Turns out Val Kilmer is a man who wears many hats. And he’s a man with many faces and passions. Val acquaints you with a lot of them.
Val Kilmer is a lot to take in. Luckily there’s tons of film capturing him in his early days and onward — including home movies and amateur film projects made with his kid brother, Wesley — from which you can try to devine who he might be off screen and off stage.
Kilmer got the film bug early and started carrying a camera seemingly everywhere all the time. Did he just love storytelling? Was he terribly vain? Both? Maybe it doesn’t matter. He’s got it on film, he warehoused all of it, and he, along with filmmakers Ting Poo and Leo Scott, makes good use of it in Val.
“He was onto the whole obsession with self-recording ahead of everyone else; he kept a video camera running at home, on movie sets, wherever he was,” Owen Gleibeman writes in Variety. “What makes Val a good and heartfelt movie, rather than just some glorified movie-star-as-trashed-parody-of-himself piece of reality-show exploitation, is that Kilmer brings the film an incredible sense of self-awareness.”
The Kilmer kids grew up in “the Valley” — on the San Fernando ranch once owned by Roy Rogers and purchased in Val’s youth by his dad. As the Los Angeles Times once explained, businessman and real estate developer Eugene Kilmer bought the ranch at the top of Trigger Street in 1969 (when Val would have been about 10).
Kilmer would eventually own his own ranch — his was a beloved spread in New Mexico outside of Santa Fe — and you see him riding there, skinny-dipping in the river that ran through it, cradling a newborn on his chest in the old adobe house he shared with his wife, British actress Joanne Whalley. He raised his kids there, and you get to see the cool adults they’ve become. Son Jack narrates the film and sidekicks around with his dad throughout. Devoted daughter Mercedes appears too and seems to be a duplex-mate living next-door now that Kilmer no longer owns the New Mexico ranch, apparently having had to sell it to pay off debts post-divorce.
His physical struggles (having to vomit and being whisked away in a wheelchair with a blanket over his head to lie down midway through an autograph session at some movie convention only to return later to resume graciously signing his name on all manner of memorabilia). His practical joking and wisecracking (including spraying his scolding ex with Silly String on the way to his mother’s funeral in Wickenburg, Arizona). There’s so much here that’s moving and meaningful.
Sure, there’s stuff like pre-fame Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn mooning the camera for Val, as Kilmer was just starting to make his way in the world after studying drama at Juilliard. But the most affecting aspects of the film don’t have to do with titillating things about famous people. Rather, they have to do with Kilmer’s deeply personal, even confessional and haunting, ruminations on his family and faith, films and fame.
Why did it come as a surprise that he’s articulate in giving voice to his own very human drama? Because he’s blond and good-looking?
He has quipped that playing Mark Twain was tough because it’s “a bitch” to play “a genius,” and Kilmer claims not to consider himself in the category. I don’t know about that. He reads a little poem to an audience early in his career that is short and sharp, insightful and funny. If he weren’t deep and multifaceted, Val might have been yet another title in your streaming queue you’d enjoy then move on from and forget.
But it stays with you, days on. As does the man.
Some parts of the film especially take hold and won’t let go. When Kilmer talks about Tombstone, the emotion resonates. He thinks of it as a love story between his Doc Holliday and Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp — like some cosmic inverse of his arrogant, competitive, chest-inflating airman competition with Tom Cruise. The clip of Doc’s deathbed leave-taking from Wyatt is heartbreaking, not just for the moment in the movie but also for the near-death experiences Kilmer has endured in the meantime — and all the more when he reveals that in striving to adequately express the dying Holliday’s pain he arranged to lie on a bed of ice for the scene. When you watch it again, the scene conveys even more suffering.
Scenes like that, stories like Kilmer’s, beg the question: When your looks and health are taken away, what is the measure of the man that remains?
Maybe Kilmer’s affinity for Mark Twain hints at an answer. Maybe his borderline obsession — from which proceeded his one-man stage show Citizen Twain and the 2019 film version, Cinema Twain — has something to do with shared tragedy and the use of humor to blunt the pain. Twain had a son who died at 19 months (diphtheria) and a daughter who died at 24 (spinal meningitis). Shortly before Twain’s own death, his youngest, daughter Jean, died by drowning in a bathtub at home at age 29 after having an epileptic seizure; Kilmer lost his brother Wesley in a similar tragedy when they were both just teenagers with their lives ahead of them.
By those kinds of devastating fires we are finally purified or ultimately destroyed. Kilmer has survived and seems on a path of some kind of purification.
Scenes like that, stories like Kilmer’s, beg the question: When your looks and health are taken away, what is the measure of the man that remains?
He has said in interviews that he’s been working on not being vain. Would that more movie stars put in that work to earn their places on our collective dais. It’s perhaps facile to presume that aging, cancer, and the cumulative effect of life’s trials and tribulations have helped Kilmer plumb his own depths for reasons beyond self-adulation. If this film was just an exercise in vanity, I was totally fooled and taken in.
If there are vestiges of vanity, well, it’s a lifelong effort to stomp out that strong weakness, and probably a lot harder for people in the ego-stroking spotlight. But in the film and the man, I saw and was touched by something redemptive: a need for acceptance, forgiveness, comfort, love, understanding.
In Val, Kilmer might be curating his legacy before someone else does less favorably. But even if that’s the case, Val is indeed a good and heartfelt movie.
Maybe I missed the whole point. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Or maybe I just fell stupidly hard for the handsome, hot guy in the beat-up cowboy hat. But more than a week after watching Val I’m still thinking about it — and him — like I met another switchbacking pilgrim on the hard climb to the final destination and feeling thankful for the thoughtful, interesting company.
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