The Amazing Spider-Man

2012 // USA // Marc Webb // July 2, 2012 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Chesterfield Galaxy 14 Cine)

Perhaps the most unkind thing one can observe regarding The Amazing Spider-Man is how much of a struggle it is to say anything notable about it at all. The film is just there, a slick, by-the-numbers recitation of the Spidey origin story in a slightly different key than Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. That 2001 feature remains curiously over-praised to this day, and it's a perverse commentary on Amazing's mediocrity that it will ultimately serve to burnish the earlier film's reputation.

Director Marc Webb's take on the Web-Slinger's tale offers an ill-advised emotional focus on Peter Parker's dead parents, as well as a few superficial changes. Here the romantic prize is Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) instead of Mary Jane Watson, and the webs that sprung from a genetic mutation in 2001 are here high-tech devices of Parker's own invention (as in the original comic tale). In lieu of Tobey Maguire, this outing features Andrew Garfield as Spidey, who at least proves more nuanced and flexible in the role. Overall, however, the tweaks leave such a slight impression that one wonders why the filmmakers bothered with them at all. Amazing distressingly suggests that Marvel and Hollywood have managed to reduce Spidey to a predictable, all-flash product, an ignoble fate for the the crown prince of conflicted, wise-ass adolescent superheroes.

The little moments that entertain in Amazing are mostly of an actorly or technical nature: Garfield and Stone's natural, sweetly awkward courtship, for example, or the eerie way that the scaly visage of the villainous Lizard echoes the face of alter ego Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans). However, the film is so weighed down by triteness and and futile pathos-wringing that it quickly fades from memory after the credits roll. For a film about one of the most recognizable and beloved of modern spandex-clad heroes, such flimsiness is disappointing, to say the least.

Your Sister's Sister

​2011 // USA // Lynn Shelton // June 27, 2012 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

The magnificent, cringe-provoking awkwardness on display in writer-director Lynn Shelton’s 2009 comedy Humpday invited comparisons to mainstream “discomfort comedy” works such as The Office, but the film’s secret weapon was the appealing simplicity of its scenario: What if two straight guys talked themselves into making a gay pornographic film, despite the fact that neither one really wanted to do so? Shelton complicated this high-concept premise with doses of unresolved college-age angst and subtle class envy. She also turned a one-on-one battle of wills into a nasty relationship triangle by adding a third major character, a girlfriend who wobbles between hurt, angry, and baffled in the face of such a nonsensical, sexually confused macho dare. It worked phenomenally better than it had any right to, primarily because Shelton and her performers treated the whole enterprise like a tragicomical high-wire act, studding it with unbearably drawn-out moments of unease, panic, and surrealism.

Shelton leans on a variation on this successful formula in her new feature, Your Sister’s Sister, and once again it pays marvelous dividends. The result is one of the most engaging films of the year thus far, a funny and anguished little tale that commands the viewer’s attention in a manner that no hollow spectacle of digital super-heroics can manage. As in Humpday, there are only three characters that really matter: a man, a woman, and her sister. It’s been one year since unemployed, acerbic Seattleite Jack (Mark Duplass) lost his brother. Jack’s best friend Iris (Emily Blunt) correctly discerns that he still needs to come to terms with the loss and sort out his life. Accordingly, she sends him to her family’s remote cabin on a misty, forest-clad island for some mandated Alone Time.

Unfortunately, Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) is also holed up in said cabin, attempting to clear her head after the disintegration of a long-term relationship. Jack and Hannah circle one another warily, but soon they are commiserating, downing tequila shots, and making a Big Mistake of a, um… coital nature. Naturally, the next morning Iris drops by for a surprise visit, resulting in lots of surreptitious glances, uncomfortable meals, and whispered conversations. Did I mention that Iris happens to be Jack’s dead brother’s ex? And that Hannah is a lesbian?

Duplass, Blunt, and especially DeWitt are all at the top of their game here, conveying the humanity of their characters without showily painting them with faux-humanizing detail. Vitally, each of the three characters is sympathetic when viewed from the right angle, and yet the performers permit peeks at their more blinkered and selfish tendencies. (Even sweet, generous Iris can be a clueless jerk, it turns out.) Duplass is, as always, a bit of an conundrum as a performer. His manner is agreeable and relaxed, but he possesses the sort of asshole unctuousness that only white guys from the urban Northwest can really achieve. Watching Duplass’ Jack clumsily talk his way into the sack with Hannah—and thereafter tap-dance as fast as he can to conceal this tryst from Iris—is vaguely unpleasant, just as it was unpleasant to watch his character break the news of his impending on-screen gay encounter to his girlfriend in Humpday. It’s a disagreeable spectacle, but also undeniably authentic, and even mesmerizing in an absurd sort of way.

Ultimately, Duplass proves adept at utilizing his demeanor for black comic effect, and whether it is a conscious effort or not, it works phenomenally well in Your Sister’s Sister, bouncing off of Blunt and DeWitt’s more polished styles to create deliriously agonizing comedic moments. Shelton’s script is lean and wonderfully structured, all rising emotional stakes and mounting anxiety. It finely balances its pathos between whispered intimacies and wailing histrionics, creating an emotional terrain that feels much like that of a tearful, vicious, real-world argument. Shelton’s latest feature ultimately proves to be a shamelessly absorbing story of family, relationships, secrecy, and sacrifice.

Brave

2012 // USA // Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Purcell // June 14, 2012 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Chesterfield Galaxy 14 Cine)

Arguably, Brave represents Pixar Animation Studios' first foray into honest-to-goodness fairy tale territory. Its story reverently (albeit loosely) follows the form of a Hero's Journey, and it wraps itself in the conventional "medieval fantasy" elements of the genre: castles and kingdoms, magic and battles, princesses and curses. The princess in this case is the flame-haired and quick-witted maiden Merida (Kelly Macdonald), the eldest child of Scottish monarchs Fergus (Billy Connolly) and Elinor (Emma Thompson). Merida is a master archer, and no slouch in the saddle, either, but her parents primarily see her as a valuable asset to be gifted in an arranged marriage that will preserve the fragile peace with neighboring clans. Merida is having none of this, naturally. Following her efforts to gleefully humiliate her would-be suitors (and parents), she sneaks off to sulk, and promptly stumbles upon a gnarled old woodcarver (Julie Walters) who moonlights as a witch. Spells are purchased, and things get... well, hairy.

In its broad outlines, the plot is well-worn stuff, but it's the quiet subversiveness of Brave that makes it such a delight. The film's explicit messages are fairly tame and even somewhat wooly: stay true to yourself, try to understand where others are coming from, and... try to divine your destiny from the land's mystical whispers? Something like that. It's the film's implicit messages that are really intriguing, and this is where Brave admirably demonstrates that kid-friendly genre cinema needn't engage in bloody-minded deconstruction to be bold. Most notably, romantic love is nowhere to be found in the film's story, a conspicuous absence for those who examine Disney's pop cultural products with a careful eye, but not one that draws attention to itself. Boys and romance just aren't on Merida's mind, and no handsome princes appear within the film's confines. Moreover, Merida's looks never come up in the film's dialog at all. No characters comment on her beauty, or lack thereof, and her most defining physical trait (aside from her cascade of scarlet hair) is her athleticism. Of the three suitors who appear—Young Macintosh, Young MacGuffin, and Wee Dingwall—none exhibit any interest in Merida as a romantic object. Indeed, one of the film's more fascinating turns is its late pivot from mocking the suitors to revealing them as pitiable lugs who are being bullied by their fathers. Laughably anachronistic, perhaps, but still a pleasure to see such a sentiment expressed in a Princess Tale (™).

While the film's marketing seems focused primarily on Merida's yearning for freedom and self-determination, the story is actually that of the relationship between the princess and her mother, and of their mutual need for greater empathy. As the queen, Elinor is forced to play the parental Bad Cop to Fergus' jovial, masculinity-obssessed Good Cop. It is she that is expected to prepare Merida for a life as a poised and obedient gentlewoman, and she that therefore receives the brunt of the princess' wrath. Elinor is presented as doting but also severe, demanding, and quietly despairing for her daughter's future. Strictly speaking, however, the queen isn't the villain, although neither is the aforementioned witch, nor the twisted, man-eating bear that once took Fergus' leg and still stalks the kingdom's wilds. The real Dragon that must be slain is the rift between mother and daughter. Elinor has so completely internalized the confining cultural traditions that were once foisted upon her that she no longer seems capable of expressing love save through disapproval. Merida, meanwhile, is so self-absorbed and reflexively rebellious, she cannot perceive her mother's sacrifices and pain. The inability of either woman to acknowledge the other's humanity is the film's central conflict. In other words, Brave not only passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, it essentially repurposes the fairy tale genre for a female-centered and distinctly modern story of familial devotion and understanding.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that while Brave isn't a ground-breaking work of animation compared to Pixar triumphs such Ratatouille and WALL-E, it's still quite an extraordinary work of pop cinema, not to mention gratifyingly witty and heartfelt. It's also—as one expects of Pixar—a visually sumptuous film, from the achingly gorgeous Highland landscapes to the off-beat design of its human characters and setting details. (Regarding the latter, Brave echoes the high-water mark established by How to Train Your Dragon's dense, humorous faux-Scottish Viking milieu.) Still, the film's earnest and unapologetic absorption with a thorny female-female relationship is what truly makes it so appealing. Which is perhaps less a commentary on Brave's overall excllence than on the parched state of thematic originality in animation, even among Pixar's features. Indeed, Brave stands out among the studio's films strictly on the basis of its narrative maturity and the rich, disciplined way that its action, sentiment, and humor serve the story. The psychological sophistication of Pixar's features has grown in recent films, but Brave is not distracted by tonally off-key chase sequences (WALL-E, Up), nor is it rendered politically problematic by its affection for Übermensch (The Incredibles, Ratatouille). It's just a damn fine fairy tale, told very well.

A Fine, Good Place to Be: Just Pals (1920)

1920 // USA// John Ford (as "Jack Ford") // June 6, 2012 // DVD - Fox (2007)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on the silent films of John Ford.]

From what this author been able to discern, the 1920 comedy-drama Just Pals is the earliest film by acclaimed American director John Ford that is currently available for home viewing by the workaday cinephile. This is hardly surprising, as Just Pals was also the first film Ford made at the studio that was then known as the Fox Film Corporation. Fox’s contemporary corporate home video label has done a commendable job of not only preserving the director’s work, but also of maintaining a quite comprehensive DVD catalog that includes even the director’s more obscure features. (Many of the releases are unsurprisingly bare-bones, but one has to count one’s blessings where silent era home video is concerned.) Given that most of the thirty-odd films that Ford directed at Universal prior to his 1920 Fox debut are lost or incomplete, and that none appear to be available to consumers, Just Pals is the necessary starting point for a chronological trek through Ford’s prolific career.

It’s probably a fool’s errand to try to discern early whispers of Ford’s later auteurist signatures in a feature as pleasantly anonymous as Just Pals. Consistent with that of many American silent features, its story is a double-dose of treacly earnestness, wherein layabout nogoodnik Bim (Buck Jones) discovers virtue and respectability through his friendship with eleven-year-old tramp Bill (Georgie Stone). There is a plot of sorts, chiefly involving the pair’s misadventures as they negotiate the perils of joblessness and homelessness in a small Western town. Not incidentally, Bim has eyes for the local schoolteacher Mary (Helen Ferguson), whose naive entanglement in a shifty suitor’s embezzlement scheme drives most of the film’s action in its latter half. The plot also features a deceitful doctor and his wife, who rather creepily conspire to keep Bill and Bim apart for their own gain. And, just for good measure, camped in the sagebrush outside of town is a flea-bitten gang of bank robbers, the co-conspirators of Mary’s suitor. All of these myriad threads come together neatly in the end, with the evildoers securely behind bars, Mary’s good name restored, and Bim and Bill reunited and polished up.

As with many workmanlike American silents that have faded from popular memory, Just Pals has a kind of matter-of-fact, plodding quality to its storytelling when laid alongside features made just twenty years later (let alone contemporary films). The tidiness of the plot’s resolution notwithstanding, the film is concerned chiefly with presenting a cluster of amusing and thrilling scenes, connected by little more than Jones’ star presence (which is not insubstantial). Accordingly, the film’s events have a this-then-that-then-this banality: Often engaging or exciting in the moment, but lacking in cohesion. Given the film’s vintage, one is inclined to be generous on this score, if only because the aforementioned amusements and thrills have a snappy, theatrical substance that is one of the primary appeals of action-studded films of the era. When Bim hoists Bill up by a pulley in order to give the squirmy tyke a long-overdue wash behind the ears, one can’t help but marvel at its physicality.

And so it is with many of the film’s set pieces: Bim’s spur-of-the-moment rescue of Bill from the hands of a railroad bull; the lad’s foolish nocturnal thievery from what turns into a moving train; and a climactic shootout with the outlaws at the town’s telegraph office. These are all familiar moments of Western action that would not be out of place in Ford’s later filmography, but here they likely represent little more than Hollywood’s perennial fascination with the frontier, rather than this particular filmmaker’s embryonic expression of genre preoccupation. Indeed, at times the Western setting of Just Pals feels almost tossed-off, expressed primarily through the odd plot detail and the film’s modest production design. With a few adjustments, the story could work just as well in a small town anywhere in America.

Visually speaking, Just Pals doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, but this is hardly unusual for the countless American silents turned out by the studios of the time. In such films, the dominant style is best described as “straightforward.” Accordingly, Just Pals is foremost an actor’s feature, and therefore Buck Jones’ film. He possesses the sort of superb leading-man face that only the silent era seemed capable of incubating: square jaw, chiseled cheekbones, and gleaming eyes, yet capable of projecting a kind of dewy sentiment that sets him apart from the stock Tough Guy. Many of the film’s most affecting moments involve little more than Jones gazing off at some distant point, often while embracing Stone with paternal affection. One can practically hear Ford off-camera shouting, “Now, Buck, you’re worried here!” And yet Jones sells it well.

Beyond this, the chief pleasure of Just Pals is the parcel of odd gestures that lend it striking dabs of wit or darkness. There are some unexpected jabs at the petty hypocrisies of the good church-going folk and self-appointed town elders. (It never gets too prickly. This is a Hollywood film, after all.) This satirical current culminates in one of the film’s best visual gags: the grizzled, comically pompous town constable wordlessly rebuffs a proffered church collection plate by flashing his badge. Other idiosyncratic moments crop up here and there. In one of the film’s only special effects shots, Bill blissfully dreams of a proud, employed Bim dressed in a succession of uniforms (including a baseball slugger’s pinstripes). In perhaps the bleakest and strangest scene, a distraught Mary stumbles upon a mother and child about to drown a sack of kittens in the creek. The mother is unable to stomach this deed, but when she turns her back, her son surreptitiously empties the sack into the underbrush. Actress Ferguson watches this scene unfold with a mixture of morbid curiosity and despair that lingers in the mind’s eye. The film subsequently fades to black, and the viewer is left to discern from later dialog that she thereafter attempted to drown herself. The “all’s-right-with-the-world” uplift that closes out the film out can’t quite erase an unsettling moment like that.

My Own Private Apocalypse: The Dream Terrors and Waking Terrors of Take Shelter

[Note: This essay contains spoilers. It is an expansion of my original October 2011 post on Take Shelter.]

When suddenly / Johnny / gets the feeling / he's being surrounded by / horses, horses, horses, horses / coming in in all directions / white shining silver studs / with their nose in flames / he saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses...

—Patti Smith, "Land"

Once in a great while, a horror film emerges that seems to crystallize an exact moment in the American experience, turning over rocks to expose the squirming maggots that were hitherto unacknowledged. Take Shelter is that sort of film, a work of cinema that seems to perceive the fears of 2011 almost intuitively and give them a vivid, disturbing expression. George Romero achieved a similar feat in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, and Tobe Hooper did it again in 1974 with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like a young Romero or Hooper, writer-director Jeff Nichols operates outside the confines of the Hollywood studio system, and like his predecessors he seems remarkably attuned to the anxieties that lurk in the American consciousness. While Take Shelter is a much more polished film than the gritty Living Dead or Chainsaw Massacre, and a much more understated kind of horror story, it possesses a similar, disturbing genuineness.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Take Shelter is the elegant operation of its story on two discrete levels that mingle and reinforce one another. One the one hand is what might be termed the Dream Reality of Curtis' nightmarish visions. In that reality, the threats are fantastical and attuned to fairly classical horror film conventions. On the other hand is the Waking Reality of Curtis' daily life, where the threats are of the everyday variety that anyone might confront. The brilliance of Nichols' script rests on how it employs the particular strengths of each of these realities to create a very powerful, emotionally resonant story.

At the most rudimentary level, horror films function by giving form to everyday human fears: our fear of sexual violation becomes a vampire; our fear of uncontrolled rage becomes a werewolf; our fear of nuclear annihilation becomes a colossal mutant reptile. If a horror film can be said to have a function beyond mere entertainment, it is to provide catharsis for these fears, a safe space where they can be unleashed and subdued. Through the horror genre, the viewer experiences a world in which their worst anxieties are allowed to run rampant, only to be defeated in the end. There are endless variations on this formula—and, of course, in the current cynical era, the monster often wins—but in general, this is the template according to which horror films operate.

The Dream Reality of Take Shelter hews to that template, and it is very effective at evoking old-school, spine-tingling scares. Granted, there is no specific monster in Curtis’ visions, no vampire or werewolf. The threat is a force, an oncoming apocalyptic storm. The nature of the storm is mysterious—there is no explanation as to whether it represents a scientific or supernatural phenomenon—but Curtis knows that it is Bad with a capital "B". He can feel in his bones that something terrible is going to happen when the storm arrives, and based on what the viewer witnesses in his visions, it's hard to disagree. Those visions feature vivid and haunting imagery: thick, oily rain; arcs of lightning; flocks of birds; warping gravity; funnel clouds reaching down from the sky. The film is relatively restrained about the use of this imagery, and as a result the emotional effect it elicits is very potent. That said, the most frightening aspect of Curtis' dream-storm is the effect it has on living things. The family pet turns into bloodthirsty beast, townspeople transform into a frenzied mob, and a beloved spouse becomes a psychotic killer.

The fear of apocalypse is an old subject in horror cinema, but an apocalypse doesn't necessarily point to a literal physical destruction of the Earth or of human civilization. It can denote a traumatic upheaval or the re-alignment of society into something unrecognizable and frightening. It's no accident that Night of the Living Dead came along in 1968, when America was seized by a pervasive fear of open race war and of a strange counter-culture that set itself in direct opposition to the dominant ideology. There was a sense that the country was on the cusp of a violent transformation.

In the same way that Living Dead gave expression to the fears of its era, Take Shelter offers an apocalyptic scenario that seems eerily fitting for a twenty-first century of rising extremism, diminishing resources, and environmental devastation. Proximally, Curtis fears that the approaching storm from his visions will harm his family (or change them). However, beneath the surface, the storm represents a swirling mass of contemporary horrors: suicide bombings, regime changes, oil shortages, global epidemics, changing climate, tainted food. It is every looming upheaval that is beyond an ordinary American's ability to control. Moreover, given that Nichols quite deliberately sets his film in a small-town Heartland setting, the storm carries an undercurrent of Red State anxiety about the racial, religious, and cultural composition of the country. The apocalypse becomes a demographic one: What will happen when we wake up one day and discover that They—the Muslim, the immigrant, the liberal, the gay—outnumber Us?

The film's Dream Reality is so successful at evoking these anxieties precisely because it does not overstate them. Curtis' visions function first and foremost as a source of sensory terror. They have a weird vagueness about them that seems to suggest a bad dream. There is that dream-like sense of beginning in media res, and a heightened awareness that something is wrong. There is a plausibility to the surrealism: I dreamed that I was standing in the kitchen. And you were there. And you were soaking wet. And you didn't say anything. And there was a knife on the counter. And you turned towards the knife... The design of Curtis' dream sequences creates a very disturbing psychological effect, as it taps directly into the viewer's first-hand experience with nightmares. There is no need to evoke any of the specific fears noted above, because the Dream Reality contains all of them. Curtis' visions are simply about the World Going Bad. The normal becomes abnormal, and chaos reigns.

If Take Shelter were merely a story about an evil storm that strikes a small town, it would likely still be an effective horror film. What makes it a great film is how Nichols relates Curtis' Dream Reality to his Waking Reality. The storm is not a threat that roams about physically menacing the characters, as a normal horror movie monster would. Instead, it is locked inside Curtis' mind, a phantom threat (although it feels all-too-real to Curtis). This returns the film to the territory of a mundane small-town American drama, and something closer to reality, where fear itself is the enemy. It's not the storm that tears Curtis' family, work, and life apart, but his own fear, and the succession of poor decisions he makes when he tries to confront that fear on his own.

While the terrors of the Dream Reality are apocalyptic in nature, the terrors of the Waking Reality are more intensely personal. Take Shelter is in large part a tragedy about a person who is losing their mind... and is perfectly, horribly conscious of it. This is a fairly unique thing in cinema. There are numerous films featuring unreliable protagonists whom the viewer follows down the rabbit hole of madness, but most of these hapless characters are not aware of what is happening to them. Moreover, in most instances, there is some horrible trauma or stress that is the cause of the character's break with reality. Darren Aronofsky's recent film Black Swan provides an interesting contrast. That film presents a portrait of a mind cracking under the colossal pressures of rivalry and perfectionism at the most elite levels of professional ballet. Needless to say, those are pressures that most viewers will never experience. In comparison, Curtis in Take Shelter appears to be an easygoing working-class family man. He has no particular strains beyond those experienced by just about every member of America's Ninety-Nine Percent. Which is, of course, part of the genius of Nichols' script: It uses Curtis' mental illness to delve into a host of everyday anxieties that are all-too-familiar. The threat of the evil storm in the Dream Reality is still present, but layered over it are the much more immediate and relatable threats of the Waking Reality.

Curtis fears that his own mind has become a kind of runaway genetic locomotive, barreling towards a future in which he is transformed from a provider into a burden. Suddenly, everything that was good and decent in his life, everything that his friend Dewart claimed to envy, is under threat. If he is indeed losing his mind, how long will he be able to keep his job? If he loses his job, he loses his health insurance, and his daughter Hanna loses her chance at hearing. If his mental condition gets bad enough, if they find him wandering the streets like his mother, will his wife Samantha be able to support him? Curtis' psychiatric crisis throws into relief the instability just beneath the surface of the American Dream, taking the film beyond the shapeless fears of the Dream Reality and into to the more urgent fears of being one paycheck away from calamity.

And yet despite Curtis' awareness that his frightening visions are most likely the product of chemical imbalances in his brain, he can't stop preparing for the storm. He knows that building a shelter for a storm that is not real is the textbook definition of crazy, he knows it makes no sense, but he still feels compelled to do it. This, ultimately is the primal fear at the root of the Waking Reality: the fear of the disintegration of the rational mind, of losing one's identity to biological forces that are beyond one's control. It's the fear of madness, but also the fear of addiction, the fear of dementia—any condition which in which the mind is in revolt, in which we cannot explain why we do the things we do. It's the terror of becoming That Guy, the one who used to be so normal... Take Shelter provides us with a rare reverse-shot glimpse of That Guy. It is the untold story behind the gossip that most people in town will hear, about the night that Curtis lost it at the Lion's Club supper.

The essential tragedy of Take Shelter is that Curtis' behavior is both perfectly reasonable and utterly foolish, often at the same time. If one examine Curtis' actions dispassionately, they make a kind of pragmatic sense in light of his visions. He reacts reasonably to the information he has at his disposal. When he dreams that the family dog attacks him, he responds in the waking world by fencing the dog up in the backyard, and then eventually giving it away. Although Curtis' visions are probably a figment of his own diseased mind, his behavior is not erratic. He's not running around with tinfoil on his head and his pajamas on backwards. He's preparing as best he can for a storm he doesn't fully understand. It's hard to argue with his logic. To wit: His dreams suggest that something about the storm will drive people to homicidal madness. Maybe it's something in the air? Better get some gas masks.

However, even assuming that Curtis' visions are real omens, and not just short-circuiting neurons, his is a pitiable situation. Nichols is an Arkansas native, and both this film and his first feature, Shotgun Stories, reveal that he has a keen grasp of the small-town milieu and all its corresponding psychological baggage. He depicts a good-natured but essentially blinkered and reactionary society that is ill-prepared for one of its own to suddenly begin behaving in a way that falls outside accepted norms. The film observes a rural America with little infrastructure for people suffering from mental illness, a feeble safety net for families suddenly hobbled by an incapacitated breadwinner, and zero patience for dealing with anyone who strays outside a narrow range of tolerated behavior.

Curtis's isolation from those around him marks Take Shelter as part of a larger tradition of independent American films about people with an intense, fearful worldview that separates them from loved ones and members of the community. Other entries in this sub-genre include: Bill Paxton's Frailty, about a blue-collar single father who believes he must slay demons concealed in human form; Todd Haynes' Safe, about a housewife who is obsessed with the idea that environmental chemicals are eroding her health; and Michael Tolkin's The Rapture, about a woman whose fanatical belief in Armageddon leads her to reject both life and God. All of these films share a mood of intense alienation, where a Cassandra-like character finds themselves the lonely steward of a terrible truth.

No matter how unfortunate Curtis' situation is, no matter how unsympathetic the townsfolk who surround him are, some of the blame for his plight rests with Curtis himself. He permits his own dumb Midwestern pride to overrule his common sense, and as a result he stubbornly (and disastrously) conceals his fears and his plans from his wife and friends. He refuses to explain himself, to admit to the diagnosis that he freely makes to the psychologist at the clinic, or even speak the word: schizophrenia. Admittedly, he's been dealt a lousy hand, in the form of a genetic predisposition to mental illness. However, he allows his fear of that illness to cloud his judgment, and makes some spectacularly bad decisions that reverberate and cause even more hardship for him. The viewer sympathizes with Curtis, because they have seen the horrifying visions he's seen, but they cannot excuse his mistakes: his deceptions, his abuse of trust, and his systematic alienation of everyone around him. This, of course, is why fear is the mind-killer: It makes a bad situation even worse.

And what of the film's final scene? What does it mean? Were Curtis' visions real prophecies all along? Was he ever really insane? Does this mean that he's been proven right in the end? Digging too deeply into the intellectual meaning of the film's final moments upsets what is essentially a perfect emotional conclusion to Curtis' story. The true narrative climax of the film occurs earlier, in the storm shelter. Curtis finally confronts the crippling fear inside him with Samantha's help and opens the door to face whatever is on the outside. The tornado may not have done any significant damage, but that's beside the point: The intensity of the storm shelter sequence stems from the viewer's shared terror with Curtis down there in the dark. At that moment, it's unclear which would be worse: To find an apocalyptic landscape behind that door, or nothing unusual at all? By the final scene on the beach, the film has already offered that essential moment of narrative tension and release. Curtis has changed, because he's let Samantha into that most shameful place and faced his fear with her aid. He's no longer alone. There's horror in the realization that the apocalypse actually is coming, but there is also relief and resolve. David Wingo's magnificent, rising score in that final scene reveals as much. It's a moment of power and perfection, reflected in the simple fact that Samantha only has to utter one word, "Okay." That one word says so much: “I see it too. I believe you. I'm with you. We're ready for what's coming.”

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2011 // USA // David Fincher // December 19, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Project (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20)

An argument can be made that David Fincher's adaptation of Steig Larsson's phenomenally popular pulp whodunit, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is an exercise in style over substance. Certainly, the film’s opening credit sequence lends credence to this position: Yeah Yeah Yeahs vocalist Karen O growls out a cover of Led Zepellin’s "Immigrant Song" as oily black liquid oozes over human figures that are embraced and penetrated by writhing computer cables. It’s jarringly reminiscent of a James Bond opening, and perhaps a sly inter-textual joke at that, given that leading man Daniel Craig is serving as the current 007. The rest of the film is only moderately less brash.

However, such aggressive styling proves to be a tick-mark in the film’s favor, at least when one considers it alongside both the source material and Niel’s Arden Oplev’s comparatively flat, mirthless 2009 Swedish film adaptation. Under Oplev’s hand, Larsson’s grim tale of buried family secrets and socialist democracy gone freakishly awry was many things—workmanlike, satisfactory, disposable—but stylish it was not. The most valuable card up the sleeve of the 2009 film was Noomi Rapace, who embodied waifish, wounded hacker-sleuth Lisbeth Salander with eerie precision and a curious kind of dark magnetism.

Fincher’s take doesn’t add any appreciable depth to Larsson’s tale, and in this respect it is remarkably similar to the Swedish film. Screenwriter Steve Zallian wisely excises the Scandinavian politics and finance that dominated hefty stretches of the novel. Such components are arguable crucial for understanding the wider context of Larrson’s story, but what is digestible on the page is probably unworkable in a film. Zallian also trims and tweaks the narrative in other ways, mostly to make the story a little smoother and more symmetrical. From a thematic perspective, however, the new film is unsophisticated, offering little beyond the visceral appeal of an unsolved mystery, seat-squirming tension, and a streak of white-hot pseudo-feminist rage.

Insofar as this is the extent of what any version of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo could offer, David Fincher’s film is an unquestionably handsome and persuasive realization of the tale. It’s visually striking, crisply conveyed, and blessed with a lucid, seductive aesthetic and mood, which is more than one can say of most murder mysteries. Rooney Mara—slinky and wide-eyed beneath ghostly eyebrows—conveys her own variation of Lisbeth, more shrinking, awkward, and defensive than Rapace’s portrayal, but also more fearsome and razor-edged when provoked. Beyond Mara and Craig the film features a cast of familiar faces—Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright among them—as well as Swedish stars and long-lost character actors (Julian Sands!), all of whom acquit themselves well enough. (Perhaps the film’s only formal blunder is the vaguely accented English dialog, which is distracting given the explicit decision to retain the Swedish setting.)

The real stars here, however, are the craftsmen behind the film, a team of returning Fincher collaborators who manage to render a stomach-churning tale of rape, murder, and revenge as something deliriously attractive. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth bestows a familiar yellowish “greasy-gothic” look to most of the interior spaces, but elsewhere a chilly gray dominates, and appropriately so. The adroit editing from Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall—who have now cut the director’s past four films—keeps things humming along with enviable vigor and clarity, a necessary asset in a story so laden with exposition. Just as essential is the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which effectively evokes an atmosphere of pure wrongness by layering plucked-out, discordant melodies over ambient droning and buzzing. These various visual and aural elements coalesce (perhaps “curdle” is a better term) into an atmosphere that is oppressive, gnawing, and eminently fitting for the tale. And therein lies the primary appeal of The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo: As a lurid, shallow thriller steeped in hideous beauty.