Movie review: Chapter 27

by Alex Bentley

Method actors have been renowned for their ability to transform themselves into the characters that they play; Daniel Day-Lewis just won an Oscar for inhabiting the character of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. Of course, in that case, the majority of what Day-Lewis did was stay in character throughout filming, even while off camera. A more extreme version of Method acting is on display in Chapter 27, in which Jared Leto plays Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon in 1980.

Leto wasn’t going to wear any fat suit to portray the portly Chapman; no, Leto gained 60 pounds in order to fully get into the skin of the killer, reportedly even getting gout for his efforts. The good news is that all that work paid off; Leto is supremely creepy as Chapman and his resemblance to the real man is almost uncanny. The bad news is that Leto now joins a long line of actors who are far better than the movie in which they’re starring.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Chapter 27 other than that it seems to have no point. By now, the basics behind why Chapman killed Lennon are well-known: He became obsessed with both the former Beatle and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (the title Chapter 27 refers to the fact that The Catcher in the Rye only has 26 chapters), viewing Lennon through the prism of Holden Caulfield’s refrain that the world is full of phonies. The film recounts the three days leading up to the killing, following Chapman as he stakes out the Dakota, the building where Lennon and Yoko Ono lived.

While there, he meets up with other Beatles fans, including a girl named Jude (Lindsay Lohan) and Paul (Judah Friedlander), the photographer who ended up taking a picture of Chapman with Lennon just hours before the murder. Lohan and Friedlander are really the only other “stars” in the film, and both seem massively miscast. Lohan’s part is relatively small and could’ve used someone with a little less notoriety to give the role some nuance. Friedlander, meanwhile, is best known as a comic actor (he currently stars in 30 Rock), and shows it here, reading each line as if he were looking at a cue card.

Of course, they and everybody else (even Lennon, bizarrely played by an actor by the name of Mark Lindsay Chapman) are only secondary to Leto as Chapman. It’s not hard to believe him in the role; he imbues Chapman with the requisite level of repulsiveness, perhaps a little too well. If there’s one lesson that can be taken from Chapter 27, it’s that maybe the signs of a stalker weren’t understood quite as well in 1980 as they are today. Most of those who encounter Chapman prior to the murder see him only as a big Beatles/Lennon fan. Jude and Paul get a peek at the man Chapman really is, but because their characters never really register, neither do any suspicions they may have of him.

In the end, it’s hard to believe that Chapter 27 provides any real insight into why Chapman killed Lennon. Other than showcasing a Method actor doing what he does best, the film feels like a 90-minute exercise in telling us what we already know. Great films should aspire to more than just being dramatizations of newspaper and court reports.

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