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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When Fay Wray was hoisted into the air by the love-struck ape in the original "King Kong," from 1933, she screamed and screamed in terror. Or was it excitement? There was a touch of lewd humor in the Merian C. Cooper-Ernest B. Schoedsack classic, and, for a full seventy years, making gleeful dirty jokes while watching the movie has been part of its myth and aura. In Ang Lee's "The Hulk," which is an amalgam of the King Kong and Frankenstein stories--and a linear descendant of the Marvel comic book and a so-so TV series--the scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) turns into a rampaging monster whenever he gets angry. Then Bruce--all fifteen feet of him, green, grotesquely muscled, and mostly naked--approaches his lab colleague Betty, who is played by Jennifer Connelly. This actress has become the mater dolorosa of the American cinema, forever deposing her men from their cross of suffering. (In "A Beautiful Mind," she gazed with compassion at a different kind of monster.) Connelly's Betty doesn't scream at Bruce's touch; instead, she keens with sympathy and woe, and, at that point, he shrinks to his normal self. This beauty-and-the-beast movie isn't a fable of mad passion; it's a fable of detumescence.
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