Val is a disappointment, plain and simple. Compiled over decades of home videos, Val Kilmer’s autobiographical documentary consists of massive highs and lows, but ends up much less than the sum of its parts. It has the potential to be a revealing, even profound reflection on a career, but instead it dashes away from answers and winds up a mostly self-serving summary of Kilmer’s acting credits, toiling in career nostalgia and shallow observations.
At a screening of Tombstone in 2019, Kilmer ponders whether his best years are behind him and if relying on them is dragging him down. His voice, permanently altered by surgery in 2015, hinders him from pursuing serious acting; this is a revealing admission, but revelation is cheap without analysis, and a lack of meaningful comment on Kilmer’s life-changing condition hollows out the film’s emotional center. Still, Val raises questions about the nature of acting that hold real promise. He justifies quitting the Batman franchise in 1995 after realizing it’s more fun to be Batman than to play him, which, in addition to the existential doubts at the Tombstone screening, pulls back the layers of ego many actors have around their innermost thoughts. But either Kilmer doesn’t realize the gold he’s stumbled onto, or he’s completely uninterested in tapping into it. Questions like these go unexplored, never to be raised again, as Kilmer points his effort at emptily discussing his condition or telling meandering family tales (of which there are many).
Val touches on career high points, but it’s all too nostalgic and light considering the intimate nature of personal documentary. Videos and behind-the-scenes footage shot during Top Gun, The Doors, and Batman Forever are all flash, providing pull quotes for trailers when the film could be establishing Kilmer’s values and goals. One point that is established is Kilmer’s admiration for Marlon Brando. It makes sense: Brando was a once-in-a-generation talent with big demands and a bigger ego, but when discussing their ill-fated collaboration, 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, the most Kilmer can express is his disappointment that Brando wasn’t what he expected. Kilmer is comfortable sharing an observation or two, but he rarely delves deeper than the surface, leaving holes in his story and allowing flimsy quotes to represent entire years of his life.
The same goes for his personal life, told through quips and stories that entertain but do very little to make the film worth seeing through. Considering the amount of footage Kilmer had to play with, there isn’t much effort put into expressing present feelings through past selves. There is young Val and there is old Val, with no connective tissue to explain how he went from this to that. Late in the film comes a montage of Kilmer’s 2000s-era films with no commentary at all. It’s a sequence that saves time, but that time isn’t used to dig into anything substantive; rather, it’s distributed amongst Kilmer’s most iconic eras to bring forth details already accessible on Wikipedia. In an effort to streamline, the most interesting details have been cut.
Kilmer spends the largest amount of time on his one-man Mark Twain play, but the problem of surface-level commentary remains. A half hour and at least a dozen Twain quotes into the segment, we’re no closer to understanding why Kilmer wanted to portray the author. His ambition to fund a film version by touring the play is abandoned after his surgery, but there is no reckoning with this dilemma, leaving the whole section feeling pointless. Twain is the most recent project of Kilmer’s, his magnum opus, and it might be gone forever. The segment could focus here, but Kilmer would rather demonstrate his ability in the role, which, while admirable, isn’t much to chew on.
Val struggles to find a reason to stitch together personal confessions, behind-the-scenes meltdowns, and family matters, settling on their mere existence as the reason for their telling. While that’s sporadically entertaining, there is little emotion to the highly emotional life story, leaving the question of “Why does this film exist?” unanswered. Kilmer’s ability to openly discuss illness and family trauma is commendable, but his insights are limited, and too much time is devoted to needless actor fluff. Ultimately, this personal film comes across as light and selective, and that is a disappointment.
