Val Kilmer's Indelible Brilliance
Why the Most Underrated Actor of His Generation is Also the Best
For those of us who are Val Kilmer’s contemporaries, it’s hard to remember a time when he wasn’t a movie star, and for most of our adult lives he has been ubiqitous on- screen. Unlike most actors, Kilmer got the lead in his first movie, the 1984 Zucker Abrams Zucker spoof “Top Secret”. He was only 23, and his singing and dancing were the highlights of an otherwise terrible movie. He went on to make nearly seventy more films in a wide range of genres before losing his voice to throat cancer in 2015.
Along the way, Kilmer earned a reputation among directors and producers (though not by most fellow actors)— being “difficult”. The dreaded D-word is Hollywood code for perfectionism and independent thinking, and carries significant career repercussions. Because he was Julliard-trained and a Method actor through and through, Kilmer always stood apart from his co-stars, who generally were neither. His habit of staying in character—in the case of Jim Morrison, for a year—tried people’s patience, as did his interest in the non-acting aspects of filmmaking. On set he shot videos; he also made directorial suggestions that were sometimes incorporated successfully (as in “Tombstone”) and other times regarded as interference (as in “The Island of Dr. Moreau”). Aside from Kilmer himself it was probably John Frankenheimer, director of “Dr. Moreau”, who did the most damage to his career. Frankenheimer, who got his start in 1950s TV, was an old-school taskmaster brought in to finish the film after the original director was fired. His workmanlike qualities made him exactly the wrong director for Method icons like Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, and the shoot was a disaster. So was the film, and Frankenheimer held a lasting and vocal grudge against Kilmer. His career suffered, and by the beginning of the 2000s he got fewer leads and fewer good movies. Many of Kilmer’s film choices were driven by economic necessity: his divorce expenses and his father’s business debts, which he had to repay after after co-signing millions of dollars in loans.
My recent Val Kilmer film festival featured “The Doors”, “Tombstone” and “Heat”. Of the three, I’ve seen “The Doors” most often, and after thirty years can no longer distinguish between Jim Morrison and Val Kilmer’s portrayal of him. Beyond his astonishing physical transformation, Kilmer did most of the singing in the movie, and so uncannily that even the Doors’ recording engineer couldn’t reliably distinguish their voices.
In “Tombstone” Kilmer plays the dentist-turned-gambler and gunslinger Doc Holliday to Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp, and in four scenes steals the entire movie from a cast of heavyweights. Doc Holliday is to movie Westerns what Hamlet is to the theater, and every great American actor from Walter Huston to Jason Robards has played him. Though Kilmer couldn’t achieve the facial gauntness of some of his predecessors, he perfectly conveys Doc’s essential qualities: his courtly manners and erudition, his tubercular cough, his deadly, ambidextrous pistoling and his undying loyalty to Earp. Kevin Jarre’s script gives Doc all the best lines, but Kilmer gives them nuance and life. As a result, his Doc Holliday has become the portrayal to which all others are compared, and it’s hard to imagine anyone supassing it .
This scene encapsulates Holliday’s character and contradictions. Michael Biehn, who plays Johnny Ringo, has confirmed that he and Kilmer worked out the choreography for the unusual, close-range shootout. Apparently the uncredited Russell directed the sequence, along with much of the movie. It appears that Russell and Kilmer also worked on the editing, with its dramatic closeups of the men’s eyes and mouths. The result is a perfect tiny movie that countless people have watched repeatedly. (On YouTube, many commenters lament Kilmer’s not having won an Oscar for the performance, but it’s worse than that: he wasn’t even nominated, nor was the film or anyone else in the “Tombstone” cast and crew.)
In Michael Mann’s 1995 gangster movie “Heat”, Kilmer is the third lead—after Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro—as Chris Shiherlis, a bank robber/hit man employed by DeNiro’s character. The movie is most famous for its blazing 10-minute shootout in downtown Los Angeles, but Kilmer makes the most of his few chances to act without a carbine. Most impressive is the brief, wordless scene in which his wife (Ashley Judd) signals him from a balcony; unseen cops are waiting in the apartment to arrest him for the bank heist and gunfight. As Chris gets the message, his fleeting expressions of relief, love and anticipation give way to ones of fear and panic. It’s an amazing feat of acting, and it lasts only seconds.
The three films have achieved cult status in the years since their release and remain Kilmer’s most popular. But I also recommend two good lesser-known films that showcase his considerable range: “Wonderland” (2003) in which he plays the porn star John Holmes, and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (2005), in which he plays a droll, gay detective. Delving deeper, there’s “The Salton Sea” (2002), an incoherent film whose only merit is Kilmer’s great performance.
After Val Kilmer lost his ability to speak, it seemed his acting career was over. But recently a British company created an AI text-speech program that allows him to communicate more easily, and in his own voice. Before this breakthrough he acted in few non-speaking roles, notably the forthcoming “Top Gun: Maverick”, but voice replication should bring further opportunities. Still, Kilmer never fit into the movie star box, and has long been as interested in making art and videos as in acting. (It’s fitting that my only encounter with him—some twenty years ago— was at a gallery opening for his paintings, not a film event.) Ironically, the same qualities that once branded him “difficult”—artistic ambition, uncompromising acting standards and strong Christian Science faith—have enabled his survival and transformation.