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Be Sure Sin Will Find You Out
By bukkhead | June 30, 2007
FILM REVIEW: ‘THE NUMBER 23’
Written by Fernley Phillips
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Rated R
98 mins.
Plenty of films have been made based on comics and graphic novels, so it makes sense that the graphic novel aesthetic has begun to bleed into films that don’t take such materials as their source. Watching The Number 23, I would have sworn it was based on a graphic novel—the use of color, the framing of each shot, the use of narrative. Turns out I was wrong. But that’s okay—The Matrix, for example, was filmed and framed with a comic-book style, which pioneered a new camera technique. The Number 23’s cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, also did Pi, and Phone Booth, both of which evoke the same sense of paranoia and fear as The Number 23. So this is definitely a film to study.
In my opinion it fires on all other cylinders as well. Jim Carrey plays Walter Sparrow: husband, father, doc catcher. A series of seemingly unfortunate events lead him to begin reading a mysterious book, the self-printed and published confession of a detective by the name of Fingerling. As Sparrow becomes more enthralled by the novel and the way it reflects his own life, he becomes that much more paranoid and obsessed with the number 23.
Director Joel Schumacher manages to keep the audience at arm’s length in terms of the number obsession. Jim Carry, as Sparrow, doesn’t try to convince us of the mystery and terror of the number 23, choosing instead to display the encroaching madness of a man obsessed. The film cooly juxtaposes Sparrow the reader with Fingerling the character (also played by Carry, a choice that at first seems like a conceit, and eventually becomes integral to the story’s unweaving). In doing so, Carry shows how one man can begin to merge with a fantasy world, if he believes it enough.
A fascination with the so-called “23 Enigma,” is not necessary to enjoying the film; in fact, I would imagine that true aficionados of the 23 apophenia probably would not like the movie too much. It’s, at best, a surface treatment of the phenomena itself, and acts as it should, merely as setting. This is a movie that could have been set against some other strange obsession—collecting baseball cards, keeping a notebook of each passing moment, etc. In this way it is sort of the antithesis of something like The DaVinci Code, where were asked to ignore the plot, dialogue, setting, and direction, and pay attention instead to the puzzle itself. In The Number 23, you would do better to ignore the numbers and pay attention to the descent.
On the other hand, it is fun to look for 23s in the movie. An address is 9554, or a phone number ends in 1211. In this way you get a sense of the bewilderment that Sparrow faces, which makes the ending that much more satisfying. And like a comic book, this makes the kind of film that allows you to pore over each scene many times, to catch the ideas missed before.
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