Kymm Zuckert Finds Some Inspiration in Kilmer's Life in Val (2021, dir. Leo Scott & Ting Poo, US)

So, I saw Top Gun: Maverick this weekend, it is terrific, you don’t have to like the original, see it on the IMAX if you can.

Val Kilmer returns as Iceman, though in his big scene with Maverick, he only speaks briefly and with difficulty, but that is not an act. Somehow, I had missed or forgotten the fact that he had throat cancer, and finding that a documentary about him was released last year, I thought that now is clearly the perfect time to watch it.

It starts with a home video, probably made during the making of Top Gun, and he is young and shining and beautiful and cocky and preening and silly. This is immediately followed by him 35 years older, slower, ravaged, but still playful, with a voice over-explaining that he had throat cancer and could no longer talk easily, or be understood. Then it shows that it is his son, Jack, doing the recording, “My name is Val Kilmer.”

“I was the first guy I knew to own a video camera,” and it shows him going through a warehouse of material, film, video, writings, a treasure trove of decades worth of stuff to make a film out of.

Then we hear him speak for real, and it’s heartbreaking. A terrible rasp made by blocking the air coming from the tracheotomy to force the sound through, kind of like a belch. It is not how he sounded in Top Gun: Maverick.

So a quick pause and Google, and it turns out that scientists have been working with Kilmer to make an artificial voice as close to his real voice as possible. And it’s incredible in the film, it is part of the plot that he cannot speak easily and it causes him pain to do so, but when he does, you would never guess that it was artificially generated.

Also, I found this beautiful passage from Newsweek:

“While Kilmer has claimed that he wasn't "too proud to beg" the studio to reprise his role as Iceman in Top Gun: Maverick, the film's producer Jerry Bruckheimer said that Cruise refused to do the sequel without him.”

Pause for weeping, back to Val the documentary that I am actually supposed to be writing about.

Kilmer wanted to be an actor from childhood, and his brother, Mark, made movies, so there is much footage of comic remakes of Jaws, etc, and Val in school plays, all in an early ‘70s glow. He dated Mare Winningham in high school, and was the youngest person ever accepted into Julliard.

It’s so clear in retrospect that he was a shooting star. Sometimes you see an unknown actor, and you think, wow, they’re good, and sometime you think, if they aren’t a star within a couple of years, there is no justice. Sometimes there is no justice, because luck and circumstance always plays into it, but seeing these scenes of Kilmer in Julliard and just afterwards, you’re like, how could he not have become a star? So he did.

His Broadway debut was in Slab Boys, where he was cast as the lead, then asked to play the second lead because Kevin Bacon was available, then the third lead, because Sean Penn was available. Attack of the ‘80s young guns was this show, though it closed in 49 performances, not mentioned in the doc.

Then he becomes obsessed with Hamlet, and we see him work on the “too, too solid flesh” soliloquy, trying different approaches, getting better and better, it’s a fascinating journey. And from the sublime to the ridiculous, next is Top Secret, which I did not one bit remember as being his debut. Interestingly, the Internet tells me that he did play Hamlet in 1988, I wonder why that’s not brought in at any point? It cannot possibly be that there was no footage, the man clearly shot his entire life.

They filmed Top Secret in London, so present day Kilmer visits London, and honestly, the more they show these old clips , the harder it is to watch him now. We all age. We all start beautiful and then go downhill, it’s the way of the world and the inevitability of life and its mad scramble to the grave, but the man was only around 60 when this was shot, and it is utterly tragic that so much has been taken from him.

Obviously, youthful beauty is ephemeral and fleeting, you don’t get to keep it, it is only a loan and the more you try to cling to it, the faster it evades your grasp, but this seems so cruel.

The film skips Real Genius, spitting in the face of the children of the ‘80s, moving straight to Top Gun. I guess the children of the ‘80s liked that movie, too.

Kilmer says that he didn’t want to do it, that the script was weak, that there wasn’t much to the character of Iceman on the page, etc. He played up the rivalry with Tom off-screen, “in true Method fashion,” which is not the Method, of course, but we won’t get into that now. He says that he always thought of Tom as a friend in reality, and that they always supported each other. Scroll up to reread that quote about how Tom wasn’t going to to the sequel without him, begin weeping again.

The shots cut back and forth between Kilmer then, and Kilmer now, horsing around in the pool with his son, and suddenly it all becomes less tragic, and more about the resilience of life, and being able to experience joy after triumphing over adversity. It appears that one can make all kinds of cliches out of seeing the expanse of a person’s life.

He includes some of the madness from The Island of Doctor Moreau, which I could watch a whole documentary on…which reminds me that there is a whole documentary on The Island of Doctor Moreau, which I need to watch immediately.

There is also a one-sided conversation about custody and visitation after his divorce from Joanne Whalley, which is a bit of a cheap shot. Very “Put-upon man trying to be reasonable with ex-wife, who is being obstructionist through no reason that I, faultless put-upon man, can see.” Later, though, we see Kilmer, Joanne, and both kids, Jack and Mercedes, together in contemporary footage after his mother dies, so it seems that they are able to be friends after all this time.

As far as documentaries go, it is one man’s view of his own life, and though there are credited directors, it doesn’t seem as though there is a director’s hand involved, only Kilmer himself. Nobody else contemporary speaks, except for fans asking for autographs (everyone at Comic Con asking for him to sign, “You can be my wing man anytime”), his son’s voice-over, a brief conversation with his daughter, etc. But nobody speaks to camera but Val Kilmer, in this film about Val Kilmer.

Since Kilmer, credited cinematographer, shot at least 2/3 of the film, from his old videos, the entire thing has the feeling of a home movie. He has a surprising lack of vanity over his current appearance, though I guess he had to get over that pretty fast. But the one thing that this film doesn’t provide is any real interrogation of the years of reports of bad behaviour on sets.

He talks about how difficult Batman was, since you couldn’t move or hear in the suit, and it was hard to breathe and impossible to act, but it would be so easy to continue with, “I was really frustrated, so it made me lash out and behave poorly,” anything to acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is twenty years of being known as an asshole to work with. Towards the end, there is a montage of interviewers asking about are these stories true, are you a perfectionist, are you an original, but it’s a glossed over afterthought, as though it was put to him, you cannot skip this entirely, as the three things literally everyone who has heard of you knows, is Iceman, “I’m your huckleberry”, and that you are a pain to work with. And he was like, okay, but fifteen seconds tops.

Basically, it’s a very sympathetic look at himself, though an interesting one, but if he didn’t have cancer, if he didn’t lose his voice, if he wasn’t outwardly a shell of his former self, there wouldn’t be a movie, only list of life moments in a film that is at least twenty minutes too long.

And then, we get that contemporary sequence after his mother dies, going to Arizona with the family to pick up her ashes, and he is clearly so broken. He says, in that terrible voice that cancer gave him, “I miss my mama,” and he is just a man, a human being, who is now an orphan. Because that’s what happens when we lose our last parents, no matter how old we are.

Val Kilmer seems to be a man who, after making mistakes, and facing some real adversity, is doing the best he can. Which is something we can all aspire to.

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog