Val Kilmer

I’m at an age where the movie stars I grew up with are getting old. Harrison Ford is in his 80s, Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks are entering their 70s, and Julia Roberts is nearing 60. They’re all still working, but they all exist in my mind as they were when I was a kid watching the movies they made in the 80s and 90s.

Val Kilmer was 65 when he died after a long fight with throat cancer, but like the others he exists for me as a forever younger version of himself. Frozen on a screen in scenes from Top Gun and Tombstone and Heat. I suspect he was keenly aware of this throughout his life. As we get older, we’re all tortured to some extent by the dissonance between the face we see in the mirror and the younger version we imagine when we envision ourselves. Much as we might dismiss the plight of the young and beautiful, this curse often hits them the hardest — the descent is steeper from a high peak. This had to have been especially true for Kilmer, someone so aware of the power and eternity of performance captured on film, and someone so uniquely beautiful in his youth that he both lit up the screen and then over and over seemed to get burned by it.

A Los Angeleno child of divorce, Kilmer was the middle child of three boys, and grew up very close to his brothers. They made home movies together among the empty backyard swimming pools of 1970s LA., with the younger brother Wesley directing Val in short films. At the age of 17 Kilmer became the youngest ever student admitted to the Juilliard School, but as he was preparing to leave for New York, Wesley suffered an epileptic seizure and drowned in the family hot tub — a loss from which Kilmer never really recovered. And so the young prodigy journeyed across the country with the light in his eyes already dimmed. The contrast between that luminous Ice Man smile and eyes touched by sadness was set early, and would follow him throughout his career. His Doc Holliday in Tombstone comes to mind, the knowing eyes of a dying man finding one last well of strength as he says “I’m your Huckleberry.”

Kilmer had a reputation for being difficult to work with, which by his own admission this was often warranted. I think a lot of that was tied to him being a passionate and perfectionist performer with trouble bringing himself into the alignment needed on a stop-and-start film set (Edward Norton is supposedly a similar character.) And I also think it had to do with him straining to be something other than what his looks and screen presence said he should be. After a lead part in Top Secret! and the success of Top Gun, he was pegged as a future Hollywood leading man, and while he would succumb to this call every now and then in films like The Doors and Batman Forever, he was always at heart a character actor. He looked much more comfortable in supporting turns like Doc Holliday in Tombstone or Chris Shiherlis in Heat than he did when he put on the Batman mask, and he thrived in the rare chances he got to be comedic - search out his appearances on Saturday Night Live. He was a “sad clown” theater kid plucked and dressed up as a smoldering dramatic lead, and though he was talented enough to pull those parts off, the disconnect likely made him more volatile. A sad introvert lashing out from not being true to himself. He famously didn’t want to be Batman, but he couldn’t resist it. He watched Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones having a great time hamming it up as The Riddler and Two-Face and that's where he really wanted to be. Batman Forever was a commercial hit, but he turned down the chance to play the part again.

Heat came out the same year as Batman Forever, and he’s fantastic in a supporting role where his commitment and intensity match Michael Mann’s direction — special forces trainees today are actually shown footage of how film Kilmer handles an M733 assault rifle. But soon after that he would lose his mind on the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau (he wasn’t the only one) at the same time as his marriage fell apart. This ended his brief stay atop the A-List and sent him sliding down the slope toward direct-to-DVD shlock that would color the rest of his movie career.

One of his last leading man tentpoles — 1997’s The Saint — actually provides a glimpse into the kind of movie star Kilmer could have been. It’s a pretty good movie, a spy thriller that was market- corrected by the release of Mission Impossible (Tom Cruise bests him again), but it gives Kilmer a chance to flex his comedic theater chops in a way he clearly relished. The plot lets him play around with several disguised characters and you can tell he’s having a blast. He’s genuinely funny and touching and effortlessly illuminating the screen in a way that gives a sense of what made him such a young phenom when he entered Juilliard, even if the movie around him is merely solid. You see a glimmer of the beautiful sad clown he should have been allowed to be.

In a sad irony he found new success on the stage right before throat cancer claimed his voice, playing Mark Twain in an acclaimed traveling road show that he had to cancel. But it set him on a path of personal reflection that resulted in the documentary Val, a serene and oddly enchanting portrait of anartist taking a good hard look at his own life, where even the blind spots and repressions have their own poetry. He was an early adopter of handheld home video and would record constantly in theater classes and film sets throughout his career — that innate understanding of the power of a simple camera to shape history and therefore reality. And so he stitches this grainy home video quilt of a creative life lived by a beautiful person straining to keep his soul afloat. Through it all he seems trapped in that time between his brother’s death and his journey to Juilliard, just a few months of his life, but months of your life can loom over decades. Much of tragedy is about the context of time and place in which it happens, which can determine how it affects us for the rest of our lives.

Kilmer claimed he would see his brother all the time, would hold long conversations with him, as he did with his mother after she died. Kilmer was a Christian Scientist throughout his life, and for Christian Scientists there isn’t really such thing as death. It’s more that humans are imperfect creatures, and one of our limitations is that we perceive people only through our five senses. So a person isn’t really gone when they die, they’re just no longer seen by our senses, and we have to find other ways to let them in. Kilmer accepted chemotherapy treatment for his cancer after the desperate pleading of his children — in violation of his theology — but he seemed at peace as he faced down death. Like he was finally a true, whole person. Some of us aren’t able to find that until so late in life.

Throughout his career he would check into hotels under his brother Wesley’s name. It was his way of ducking fans and paparazzi, and finding some sense of home on the road. “Hotels are like prisons,” he once said. “They’re full of people who don’t want you there.” But he would talk to Wesley in those hotel rooms, his brother forever frozen in youth, and knew they’d make movies together again someday. Here’s hoping they are.