Customer Reviews

The Caveman's Valentine [VHS]

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) has honored actor Samuel Jackson, director Kasi Lemmons, and her sister, Dr. Cheryl Lemmons, the psychiatrist who served as a consultant to the movie, with its 2001 Outstanding Media Award for a dramatic motion picture---because of its portrayal of a homeless man with paranoid schizophrenia, who is both protagonist and hero. Jackson's character, Romulus Ledbetter, who solves a murder mystery, is a figure of intelligence, insight, talent and dignity, even as he experiences paranoid delusions and hallucinations (which he calls--correctly--"brain typhoons"). The Caveman defies the stereotypes and stigma usually associated with mental illness, and represents a major, cultural breakthrough for Hollywood. Viewers will come to know and like Romulus as an individual. There are many funny, ironic moments, but he and his illness never are used as the butt of jokes. The acting, direction and visual effects are superb, the mystery only so-so, but there IS a twist at the end. The realism also is greater than many may believe. Don't expect a big, wonderful, warm, happy ending. Romulus is a man whose spirit survives, and he prevails...but so does his illness.

The Caveman's Valentine (Kasi Lemmons, 2001)

Lemmons, who gave us the well-above-average Eve's Bayou a few years back, helms George Dawes Green's adaptation of his own award-winning debut novel about a schizophrenic pianist, Romulus Ledbetter (Samuel L. Jackson), who wakes up one morning, walks out of his New York cave (yes, they do still have caves in New York, at least if you believe Green, and homeless people live in them), and discovers a frozen body in a tree. This may not be anything other than par for the course in winter in new York, but Ledbetter is convinced that the man's death is anything other than natural. Of course, Ledbetter is also convinced that the Chrysler building is inhabited by an evil overlord named Cornelius Beford Stuyvesant (groove on the name for a few minutes, if you're acquainted with the early history of NYC) who's out to kill him. So no one, least of all his daughter Lulu (Aunjanue Ellis, Cuba Gooding Jr.'s love interest in Men of Honor), wants to take him seriously. But Lulu, an NYC police officer, is a subordinate of the guy who ends up running the case. What's a girl to do? Add to this the fact that the dead guy's boyfriend, Matt (Rodney Eastman, of many indie films and a copule of Nightmare on Elm Street flicks-- he played Joey, the mute guy), DOES believe Ledbetter, and provides him with the name of the killer, interntionally-renowned photographer David Leppenraub (Colm Feore, who's been in most every movie made in the past decade). Ledbetter starts digging around to see whether there's a murder here to investigate, and, as we all know, complications ensue.

The movie is cast perfectly, from Jackson all the way down to the relatively minor part played by an almost unrecognizable Anthony Michael Hall (who really does deserve a lot more high-profile roles; the guy is just plain good). The script is well-done and moves along at a proper pace, never letting the action drop even when exploring its various subplots. Okay, Leppenraub is a little too obviously modeled on Mapplethorpe, but we'll forgive Green since the rest of it's so well-done. But the key to the whole performance is Jackson himself, who gives a career-best performance as Ledbetter. Schizophrenia may never have been filmed as well as it is here. Rather than go for the Hollywood-style nutcase one normally associates with filmed depictions of schizophrenia, Lemmons and Jackson take the DSM-IIIR route and hand us a character who's, ironically, not as believable unless you've read a whole lot of scizophrenia case studies. Then you realize just how perfect a depiction this is, and your jaw hits the floor, both at Jackson's wonderful performance and the fact that Hollywood let this movie slip through the cracks.

Very much worth going well out of your way to see, especially if you like Sam Jackson. Lots of interest from indie circles, too, as many indie-film darlings show up here. Hard to believe this movie got almost no press given the cast, but so it happened. Very highly recommended. ****

I got this movie just because of Samuel Jackson. It turned out to be a great movie. On the one hand, it's a very decent thriller, on the other hand, it's a good psychological drama. The story of homeless man witnessing a murder is not the most original but the movie makes it fresh by very good character development. Having said this, the thriller part of the movie is not perfect. There are certain aspects of it that could be done better or plot sometimes could be more logical. But still the overall approach to the movie, its atmsosphere and great Samuel Jackson play make this movie worth watching.

This is perhaps one of the most underestimated films of all time. I don't see how this film went totally unnoticed by pretty much everyone. Samuel L. Jackson gives THE best performance of his career as Romulus Ledbetter - second only to Jules Winnfield in "Pulp Fiction". Kasi Lemmons proves once again that she's an excellent director, who strangely hasn't directed anything since this. The music by Terence Blanchard is also excellent. The cinematography is BEAUTIFUL. Everything about this film is excellent, although your suspension of disbelief will come in handy every now and again.

Totally recommended!

The title of the movie sounds puerile enough. Who and what is a caveman's Valentine, anyway? However, this movie is anything but facetious or shallow. Astounding in its depth and the manner in which it treats certain subjects with sensitivity, I would describe this movie, which is based on a novel of the same name by George Dawes Green, as nothing short of genius.
Romulus Ledbetter (Samuel L. Jackson) is a schizophrenic former musician who renounced middle-class life to live in a rocky enclosure in Manhattan's Inwood Park. One cold Valentine's Day, driven by voices and subliminal messages he finds on his TV set (That's the surreal bit: He gets to watch TV even though there's nothing in the cave for it to be plugged into), he ventures outside to find the dead body of 20-year-old Scotty Gales. Romulus believes this to be the work of an omniscient and evil mastermind by the name of Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant who happens to live in the Chrysler Building.
Romulus believes it to be his moral and divine duty to track down the murderer of Scotty Gales and thus his adventure begins.
We the audience are offered glimpses into the former life of Romulus; his musical education at Juilliard, his wife, his daughter now grown up and with the police force, and his decline into insanity. This movie deals sensitively with the issue of homelessness, mental illness and the emotional turmoil that families of the mentally ill go through. Romulus' family is torn between helping him and rejecting him for his non-acceptance of their lifestyle, values and middle-class sensibilities.
We catch glimpses too of Romulus' version of reality; of the voices and visions that haunt him, of the moth-seraphs that dwell in his head, of the manifestation of his wife, also his Muse, each time he sits before a piano and quakes. We see, in two scenes, his musical genius and his emotional involvement with his music.
As the plot thickens, we see that the main suspect is not the enigmatic Stuyvesant but an artist named David Leppenraub, who had used Scotty Gates as a nude model on several occasions. Romulus seeks to entrap and expose Leppenraub as the killer, but matters are not as simple as one thinks.
`The Caveman's Valentine' is a detective drama, a psychological thriller and a character study all rolled into one, and brought to a state of high polish by the efforts of Samuel L. Jackson and Kasi Lemmons.
No one could have made Romulus Ledbetter as real and alive as Samuel L. Jackson did. For his performance alone, I would rate the movie 5 stars out of 5. And Miss Kasi Lemmons? I'd give her a standing ovation for outstanding directorial work.

Movie Summary: Romulus Ledbetter is a genius and a master pianist. He went to school at Juliard, has a wife and daughter and lives in a cave in Central Park. Romulus you see suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. He has demons in his head that drive him into fits of rage. On Valentines day upon emerging from his cave, Romulus finds a frozen body in a tree. He considers this his valentine and takes it upon himself to find out who killed the young man. Romulus fights his demons and once again enters the normal word to find the person who left him such a valentine.

My Opinion: It's no mystery that Samuel L. Jackson gives a great performance in this film. If you are a fan of his, then it's worth seeing just for that. Aside from that, this movie is basically a "made for TV" type drama. That's not necessarily bad, many of those can be very gripping and entertaining and TCV is both of those. It does require a lot of suspension of belief though. The story takes place in the "real world" and thus must follow those rules. The way Romulus reenters society after living in a cave for so long is a stretch. He finds a guy on the street who happens to invite him to his home and presto he's got a suit of clothes and looks normal again. This doesn't really ruin the movie, but it's there. What does bring the movie to a screeching halt though is one of the last scene cuts. This one snaps your head so badly that you will have whiplash well after the credits are over. Out of nowhere Romulus follows another character onto a train and the movie comes to its climax. There is no set up or explanation and you are left wondering what the heck happened. Not even the deleted scenes shed any light on this one. For me this cut one star off my rating and made me feel like the movie cut short. It deserved a better ending than it got.

DVD Quality: Video: Widescreen Anamorphic 1.85:1 with good video quality. Sound: DD 5.1 sounded fine. Extras: Deleted Scenes that help a little with the plot, production notes, trailer, commentary. Menus: Nothing all that special. This is an average DVD release.

What You Should Do: Rent it if you are a Samuel L. Jackson fan. It is an interesting mystery/character study that takes a little bit of work to get into. It's not your standard Saturday night entertainment fare. Mostly it is a showcase for Samuel L. Jackson's acting talent.

Related Movies To Check Out: Jacob's Ladder, Rain Man, Memento

There were many things missing or different from the book, but what movie adaptation is perfect?... Samuel L. Jackson was wonderful as Romulus, and the story made a good movie. If you enjoy the movie, you should pick up the George Dawes Green book -- same author as The Juror, also adapted into a movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin.
Also, on the DVD's "Deleted Scenes" section there is a WONDERFULLY choreographed scene with Rom's "moth-seraphs" which is just amazingly beautiful to watch! It's too bad they cut it from the movie, but be sure to take it in when you're going through the Bonus Features.

Previously, I viewed this movie on cable and thought it was brilliant. There was nothing else to do but to order a copy for my video library.

I have seen this film many times over the years and my opinion of it hasn't changed much. Kasi Lemmons is a very interesting director, she has a nice visual flair as evidenced also with Eve's Bayou, she seems to have incorporated elements of Black Theatre into this piece with the Moth Seraphs and their dances.

Samuel L. Jackson is completely at his best, and once again shows why he is a huge mainstream movie star. His portrayal of Romulus Ledbetter is very much Sam Jack, but he does some amazing things with this character with such small nuances as his disoriented walk much like what Ralph Fiennes did in Cronenberg's Spider (for those who have seen that), in fact this is the kind of story I could see David Cronenberg tackling, but alas this film suffers from what I call a conventional ending, and has too many cliche plot twists for me that in the end it almost comes off as an above average prime time television show along the lines of CSI or even a made-for-television film.

I do recommend seeing this for Lemmons direction, and Jackson's awesome performance. Any young actor can learn a thing or two.

-Thomas Galasso

Director Kasi Lemmons has been long known as an actress whose works include superb "The Silence of the Lambs" and eerie "Candyman." But where was she? If you can immediately remember her roles in them, you got a splendid memory. Well, try to find the heroines' (Jodie Forster and Virginia Madsen) collegue and friend. Check it out if you're not busy because you're surprised to know that both roles are comparatively big.

But in the future her name will be remembered as that of a director, and a pretty good one at that. Her debut "Eve's Bayou" in 1997 was deservedly praised for its original storytelling and Gothic atomosphere that are based on the mythic locales of the Deep South. And that film was supported by strong performance from Samuel L. Jackson, again starring in "The Caveman's Valentine."

As the second feature film, Ms. Lemmons moved her film's background to New York, and again brings back Sam Jackson's bravura performance as "Caveman," who, though he was once a skillful piano player and even attended prestigeous Julliard, is now living alone in a small "cave" in a park of the city, haunted by an illusion that someone is watching him from the top of the Chrysler Building. But when he found a dead frozen body up on a tree, he notices that there is some REAL plot going on. He claims that he alone can see that secret. But how can he convince the others of his theory, when people around him including his own daughter are not willing to trust him and his mind?

The strength of the film lies in, not surprisingly, Jackson's powerhouse performance as Caveman, who is certainly tormented by his visions, or in his words, 'brain storm." Thanks to his acting, the original story that sometimes too incredible to be true can hide its holes, making us suspend our disbelief even though for a while. You know, today, in New York, who would care to speak to, or let in your condo, the guy who raves incredible things on the street, and moreover give your fancy clothes? But it's Sam Jackson, and we know he would succeed anyway.

But his strong acting sometimes backfires. The supporting cast are comparatively weak, and about the thriller part of the film gives too little attention simply because we are always sort of forced to see things all through Caveman, watching Jackson's forceful acting maybe too much. And his theory of murder, itself a shaky one, is made more so owing to the lack of logics, and to make matters more confusing, Kasi Lemmons, unlike her excellent previous work, uses too many imageries (including CGI images) to emphasize the potential madness of Caveman. The story itself is more than simply disturbing -- it is disrupted often by its own power, which should have been more restrained as she did in "Eve's Bayou."

Overall a satisfactory entry from this promising director, "The Caveman's Valentine" is a very ambitious one, too. I may be allowed to say that it is too ambitious for its own sake, being set in modern city of New York, taking the delicate issue of mind, and connecting it to a neo-noir thriller. Probably you either like it, or ignore it. Either way, if you love to see Samuel L. Jackson doing what he can -- not being rendered to a digital pixel as in the new "Star Wars" trilogy -- this will offer you what you need.