FilmBlather.com

"Son of my mom!"

Movies with characters classified as "schizophrenic" (as opposed to just insane) tend to be "quirky," trying to milk laughs out of their subjects' problems and doing their darnedest to make them "cute." The Caveman's Valentine is a serious movie -- a murder mystery, no less -- with just such a person as the protagonist. Though Romulus Ledbetter (Samuel L. Jackson) has his share of quirks -- he believes, for example, that humanity's nemesis lives on the top of the Chrysler Building -- the material is played mostly straight and the mystery at the film's center is unexpectedly engaging.

Romulus lives in a cave, both physically and literally. A cave in the middle of New York City is his home and, as the movie takes great pains to point out, he lives in a cave in his mind as well, a dark cave, where mysterious creatures circle around him as he plays the piano. He went to Julliard before becoming homeless, but everybody gave up on him. Now, he waves off his policewoman daughter's occasional attempts to put him in a shelter, even as he does try to keep up contact with her.

One morning, Romulus finds the frozen body of a homeless boy he knew sitting peacefully in a tree next to his cave. The police, as always seems to happen in movies, blame uncontrollable forces of nature for the boy's demise: namely, that he froze to death. The Caveman thinks not. He has an idea that the deceased was a model for a famous photographer who is reputed to, well, not treat his models too kindly. He goes after this man with a vengeance, seeking help from anyone who will listen and burying himself farther and farther in the dark corners of his own deranged mind.

But this isn't a movie about a guy who's off his rocker. It's a legitimate mystery, with a twisty solution at the end of it all. Romulus is the protagonist, conducting a one-man investigation into a very real crime. The fact that he's insane is actually what makes The Caveman's Valentine interesting because the mystery itself is fairly pedestrian. The world that Romulus' mind occupies is every bit as interesting to explore as the "real world" events that are shown here.

The movie was directed by Kasi Lemmons, one of the few black female directors working, and the woman who made her directing debut with the absolutely brilliant Eve's Bayou. The Caveman's Valentine isn't quite on that level, but it confirms Lemmons as a serious, gifted filmmaker. Her stylistic flourishes add dimensions to Jackson's character, and the design of Romulus's cave -- the one in his mind -- is brillianty unsettling.

Jackson, who also starred in Eve's Bayou, pulls off an enormously difficult tightrope walk with his performance, balancing his character's over the top insanity with the humanity needed to keep the audience emotionally involved. Sometimes, with his beard and dredlocks, he is barely recognizable, but his presence is felt in every frame; like Robert De Niro, Jackson is at a point where his "presence" is now more like an aura.

I don't know if The Caveman's Valentine will ever achieve mainstream success -- it's probably too weird and disturbing to make that crossover -- but its popularity with the "art crowd" is all but guaranteed. There's likely to be backlash to a sophomore effort by a director with such a brilliant leap out of the starting gate, but if this movie is inferior to her first, it's only because it's less ambitious.