Chapter 27

[April 9th, 2008]

Among the many claims to fame of my alma mater Covenant College (tiny! Located in Georgia! Presbyterian!), foremost is that it once counted Mark David Chapman as a student. Granted, he attended for a mere semester, and the only remaining evidence of his presence is a few freshman essays and his name carved in the school’s tower. But the way I figure it, an alum’s an alum, and the obvious advantage of counting an assassin among my fellows is the reduced pressure it places on post-graduate achievement: Whatever I accomplish with my life, I will not have shot John Lennon.

Imagine my disappointment, then, to discover that Chapter 27, J.P. Schaefer’s movie about Chapman’s decisive 48 hours in New York City, neglects to mention Covenant College even once. There I was, ears alert, waiting for the new, fat Jared Leto to mention his happy memories of Lookout Mountain, and instead I get Leto’s Chapman rambling on about Hawaii, which “changed [his] life,” apparently. Well, sure it did, Mark: It’s glamorous, it’s got those cute hula dancers and, last I checked, it’s been in hundreds of movies. When will Covenant College get another chance at this kind of spotlight, eh? Where’s our prize?

As it turns out, it’s just as well I spent the entirety of Chapter 27 waiting to hear the name of my college, because I cannot think of a single other reason to sit through the movie. After a brief soliloquy expounding on the virtues of The Catcher in the Rye, Mark David Chapman declares, “I’m going to kill John Lennon,” and 84 minutes later he kills John Lennon. In between, we are invited to admire how much weight Jared Leto has put on, and how much his hillbilly lilt sounds like a brain-damaged Truman Capote. The performance is meant to put us in mind of the young Robert De Niro—a little Raging Bull here, a lot of Taxi Driver there—but Schaefer’s direction is ultimately a prime example of how cinema has been degraded since the glory days of Scorsese. Taxi Driver sought to drive its audience inside the alienated experience of a potential killer; Chapter 27 just wants a crowd to stare at the freak. Schaefer’s camera lingers on the rolls of fat hanging off the madman, at the acne dotting his back, at the preposterously outsized glasses slipping off his nose. It turns him into a pathetic specimen for passersby to gawk at. Chapter 27 is, as Holden Caulfield would put it, a movie made by a bunch of phonies. It’s another needless confirmation that the shooting of John Lennon was a stupid, pointless waste. R.