When Black explains what the film is about, he goes straight to the happy ending, in which the characters rediscover hope.
"[The movie is about the fact] that the best you'll ever do is not something you already did, it's not behind you," Black said. "It's in fact ahead of you, if you have enough faith to take that leap."
He is talking about the film but he might also, of course, be talking about his life.
And so: Has Black done his best work here? It's hard to say. But Brooks, for one, believes the fact that Black directed it is a significant step toward his growth as an artist.
"For a long time I've been urging him to direct, because when you have the kind of voice he has as a writer, it's very tricky to have it translated by somebody else," Brooks said.
Greenblatt said, "I think it's his purest work because he was in control of everything on it."
Despite Black's proclamations of enjoying the process, however -- "It was the greatest experience," he said of directing -- there is at first no unique visual grammar that emerges, no announcement of an exciting new visual voice.
Rather, "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" appears to be almost self-consciously, and even simply, about the putting-up of words on screen. It is the sort of film in which chapter titles not only exist but are given their due with several seconds of otherwise dead screen time; in which scenes are cut into and frozen before the narrator takes us back to earlier moments.
But then it comes clear: His "style" is a visual embodiment of the writer, the wordsmith, the verbal storyteller taking control. If one were to nail Black's directorial vision, it would be to get the viewer to feel as if he is reading a great script.
And that, of course, may be the point. "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is about the writer fighting back, making sure that his characters, and their character, stay in the movie. That finally Shane Black's voice is heard.
Now that he is back, he seems to be saying that in some ways he was never here -- not really -- at all.
