Cusack defends Poe portrayal

By Roger Moore

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

ORLANDO, Fla.

John Cusack has heard the sniping. He’s Internet savvy, a big-time Twitter user. So he knew Edgar Allan Poe fanatics were complaining about the movie he was making about the writer. He knows the early reviews of “The Raven,” in which he plays the poet/writer as a haunted man on the trail of a serial killer, haven’t been kind.

“Poe probably deserved better than this movie, which turns his heritage into a sub ‘Se7en’-style serial-killer thriller,” sniffed Britain’s Birmingham Post. But Cusack isn’t taking that lying down.

“Somebody I’ve read said, ‘Oh, he wasn’t some heroic man of action.’ And I go, ’Oh really? He went to West Point. He was kicked out, but he was there. He got in. And he was a swimmer. It’s not a stretch to think of him trying to solve a mystery, a series of crimes. He had an analytical, mathematical mind. You can see that in the writing. He called it ‘rationation.’ But basically, he invented forensics in his fiction.”

And Cusack is just getting started. An actor fond of finding the dark side in light characters and bringing lightness to the dark ones, Cusack found Poe to be right up his alley. At 45, Cusack has lived his movie-making life by making more interesting choices than commercial ones. He’s just hoping filmgoers get into Poe the way he got into the author of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven” and “The Cask of Amontillado” — the 19th-century author who popularized the short story, invented the thriller, detective fiction and, some say, science fiction. “The Raven,” directed by James McTeague (“V For Vendetta”), re-imagines Poe’s last days and the mystery surrounding his death.

“I loved the conceit here,” Cusack says. “Poe getting caught up in one of his stories, trapped by a fan who is mimicking the murders in his work.

“He wrote about gruesome crimes ... And he wrote about people going mad, as in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’” The movie acknowledges Poe’s mental state but makes note of his scathing wit and wicked wordplay.

“He was on the verge of madness, a lot of the time. He was a poet who wanted to understand death, walked around graveyards, wanted to scare the hell out of himself. What a crazy, wonderful character to play.”

The screenwriters for “The Raven” reference various Poe works and have the serial killer connect the murders by names, addresses and manners of death depicted in Poe’s fiction. They establish a “ticking clock” element to the pursuit by borrowing plot elements from Poe’s “The Premature Burial.”