Mark Reviews Movies: VAL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 22, 2021

For the majority of his life, actor Val Kilmer has been documenting his experiences on camera, and we're not talking about the dozens of Hollywood and independent movies in which he has appeared over the course of his almost 40-year career. No, Kilmer has owned multiple video and film cameras over the course of his life, and according to the man himself, there exists "thousands" of hours of footage that he captured over the decades. We have little reason to doubt Kilmer. Near the start of Val, the actor takes directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott into the vast storage room where the footage is housed, and the space, the boxes, and the canisters all add up.

Assembling this vast amount of footage into a narrative seems like a pretty daunting task for the filmmakers. Kilmer himself acknowledges this, but the actor, who also produced this documentary, knows exactly that the challenge, which he has presented to himself and everyone involved in the film, almost certainly will never be accomplished to the fullest extent.

There's too much footage. There are too many angles from which to approach Kilmer's biography. There are too many thoughts that he wants to share.

There's simply too much life, but after experiencing a significant and still-persistent health crisis, Kilmer also knows, in a very tangible way, that there's no time like the present. There's likely less of it for him at this point.

To be clear, Kilmer isn't dying. He had throat cancer a few years before this documentary was shot (excluding the extensive archival footage recorded by Kilmer, obviously) and edited together around 2019. The cancer, thankfully, is gone, but the radiation and chemotherapy treatments eventually resulted in a tracheotomy. Kilmer has a hole in his throat now and speaks by covering the opening with his fingers.

The directors treat this medical fact as such. This is now how Kilmer lives, speaks, and breathes, and we can, should, and must accept that, because there, but for the fortune of fate and our own biology, go we.

For the most part, Kilmer has accepted his condition, although he admits frustration and loneliness that he is often not understood. The filmmakers provide subtitles when he does speak, and when we first hear a voice that sounds vaguely like Kilmer's of old, we wonder what technological or casting trickery Poo and Scott have employed. The answer is both simple and rather touching: It's Kilmer's son Jack, reading the script that the actor has written to accompany this chronological account of Kilmer's personal and professional lives.

The film is divided as such, with most of the previously recorded footage focusing on his acting career, with touches of the family into which he was born and since has made, and most of the present-day footage focusing on his daily routine, with moments of him attending various functions celebrating his professional accomplishments. Both the present and the past begin with intimately personal details: respectively, his current health and a family broken by divorce and by tragedy.

For all of the fascinating behind-the-scenes drama and antics and intrigue that we see in much of this footage, the most important part of Kilmer's life becomes his family. His very habit of documenting everyday events and professional experiences on camera seems to stem from it. His younger brother Wesley was an aspiring filmmaker, who re-created and parodied some of his favorite movies as a kid and teenager. Kilmer would act in them, until he started acting in high school and becoming, at the time, the youngest person to be accepted into the drama department at Juilliard.

The teenaged Kilmer arrived in New York City from Los Angeles shortly after Wesley's sudden and tragic death. The aspiring actor brought a video camera with him and hasn't stopped recording since.

There's a lot more about his family—the emotional unavailability of his father, who eventually asked his movie-star son for loans, and his devotion to his quiet but obviously loving mother—as the years progress, and we see home movies of Kilmer, then married to actress Joanne Whalley (who later appears in the present-day footage, as a hopeful epilogue to their messy divorce), with his children. Whatever absences he may have taken for work no longer matter. There's Jack, narrating his father's story, and there is, as Kilmer lovingly labels her, his "genius daughter" Mercedes, living next door to her father. The huge smile Kilmer has when they're about to meet to leave for an event says it all.

These scenes are what leave the most significant impression, but the filmmakers don't skimp on the footage Kilmer recorded while working on his biggest and more notorious movies. Some of it, such as the rivalry Kilmer intentionally but playfully started with Tom Cruise on the set of Top Gun, feels like fluff.

Most of it, though, is fascinating. Along with Kilmer's own dissection of his performance, a juxtaposition of scenes from The Doors, in which Kilmer played Jim Morrison, with his constant rehearsals for the role, as well as footage of the real Morrison, offers some genuine insight into how he approaches acting. As for the nightmarish professional jobs, he describes the dichotomy of wanting to be Batman with the uncomfortable reality of playing the superhero, and his chance to meet Marlon Brando, one of his icons, is ruined by the production in which he had that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The filmmakers and Kilmer himself breeze by the actor's less-than-favorable reputation (His reasoning for it, especially after hearing about and seeing those unfortunate production experiences, is sound), but regardless, whoever Kilmer was then is not the same man he is now. He's introspective, a bit regretful, and mostly thankful, and Val, assembled with some humility, offers a clear-headed portrait of a person searching for and sincerely finding meaning in a life on and behind camera.

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