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The headlines you’ve seen this morning announcing the sad passing of Val Kilmer generally all cited him as the star Top Gun and Batman Forever. Which he was, certainly. And God knows he acquitted himself beautifully in Top Gun, the Tony-Scott directed jet-fighter blockbuster, playing “Iceman,” the cocky rival of Tom Cruise’s “Maverick.” And certainly he gave it the old college try in one of the more misbegotten Caped Crusader movies. On the set of 1995’s Batman Forever he clashed with director Joel Schumacher to the extent that Schumacher called him “psychotic.” Publicly, even.
But what Val Kilmer really was, as it happened, was serious. Even in comedic roles, at which he excelled, he was a serious actor, and a thoughtful one. And had been for almost all of his life. At the time that he was accepted into the famed Julliard School of the Arts for acting, he was the youngest person to get in. (He graduated in 1981. Prior to Julliard, he attended high school in California where he was raised. One of his classmates was Kevin Spacey. They disliked each other instantly.) He turned down a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 The Outsiders because he was still honing his stage craft. Coppola finally got to work with Kilmer three decades later, on Twixt, which would be one of the actor’s last films.
And his first two pictures were goofy comedies. His debut, Top Secret!, was concocted by the creative team responsible for Airplane!, Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker (aka ZAZ), but took a different tack from their first classic. The often outrageous sight gags came at a more leisurely pace, and a lot of the humor was character-based. Kilmer played Nick Rivers, an American rock and roller who’d like to be Elvis but is actually more of a Fabian type, gallivanting behind the Iron Curtain and getting mixed up in espionage. Kilmer brought an insouciance to the role that was winning rather than smug. He did likewise in his next picture, Martha Coolidge’s Real Genius, playing Chris Knight, a math prodigy turned slacker who pads about his dorm wearing bunny slippers while revealing to his eager beaver young protégé the corruption inherent in the system.
After which it was time to get serious. And it’s time for this writer to wonder whether he can use the phrase “dick-swinging contest.” Because that is, let’s face it, what the whole business between Kilmer’s Iceman and Tom Cruise’s Maverick is in the 1986 Top Gun. A lot of peace-creep hippies deplored Tony Scott’s movie as gratuitous war-mongering (I think I may have been one of them, actually), and maybe it was, but the movie was also a wholly organic Hollywood phenomenon, one that actually resisted being sequel-ized for decades. 1983’s Risky Business made Tom Cruise a star, but Top Gun made Tom Cruise TOM CRUISE. And in a sense it defined Kilmer, who never worked in pure comedy again until very late in his career. Instead he started assembling an iconography.
Whether you like Jim Morrison or not (my feelings are mixed, although I am the owner of a Bluray compilation of Doors tunes in Dolby 5.1 Surround), he was undeniably a singular presence. Singular as in irreproducible. But director Oliver Stone persuaded Kilmer to try, and the actor went for it with a combination of deep research and Morrisonesque abandon. The Doors is one of the loopiest rock bios ever made, depicting Morrison as a being of pure spirit who at one point is depicted as being in danger from the corrupting influence of Crispin Glover’s Andy Warhol and Christina Fulton’s Nico. Uh-huh. Whether you’re down with Stone’s vision or not, Kilmer invested in it and delivered on it. Less controversial was his turn as the tubercular gunman Doc Holliday in 1993’s Tombstone, a fantastic O.K. Corral western starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp. Kilmer depicts Doc as a medico with some deadly skills and a poignant vulnerability. His declaration to Earp, “I’m your huckleberry,” meaning he’s the right man for the job of Earp’s deputy, has become a cinephile catchphrase, and Kilmer used it as the title of his 2020 memoir. In the same year as Tombstone, Kilmer went to work for Tony Scott again, playing Christian Slater’s hallucination of Elvis in the gonzo True Romance.
His stardom grew, as did his reputation for being “difficult.” Tombstone costar Michael Biehn has famously been quoted as saying on the set of that movie he never met Val Kilmer, only Doc Holliday. His total immersion in roles could frustrate his directors. Throw in another acting maverick and things could get even crazier; the making, or unmaking, of the 1996 The Island of Dr. Moreau, costarring Marlon Brando, is a trainwreck tale that still harrows to this day. And then, of course, there’s Batman Forever, where Kilmer brought a little bit of Nick Rivers to his Bruce Wayne, one of no doubt many ways he exasperated Joel Schumacher. But by the same token, his work in Michael Mann’s immortal Heat, as one of the squirrelier members of Neil McCauley’s crew, is spot-on, beautifully modulated, and Mann, not an easy man to please, was generous with his praise of the actor after the news of his death broke.
It was during this period that Kilmer was made into a cover subject by the movie magazine Premiere, where I was an editor at the time. I wasn’t involved with the piece or the photo shoot, but I distinctly recollect that the whole enterprise was no picnic. Despite his looks — and his ability — he shrank at the idea of being a movie star, and as the ’90s continued, after his turn as master thief Simon Templar in The Saint flopped, he concentrated on character and support roles, or leads in “smaller” movies. Check him out as an addict/narcotics informant in 2002’s The Salton Sea, or playing David Mamet’s idea of an action hero in 2004’s Spartan. He played real-life porn actor John Holmes as a twitchy addict in 2003’s Wonderland. He reunited with Oliver Stone for a frankly inconsequential turn in 2004’s Alexander.
One of his best later roles was as private eye Perry Van Shrike in Shane Black’s incredible Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which paired him with Robert Downey, Jr. Throwing of the surly bonds of mainstream stardom, he bopped around in pictures as diverse as Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and MacGruber (the latter representing his return to pure comedy). He finally worked with Coppola on the director’s very quirky horror picture Twixt. And as he fought the throat cancer that incapacitated him severely, making work difficult and often impossible, he mustered the energy to take Tom Cruise up on a generous and kind offer, and reprise his role as Iceman, now an Admiral, in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, which would be his last film. Even as his powers diminished, he remained our huckleberry.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.
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