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There's also Dr. Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson), whom convention would designate the Spirit's "true love," if this Spirit were capable of such a thing. Ellen understands the masked man's strange fickleness of mind and heart, and evidently loves him for what he is, or what he is capable of offering her, which is not much. Ellen's father, Commissioner Dolan (Dan Luria), wants to protect his daughter from the womanizing Spirit, but she's content to love her hero from afar, which might suggest something about what kind of father Dolan was, if you stopped to think about it, which you most certainly should not.

I don't object to Miller reinventing the Spirit as a rooftop-bounding, deathless super hero. It wasn't Eisner's vision—Eisner saw the Spirit as more of a James Garner "Maverick" type, and at one time hoped to see Garner play the character in a feature film—but the spirit of the Spirit could survive such a transformation. After all, The Spirit wasn't really about the Spirit fighting crime; it was about telling stories in which the Spirit was often reduced to a supporting character or even a cameo. Eisner's most important influences weren't Warner crime films or crime writers like Dashiell Hammett, but the short stories of O. Henry, Bierce and Dickens as key influences on his style.

I do object to Miller using The Spirit as a receptacle for recycled bits and pieces of his own artistic history, such as the "My city is my lover" shtick from Daredevil, among others. There are also in-joke references to other cartooning legends such as Steve Ditko and Harvey Kurtzman; occasionally even Eisner himself is referenced ("What's ten minutes in a man's life?", a nod to a Spirit story called "Ten Minutes").

Writer-director Frank Miller on the set

Worse, The Spirit fails to do the one thing that defined Eisner's entire career: It doesn't tell a story. There's a lot of action, all more or less revolving around a quest for a MacGuffin—but a narrative logic never emerges and so there is never a story or even a world to engage. There's just a lot of imagery, dialogue and violence. At no time does anything resembling a point threaten to emerge.

Here is an anecdote that is more interesting than this movie and probably than the preceding review. Some twenty years ago, I submitted the Spirit to an exercise in Frank Miller style—and showed it to Eisner. I drew a page of the Spirit with each panel representing a different artist's style, the joke being that the Spirit was aware of being represented in foreign styles, and was trying to find the culprit responsible (me, of course).

One of the panels was a wide, low close-up on the Spirit's angry eyes, a shot borrowed from Miller's visual playbook. Reflecting Eisner's skepticism of Miller's work, I made the Spirit furious about being represented in Miller's style: "Miller … Miller, I swear … you'll pay for this." Eisner thought it was hilarious. If only he had known.

Talk About It

1. Simone Weil said, "Imaginary evil is romantic and varied: real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring: real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. 'Imaginative literature,' therefore, is either boring, or immoral, or a mixture of both." Do you agree or disagree with Weil in general?
2. Does Weil's criticism apply to regards The Spirit? Is The Spirit boring, immoral, or a mixture of both? Or is Weil wrong?
3. Is the Spirit a hero? Why or why not? What does it mean to be a hero? Who is your favorite superhero? What makes him or her heroic? How is the Spirit like or unlike that character?
4. Why do we like masked crimefighters? Some heroes wear masks to protect their loved ones or their civilian identities, but others, such as the Lone Ranger, the Phantom and the Spirit, don't seem to have a clear reason for hiding their identities. Why do we create and enjoy stories about such characters? What does the mask add that an "ordinary" movie hero such as Wyatt Earp or James Bond doesn't have?

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