Whipped Cream Difficulties

Last night, after the SDC, we got together for movies at the home of (friends who shall remain nameless unless they want to out themselves in comments). Thanks for hosting, (friends who shall remain nameless unless they want to out themselves in comments).

We’re still sort of in the Halloween creepy/scary zone, or at least we felt that way, so we kicked things off with something short: the 1941 version of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart“. I thought this dragged just a little bit (which is odd for a 20- minute movie) but there was a lot of effective creepy stuff going on here. In particular, I liked the way they played with sound to heighten the atmosphere of paranoia and dread. I think Richard Corliss has a good point when he suggests this may have been the first movie influenced by “Citizen Kane”.

(“Tell-Tale Heart” is also significant as the first film directed by Jules Dassin, who went on to direct “Rififi”, “Topkapi”, and “Never on Sunday”, among other films.)

So we figured, after that, we’d watch another early “horror” film: “London After Midnight”. How could we miss? A legendary “lost” film, directed by the great Tod Browning, with Lon Chaney?

Yeah. Well. About that. We figured someone had dug up a print somewhere. Ha ha, no. It turns out that Turner Classic Movies got Rick Schmidlin (who has also worked on restoring “Greed” and “Touch of Evil”) to do a “reconstruction” of the “film”, which basically involves panning over publicity stills from the movie with inserted dialog cards. Apparently, someone liked this, as Schmidlin won a “Rondo Award” for his work (according to Wikipedia). As far as we were concerned, after about five minutes of watching this, punctuated with such comments as “What the f–k?”, “What is this s–t?”, and (my favorite) “Why would anyone do this?”, we shut it off and decided to watch something else.

We settled on “Take Shelter“, a movie I’d heard about in theatrical release but never got around to watching. In general, I like it (though I think it could have been made 10 to 15 minutes tighter, and that would have made it more effective). I could look at Jessica Chastain all day; Michael Shannon’s performance doesn’t have a lot of nuances, but he’s not really playing a nuanced guy. I think he pulled off the lead role very well.

After the jump, I’m going to talk about some things that may be spoilers.

As I said, I think I liked the movie more than other folks, but I may have a higher tolerance for ambiguity than other folks, too. Some overheard comments: “I want closure!” “Die in a fire!” (To be fair, the “Die in a fire!” comment from Lawrence was not actually in response to the movie, but in response to this interview with the director, and specifically

[The ending is] specifically designed to be ambiguous. That really riles some people and some people really love it. What’s funny and interesting to me — and not to sound too cocky about it, but I really do think it worked — is everybody talks about the specifics of what’s happening in that scene. And to me, the specifics don’t matter that much.

And:

But what’s important to me is that these two people are on the same page and are seeing the same thing.

Yeah. So much of this movie is about a husband and wife who love each other, and are trying to keep that together in the face of uncertainty. (I commented, jokingly, at a key point in the movie, that “The real storm is in the human heart.” But Nichols sounds like he could say that sincerely.)

But as long as they’re seeing the same thing I think there is a resolution and the possibility of hope in the film.

So basically, the ending admits to two possibilities, as I see it:

• Either the protagonist has been right all along. In that case, the characters face an apocalyptic disaster scenario, that’s probably going to kill untold numbers of people, including their friends and neighbors. Or:
• The protagonist is crazy, and he’s dragged his wife into his madness with him, in a folie à deux.

Neither one of these scenarios strike me as holding out the possibility of hope.

(There is a third possibility that I considered briefly, but which I don’t think is consistent with the rest of the film: everything that takes place, from the very beginning, is taking place in the protagonist’s head. For all we know, he’s in a institution somewhere, and the wife and child are a dream, or something from his previous life that he’s remembering. I don’t think internal evidence supports that, but I’ll mention it.)

So, yeah: glad I watched it, think it could have been tighter, but still a good movie if you have a tolerance for ambiguity and nihilistic endings.

(As a side note, I’m a little surprised by some people’s dislike for “The Usual Suspects”, and particularly the ending. You felt jerked around? Fine. But were you not entertained?)

(Thanks to Carol C. for sending me the link to the Jeff Nichols interview.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2012 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.