Val

9/3/2022

The line between fiction and reality is seldom as blurry as when it comes to actor Val Kilmer who, as clichéd as it sounds, is a true chameleon. As consumptive gunslinger Doc Holliday in Tombstone, Kilmer looks for all the world like a man who’s running late for his own funeral. And on The Doors, "He looks so uncannily like Jim Morrison that we feel like this isn't a case of casting, it's a case of possession" (Ebert). As it turns out, Kilmer has apparently held a camcorder in his hand for as long as he was strong enough to lift it, only putting it down in the stretches between "action" and "cut." This footage, spanning 800 hours of footage and 40 years of personal and professional life, is the raw material for Val, an intimate, honest, urgent, bittersweet, optimistic, hopeful documenta