The Hughes Brothers’ “From Hell”, a competent Hollywood adaptation of a highly artistic graphic novel, breaks up fairly neatly along those lines. Where the movie tends toward a Hollywood treatment, it falters, and where it stays true to the holistic intensity of the comic, it presents a fascinating and disturbing portrait of one of the more mysterious crimes in human history. Of course, about nearly every movie adapted from a book one can say the same (“Breaking News: Movie Not As Good As Book!”). When “From Hell” departs from the book, though, the story stays afloat because of its almost encyclopedic attention to detail. We are fortunate that the Hughes Brothers have at least one thing in common with Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, the book’s creators—they have an afficianado’s eye that eagerly looks on with the sort of reverence children have for good ghost stories.

The look of “From Hell” is stylish, almost flamboyant, an amazing feat considering the movie’s primary locations are the slums of London. They seemed to have absorbed the malevolent skies, modelshop cityscapes, and hallucinatory lushness of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula” (the conspicuous ab-sin-the bottle is even quoted at one point), and rather effectively combined it with the slummy realities of Whitechapel, the sordid inner city where the murders took place. To their credit, the Hughes Brothers have captured a wonderfully literary atmosphere of gaslamps and fogs, of horse-drawn carriages and florins tinkling on cobblestones, of silver knifeblades winking in fresh puddles of rain, of black cloaks casting long shadows. Theirs is not the pale evocation of Victorian London that we might find in a more buttoned-up film that wears its literary pretensions on its sleeve—say, a Merchant-Ivory snorefest—but rather a lurid vision of London akin to those of writers indigenous to that time and place, such as De Quincey, Dickens, and especially Stevenson.

In keeping with Eddie Campbell’s superb drawings, the film has a dark, inky look that greatly enhances the dread that must have come at nightfall in Whitechapel, when ravenous murder seemed to haunt the alleyways. Many of the shots, including the eerie exterior of Mary Kelly’s hovel during the fifth murder, are taken right from the book. The Hughes Brothers’ great visceral style is felt in every frame of the movie without loading it down with superfluous mannerisms, and stylizing the tale, even if the style is necessarily different than Campbell’s, is the one area in which they’ve shown absolute fidelity to the book.

I have focused on the brilliant look of the film before addressing the story for the simple reason that the story, just as it is in the graphic novel, is D.O.A. The story of Jack The Ripper is not particularly interesting as a dramatic piece. The Ripper tale, the first highly publicized serial killer case in history, is more important for what it signified—the birth of the tabloid villain—than what it actually was. The real interest is in the apparent obfuscation of the truth by some very powerful members inside Buckingham Palace and Scotland Yard, and, more importantly, the darker truths revealed about the civilization that helped birth these crimes. The Hughes Brothers seem (rightly) preoccupied with issues of class and abuse of power, whereas Moore added mesmerizing essays into the magic, mysticism and pure evil underlying the murders. Both give the full arc and scope of a momentous event whose secrets have been forever lost.

The result should have been a slow and chilling meditation on the crimes rather than a white knuckle serial killer whodunit (such as “Silence of the Lambs”, which is distractingly alluded to a few times in the film), but the Hughes Brothers try to have both. They fail. Moore’s characters are not so much brought to life as simply exhumed for autopsy, animated with enough personality to fuel the story, but slaves always to recorded fact. This is a better approach to any story whose essence is historical speculation. But the Hughes Brothers put too much effort into investing the story with “life” that isn’t there, and flounder a bit. The melodramatic musical score, for instance, is jammed into every available spot in an effort to add suspense and fright to the proceedings, but after the first twenty minutes it becomes tiresome and overwrought. The central characters have been pumped up so much their personalities somehow shrink, as in a funhouse mirror.

Consider Robbie Coltrane’s Godley, a minor character in the book who is given a much larger role in the film as Abberline’s sober foil. He’s there to pick up the pace, but most of his lines are either flat banalities of expository writing or lifeless quotations of poetry. Faced with the somewhat inevitable and pathetic ending, Godley, since he has no voice of his own, can only conjure a line from Hamlet (an utterly ridiculous moment, and Coltrane seems to acknowledge this with a pained smile). The other two major leads, Johnny Depp’s Abberline and Heather Graham’s Mary Kelly, stray dangerously close to Tinseltown cliché, the former the troubled detective with a taste for narcotics who bucks authority, the latter the whore with the heart of gold; their love affair seems forced to say the least. Ironically, had the principles been drastically toned down, it would have been easier to get involved in the unfolding gruesomeness. At least they get the accents right. Mostly.

The one character who is toned down, Sir William Gull, is the only truly complex and remarkable character in the book (isn’t that always the way with serial killers), and was Moore’s focus. But for presumably commercial reasons, his character is eviscerated—no pun intended—by the Hughes Brothers, who try to create a suspenseful third act by setting up a showdown between detective and bad guy, a showdown which is not in the book (the meeting happens, but only after the murders, and is almost comic in its stunning anticlimax). To achieve this, not only is Gull under-, but Abberline overwritten, changed from the hard-bitten and taciturn family man he was in the book into a rather silly caricature of a Sherlock Holmes-type opium eater who has proleptic and eidetic hallucinations which allow him to solve the crime (he seems to be a conflation of Abberline and Lees, a fraudulent psychic in the book).

Still, the essence of Gull’s Masonic madness comes through. And, in giving Abberline his eccentricities, the Hughes Brothers succeed in developing a nice theme of doubles. Abberline and Gull are enemies opposed, yet drawn together by the same mysterious energy that pushes them in different directions. Gull speaks of Freemasonry as the hidden veins beneath the skin of London, and later he talks of the heart being “a single pump for a double circuitry” of blood. The theme is wrapped up beautifully at the end by Abberline’s coins, the twin images of Queen Victoria taking us into the fadeout. Here the Hughes Brothers invoke Coppola again, this time “Apocalypse Now”: the duality of man, the hypocrisy of his society, his capacity to love and also to kill, the dynamic war of creation and destruction that goes on behind the sun-kissed façade of Western rationalism and…well, you get the gist.

Thankfully, “From Hell”, a solid Hollywood entertainment enlivened by skillful artists, offers only subtle hints at the highmindedness that is almost impossible to convey in two hours. The Hughes Brothers, like wide-eyed fetishists, seem too occupied with recreating the Ripper murders to deal with Moore’s flights of fancy. Yet “From Hell”, because of its visuals, is one of the few really faithful translations of a comic book into celluloid. The level of care and sophistication shown in the visual rendering of the story is a welcome change from the sloppy beasts whose decaying carcasses clog the multiplexes these days. The Hughes Brothers’ influences are easy to spot but the brothers are more than competent enough to deliver the goods. Not being an enthusiast of the Ripper story, I cannot say whether or not they’ve added a new and illuminating addition to the case files, but they have certainly announced their own maturity as filmmakers.