There are few things as tragicomic as the passion project gone awry. It’s one thing to whiff with work-for-hire. It’s quite another to bomb the story you believe you were born to tell. Put yourself in the Italian loafers of Mitch Glazer. Within the comedy world, he’s a Zelig figure with a knack for being in the right place at the right time with the right people. In the mid-’70s, the right place at the right time happened to be the hallowed halls of 30 Rock, where as a young writer for Crawdaddy, Glazer followed a Falstaffian young television sketch performer named John Belushi, whom Glazer dubbed “the most dangerous man on TV” in a cover story that went a long way toward cementing the legend of the original cast of Saturday Night Live.
Glazer helped make Saturday Night Live the epicenter of mid-’70s hipness, and he didn’t hurt Crawdaddy’s already vaunted reputation in the process. Saturday Night Live never stopped repaying Glazer for the favor. Michael O’Donoghue, the evil genius often regarded as one of the most brilliant minds ever to bless the show as a writer or producer, became Glazer’s writing partner on the 1979 dark comedy Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video and the 1989 blockbuster Scrooged, a vehicle for O’Donoghue’s old Saturday Night Live buddy Bill Murray. Glazer made quite a name for himself both as a journalist and a screenwriter, but for the past two decades he has nursed a dream as idiotic as it is boldly sincere: a deeply personal neo-noir rich in symbolism and atmosphere about a melancholy jazz musician and his doomed romance with a woman with angel wings.
This was a story close to his heart. This was a story he was put on earth to tell. He wouldn’t just be one of a series of screenwriters, as he was on previous projects like Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (where David Mamet came in at the last minute and did uncredited rewrites as a favor to producer Art Linson) or the Al Pacino/Colin Farrell vehicle The Recruit. This would be Glazer’s vision. He wouldn’t just write. He’d also make his directorial debut. Passion Play is such a passion project that “passion” is in its name. It might as well have been called Labor Of Love.
When it came to casting, Glazer once again proved lucky. For the lead role of a formerly heroin-addicted horn player angling for redemption, he cast his old high-school buddy Mickey Rourke, fresh off a comeback fueled by The Wrestler and Iron Man 2. For the female lead he snagged Megan Fox, one of the preeminent sex symbols of our time and a major box-office draw due to Transformers and Transformers: The Revenge Of The Dark Side Of The Fallen. When a 20something actor named Toby Kebbell dropped out of the crucial role of a mobster who forms the third corner in a romantic triangle with Fox and Rourke, Glazer’s old pal Murray volunteered to fill in. Since Murray is not the kind of man to go around doling out favors willy-nilly, or doling out favors at all, he obviously must have really believed in the script or in Glazer. My guess is Glazer.
It’s not easy acting opposite actors as famously intimidating as Rourke and Murray, but Fox had done such a smash-up job on the film, at least according to early reports, that Rourke hailed her as the “most talented” actress he has ever worked with. Glazer went even further, crowing in a Vanity Fair Q&A that after they filmed their first scene together Rourke pulled him aside and said, “She’s fucking amazing! Oh my God, it’s going to be so good!”
Everything was coming up Milhouse for Glazer until the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Glazer’s vulnerable little orphan was eviscerated. The brickbats didn’t end with the critics. The perpetually unpredictable Rourke told the New York blog Vulture that the film was receiving a limited release “because it’s not very good,” dismissed the film as “terrible” and lumped it in with the dozens of other terrible films he had made over the course of his sometimes glorious, sometimes shitty career. Rourke later backtracked, but the damage was done: Glazer’s labor of love was officially DOA. The film Glazer had dreamed about making for two decades and cast with three giant stars, two of them genuine icons, received only a tiny theatrical release before appearing on DVD.
The problems begin with what should be the film’s greatest strength: Rourke’s performance. In order for Passion Play to come off as anything but a laughable humiliation—as you will see from the clips below, embarrassment isn’t a strong enough word—for all involved, the film needs the reborn Rourke of The Wrestler, a world-weary survivor whose gruff exterior just barely masks naked vulnerability. Instead it gets the Mickey Rourke of countless forgotten direct-to-DVD movies. And speaking of that gruff exterior: Passion Play ultimately takes the form of a tragic romance, so it’d be nice if its male lead didn’t look like he was wearing an ill-fitting Mickey Rourke Halloween mask. Rourke was once a beautiful man. Now he looks like he skinned that beautiful man, aged his head in water for decades, then strapped it on his head.
Passion Play banks way too hard on Rourke’s magnetism to carry it through its rough spots, which begin with the first frame and end with the last. Glazer hasn’t bothered to write a character for his old friend, just a blurry noir caricature of the soulful sufferer to be filled in with fond memories of Barfly, Diner, Body Heat, and other films Rourke made when he was still young and hungry. Passion Play needs Rourke at his ragged best. Instead, he seems to have decided to quit acting just before filming began without telling anyone and went ahead and played the role anyway. Rourke shows up, hits his marks, and says his lines, but what he does can’t quite be considered “acting” in even the loosest sense. He’s onscreen all the time, but he’s not exactly present.
Can you blame him? Passion Play opens with Rourke’s soulful horn player escaping death at the hands of a hitman hired to murder him as punishment for fucking the wife of mobster Bill Murray. Just before the deed can be done, however, a mysterious gentleman in what appears to be karate pajamas kills the killer for unknown reasons, then wanders away, as folks tend to do in those circumstances. Rourke then wanders through the desert until he encounters a mysterious sideshow and its most beguiling attraction: a Manic Pixie Dream Bird-Girl played by a sad-eyed, pouty-lipped Megan Fox. Yes, Rourke falls instantly in love with a beautiful woman with fully formed wings on her back. She’s an angel, or rather a bird-girl who can fly, sort of, but only when the wind is particularly strong.