performance and understanding granted by the uncompromising topics.
Foster’s history of pushing the envelope with a high degree of artistic integrity was thrown into fresh focus when she took a grim and gritty comic book blockbuster to task for what she deemed an offensive storyline. While speaking with USA Today, she railed against Sin City, the technically pioneering neo-noir directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, who was also the writer and artist of the source comics and a household name in the DC universe.
The film starred a veritable who’s who of Hollywood in the mid-2000s, including Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen to Brittany Murphy and Benicio Del Toro, and was a huge hit at the box office, regaling audiences and critics alike with the unique digital filmmaking techniques used to faithfully translate the comic book panels to screen. This same process would be used to even greater effect the following year in 300, another adaptation of a Miller IP.
To Foster, though, no amount of cinematic finery could distract from what she considered distasteful about one of the film’s three overlapping stories starring Bruce Willis as an ageing detective who saves a young girl from being molested, then is forced to protect her again as an adult stripper, when her attempted rapist returns for revenge. Thanks to Sin City being a knowingly over-the-top tribute to hardboiled noir novels and pulp detective fiction, the story isn’t exactly subtle, and the rapist dubbed ‘That Yellow Bastard’ is literally depicted as a grotesquely deformed yellow man in a predominantly black and white world.
“That was so painfully cartoonish, I was offended,” she raged, “I don’t know how you enjoy or laugh about a child abduction and molestation. What part of that sentence is funny? I can’t get beyond that.”
The iconic star went one step further and accused the film of projecting a bad message to the world, and one she didn’t want her two young boys picking up on, warning, “I don’t know if everyone understands the impact of that movie’s message”, although she declined to specify what exactly she believed that was.
Overall, the reaction to Foster’s comments, especially from fans of Miller’s work, was one of bemusement and hypocrisy, especially because Sin City at no point presents the abduction and molestation story as funny. It’s easily the grimmest story in a frankly murky movie, and is played very straight in terms of its emotionality.
Perhaps the exaggerated imagery and extreme tone of the film made that harder to recognise, or Foster truly believed there was no underlying sensitivity to it, unlike in her movies, whatever the case, something about Rodriguez and Miller’s heightened world certainly rubbed her the wrong way, and I’d bet good money she didn’t return for the sequel, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.
