Ang Lee’s “Hulk” centers its story on Bruce’s relationship with his father, renamed David Banner (Nick Nolte). In this film, David was a scientist researching gamma radiation as a way to improve cellular regeneration (and thus human healing). Barred from human test subjects, he experimented on himself and passed his altered DNA onto Bruce. He eventually came to regret this, but after being fired and left unable to cure his son, decided to kill him and spare Bruce (and the world) from a monstrous fate. Bruce’s mother (renamed as Edith) tried to protect Bruce, and David accidentally stabbed her.
This tweaks the origin of the Hulk a bit. It makes it so that Bruce’s gamma dosage unlocked something that was inside him all along rather than transforming him. But it still gets the essence of the story and elegantly adds new perspective; the Hulk is the embodiment of the scars that Bruce’s father left on him, so this revision only makes that more literal and ties into the story’s science fiction.
Underrated though it is, I’m still not sure “Hulk” is a great movie, but Nolte gives a great performance. David glues your eyes to the screen, particularly in the climactic scene where he and Bruce talk before they transform and clash as titans. He’s creepy, but there’s an aura of sorrow to him — as he talks, you can tell that while he regrets how his life turned out, he doesn’t blame himself for it. David laments most not that he tried to kill Bruce, but that he failed and lost his wife instead. When David touches Bruce, it feels covetous and predatory, not like the affection of a father should.
David calls the Hulk his “real” son and Bruce only “a husk of flimsy consciousness ready to be torn off at a moment’s notice,” yet desires to steal the Hulk’s power for himself. “I gave you life, now you must give it back to me,” David demands of Bruce, just how every narcissistic parent has insisted of their child (if not always so literally).
Compare Nolte’s performance in “Hulk” to his lead role in Paul Schrader’s “Affliction,” about a small-town New England cop named Wade Whitehouse. The titular affliction is how Wade’s alcoholic father, Glen (James Coburn), abused him. As an adult, Wade has inherited his father’s sins and spirals until he ends up even worse than him. Once he played an abused son, and then in “Hulk,” he continued that cycle by playing an abusive father.
So far, only one live-action Hulk movie has explored a crucial aspect of Marvel character Bruce Banner and his relationship to “the other guy.” Read More