Steven Soderbergh's cult "Kafka" is not a biopic of writer Franz Kafka, yet it has references of his works such as "The Castle", passages of his life (where he tells to a friends to burn his manuscripts away without showing his writings to the public) and a main character who happens to be a writer named Kafka.
The extremely shy Kafka (Jeremy Irons) works in a bureaucratic place where he also writes to himself a few stories and some letters to his father. In this same place he only has one friend, a guy named Edward Raban who disappeared mysteriously. Kafka starts a strange journey trying to figure out what happened to his friend entering in a dangerous game with some strange figures such as Edward's lover and Kafka's co-worker (Theresa Russell) and her revolutionary friends; a very friendly figure who knows too much (Jeroen Krabbé); Grubach a police inspector (Armin Mueller-Stahl); and some of his own work colleagues such as his new assistants (Keith Allen and Simon McBurney), his estranged boss (Alec Guinness) and the annoying Mr. Burgel (Joel Grey); and at last Dr. Murnau (Ian Holm).
In a magnificent performance Jeremy Irons makes of his Kafka a man suffocated by the environment where he lives and the only way to escape of it it's to write stories that reflect his life in an awkward way and/or his life as an "investigator" that took him to darker places that could have been a source of inspiration for his works. The movie goes to tell us that he lived in a bizarre and very surrealistic place with surrealistic figures all around him and they were always trying to watch his next step, what he was doing and Kafka run away from this people, hides his writing works. This is a good thriller material!
Soderbergh makes of "Kafka" a good humored film noir that has a great mystery to be solved, the rhythm of the film is intertwined with some slow paced moments where you can pause your brain to solve some of the puzzles, a frantic suspense that goes to complete a surrealistic plot. The final result is a great movie with nothing obvious and it makes good homages to Kafka's work, and homages to another classic films. It is an interesting cross between "The Third Man" and "Brazil", the visual of those two films combined along with the almost colorless Kafka's books are put together in here.
Walt Lloyd's cinematography is one of the most interesting and effective work ever made in film history, a photography that goes from black and white to color in a great way, showing these two worlds that seem to distant so each other when in fact they're close enough. In this case you can sense that the colorful world presented in the castle isn't better than the oppressive grey world outside of its dominions, the colors are presented only to tell us a frightening reality that is so shocking that we really want to go back to the black and white world along with Kafka. And as a great mind said one time: "The black and white doesn't lie".
After covering up the body, the five apostles decide to repeat the process. Luke has an interesting concept: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler when he was a frustrated student, would you do it? And so begins the body count: Their guests usually consist of the kind of pathetic people one left-winger usually hates. One of them is a homophobe priest (Charles Durning) who affirms homosexuality is the disease and AIDS is the cure. Can you really blame these people for wanting to poison the fellow? This scene is incredibly well done, from the first-rate dialogue exchange from the students to Charles Durning's perfectly timed acting. Annabelle Girsh's hilarious death sentence just has to be seen. ("I think it's time for dessert.")
As the group continues to "make the world a better place," their victims start to become less and less threatening from a date rapist (Mark Harmon) to a spoiled teenager (Bryn Erin) who sues her school because they are making sexual education mandatory. Unfortunately, none of these scenes end up having the same dramatic (and comic) impact as the first two because they are unbelievably brief, leaving the audience gasping for more. The film soon endures the machine gun-editing technique of putting up about 30 scenes in six minutes set to a carefully-selected pop tune in order to sell the soundtrack.
There is a subplot involving the disappearance of a young girl who is being searched by the local police department headed by Sheriff Stanley (Nora Durnn) which look like they belong to a different and more serious movie. This is actually unusual since you would expect the goofier moments to come from an ex-SNL cast member. Or should you? The answer as to why these scenes are even in there comes much later on in the film. Frankly, Nora Durnn's scenes (Not counting the ones where she actually interacts with the students) could have all used some cuts.
Character interaction could cause another serious pet-peeve to audiences who relate to the people on-screen. The only character who seriously remains constant throughout the entire picture is Luke, while the others all seem to switch personalities. In one scene, Paulie is extremely against the killings while Judy is totally for it. But later on (In one of the film's funniest sequences) the actresses seem to switch roles. A hysterical Judy ends up screaming out that they shouldn't be killing people while Paulie coldly replies: "They are not people, they are people who hate!" The Pete character is seriously undeveloped while Marc is hardly any better.
The film does eventually pick up with the very last victim they choose, which I won't spoil. Not counting the suspenseful showdown, nothing really happens during the last 15 minutes but dialogue exchange in the dinner table bringing up usual liberal vs. conservative topics, and there is where the movie truly shines like it did with the beginning. It's a shame it had to end, really. Conservatives bashed this film as the ultimate proof that liberals run Hollywood, not realizing the film does defend them to one extent. It doesn't matter how "fun" the characters' concept seems to be, it's still sick and it goes against one of the major freedoms that liberals should be defending: The freedom of speech.
Out of the film's then-unknown lead actors, the only one that really made it to be a star is obviously Cameron Diaz. But no matter how underdeveloped the characterization is, all the actors are able to keep us entertaining. Courtney B. Vance and Ron Perlman seem to own the film during the last moments. As for the dinner-guests, they end up being more well-known cameos. Aside from Durning, Harmon, and Paxton, get ready to see Jason Alexander having a (short) blast as an anti-environmentalist businessman.