Can we start with the Batman Smile? “I’ve met someone,” coos Nicole Kidman, portraying criminal psychologist Dr. Chase Meridian, who has just smooched Batman and is now rejecting Batman for some clown named Bruce Wayne. “He’s, well, he’s not you. I hope you can understand.” Batman understands. “I understand,” says Batman, in a notably less ridiculous version of the usual Tough, Growling Batman Voice. And then Batman turns around, takes a couple of steps, stops, and smiles. A radiant, startling, exquisitely goofy smile. Sitting in my packed theater in 1995 watching Batman Forever, I could feel everyone around me smile, too.
Batman is a thankless, nigh-impossible role. Michael Keaton fought it to a draw, but if you want the truth, everybody else, no matter how famous, no matter how handsome, no matter how growly, gets swallowed up by the suit, by its inherent limitations. All you can do is sulk, and glare, and growl, and punch out even goofier villains who get to have way more fun than you do and have a way better shot at winning an Oscar than you do. But man, the Batman Smile. The unguarded humanity in it, the split second of life-affirming silliness and joy. There’s a real person under that ridiculous cowl; there’s a real movie star in that ridiculous role. And who can blame Nicole Kidman for preferring just plain old Val Kilmer?
He’s gone—Val Kilmer died on Tuesday, at 65, of pneumonia—but no, wait, never mind, Val Kilmer’s here again, right before our eyes, doing incredible work under oft-ridiculous circumstances. Give me just one movie, and I’ll take 1993’s Tombstone: Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, his deadpan face sweaty and his mustache resplendent as he mockingly spins the tin cup like a gun. Everyone in my packed theater laughed. (“I’m your huckleberry,” he drawled, speaking to each and every one of us.)
Val Kilmer as the most smoldering bank robber in world history in 1995’s Heat, smolderingly firing that machine gun like he was born with it, though for me it’s the far quieter moment when Robert De Niro calmly explains the whole tough-guy premise of the movie to him—Don’t let yourself get attached to anything that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner, et cetera—and Val’s soft, smoldering reply is “For me the sun rises and sets with her.” Everyone in my packed theater leaned forward to hear him better.
And if we’re talking societal impact, yes, absolutely: Val Kilmer as Iceman in 1986’s almighty Top Gun, embodying ’80s blond dickhead perfection, embodying that ridiculously daunting call sign, embodying the majestic, homoerotic allure of volleyball, an all-timer of a scene in which everyone in every packed theater everywhere, uh, well, reacted. Tom Cruise is a handsome, charismatic movie star, yes, sure. But Val Kilmer was handsomer, Val Kilmer was more charismatic even in icy stillness, and Val Kilmer was a greater distillation of that all-powerful and inherently undefinable quality we call movie stardom. And you can read Cruise’s entire career since—all the running, all the screaming, all the stunts, all the effort—as a desperate attempt to make up that deficit, to get on Iceman’s level, screen-presence-wise. But that ain’t how movie stardom works. Either you have it or you don’t, and Tom had plenty, sure, but sometimes it felt like Val had all of it.
And Val had it all immediately: He exuded pure goofy movie stardom in his big debut, belting out “Tutti Frutti” for some reason in the delightfully ludicrous 1984 Zucker brothers comedy, Top Secret! He exuded pure medium-goofy movie stardom when he solved the power problem in 1985’s less-problematic-than-most-’80s-comedies lark Real Genius. He exuded pure movie stardom in even his less commercially bombastic roles; “I had such a crush on him,” my wife informed me when we got the news, referring not to Top Gun or even The Doors, but to Val’s role as a smoldering FBI agent in the 1992 neo-Western Thunderheart.
And ah, yes, The Doors. Let’s see here: Kilmer played Batman, and “Iceman,” and Elvis Presley, and Mark Twain (?!), and the Voice of God, yet his most daunting role was Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s extra-ludicrous 1991 epic, The Doors, embodying the most smoldering, the most ludicrously poetic, the most polarizing, the most rock-stardom-imbued rock star of them all. Even by ’91, it seemed as if we all largely thought of Morrison as a couple of iconic still photographs and an ungraspable myth: The hottest man who ever lived was also kind of a doofus. But Kilmer made him real, made the Lizard King graspable but still untouchable, in all his glory and goofiness.
Kilmer also tickled Lou Reed once.
What a life, what a dazzling series of movie star arcs. Near the end of that initial 15-year burst of ultra-stardom (which also includes 1997’s The Saint, a ridiculous litany of master thief flourishes and silly costumes that Val valiantly wrestles to a draw) comes 1996’s misbegotten The Island of Dr. Moreau, a disastrous meetup with Marlon Brando in which, by all accounts (including his own), Val behaves quite poorly in his struggle to reconcile movie stardom with serious acting. (Being a fun guy to hang around with is not a primary element of movie stardom or serious acting; Dr. Moreau is the sort of movie so catastrophic that it inspired its own full-length documentary.)
From there—throughout the 21st century, really—it gets chaotic, though with flashes of brilliance: the 2005 neo-noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, if you prefer tough-funny Val, and the 2010 ultra-farce MacGruber, if you prefer goofiest Val. You could watch his new movies if you wanted to, but you no longer had to. It got confusing; it got mysterious. “What Happened to Val Kilmer? He’s Just Starting to Figure It Out,” blared the headline of an epic May 2020 New York Times Magazine feature that discussed, at excruciating length, the fact that Val had all but lost his voice to throat cancer. “Someone comes up to you and says you have only four months to live, and the concept of time is a human one,” he explains. “So, if you describe the divine concept of time, there is no time.” I imagine it sounds better—it sounds profound—when he says it, or when he struggles mightily to say it.
Eccentricity is a huge part of the movie star gig. The good eccentricity and the not as good eccentricity. Both are on full display in the bizarre and engrossing and heartbreaking 2021 documentary Val; Val’s physical voice, such as it is, is the heartbreaking part. But that brings us to Top Gun: Maverick.
This is both a crucial scene from the best film of 2022 (no argument) and also, somehow, not part of a film at all. The idea of a scene taking you out of a movie because it’s too unbelievable, too real-life personal, too meta—this is usually a pejorative, this idea. Not here. Iceman, playing the role of Val Kilmer, surrounded by monuments to his greatness, sitting, silently, dying. It is too much to bear; it is dad cinema apotheosis. It is movie stardom incarnate. It is overwhelmingly beautiful. The movie screen splits in half in your mind: Maverick and Iceman on one side, Cruise and Kilmer on the other. Maverick and Iceman embrace; Cruise and Kilmer embrace. (Everyone in your packed theater bursts into tears.) Who’s the better pilot? Iceman asks, with a heartbreaking physical struggle. The two hotshots chuckle and leave the question unanswered. Who’s the better pilot? Kilmer asks, with a heartbreaking physical struggle. There is only one right answer. The sun rises and sets with him.
