Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/11/09
Expanding a short story into
a feature film is a daunting challenge. Most short stories are short
precisely because it takes only a limited amount of time to say what they
want to and then move on. As such, they provide the filmmaker with
only a jumping-off point, and stuffing that brief tale full of padding
trying to keep all the story beats in line is a recipe for disaster.
When it works, it's because the original story inspired a whole new line
of thought in the screenwriter, allowing him to tell his own tale that's
inspired but not bound by the original. Richard Kelly has taken a
crack at Richard Mattheson's classic short story “Button, Button” and succeeded
spectacularly at using it as Act 1 of his mind-blowing sci-fi thriller
The Box. He asks a simple question Mattheson never did:
“Where does the box come from?,” and follows that thread to the very meaning
of human life. His utterly creepy parable is also the most successful
entry yet in that rising genre of movies made in the style of other time
periods; in this case, it's easily the best sci-fi horror flick of 1976.
It's a very bad day for the
Lewis family. Well, not so much for young Walter (Sam Oz Stone),
but for teacher Norma (Cameron Diaz) and NASA engineer Arthur (James Marsden),
it presents a series of career and financial challenges that leave them
wondering what they'll do to keep the family afloat. Enter a strange
wooden box Norma finds on their doorstep. It comes with a card promising
a visit that night from a Mr. Steward, and sure enough, at 5:00 sharp,
Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) shows up on her doorstep with an offer.
The box is topped with a glass dome and a big red button. He entrusts
her with a key to open the dome and informs her that pushing the button
within the next 24 hours will kill someone the Lewises don't know and result
in them being given a cash payment of one million dollars. When Arthur
gets home, he inspects the device. It seems to be nothing but an
empty wooden box. How could Mr. Stewart possibly know if they push
the button or not? Once they've made their decision, strange things
start to happen. Everywhere they go, strangers stare at them malevolently,
and people they think they know act strangely. Arthur starts to investigate,
and it's imperative that they discover the truth behind Mr. Steward, who's
promised to pass the box along to someone else. Someone they don't
know.
The most important part of
pulling off a movie like The Box is successfully establishing an
atmosphere of dread, and Kelley does a sensational job. It helps
that it's virtually impossible to guess where his story is headed, even
well past the halfway point. As he piles one bizarre, inexplicable
incident on top of another, he also makes brilliant use of the frame to
maximize tension. He'll drop a man standing outside the Lewises'
window, mouth disturbingly agape, directly in the center of the frame in
one shot, then have someone pass outside the same window at night in another
so far to the periphery that we're only kinda sure we even saw it.
The Donnie Darko director (bouncing back from the ambitious folly
of Southland Tales) also knows how unsettling it is to have people
stare at us when we don't know what they're up to. Kelly milks the
invasion of personal space, both visually and literally (a sequence in
a library where the other customers are entirely too interested in Arthur
is delightfully squirm-inducing), for all it's worth, and it's effective
both for generating scares and also working his themes of ethics and responsibility.
In case all that wasn't creepy enough, there's the simple matter of Mr.
Steward's face, gruesomely mutilated below the cheekbone on the right-hand
side for reasons too plot-specific to get into. Langella could be
reading aloud from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and he's still be
scary as all get-out.
Kelly built the Lewis family
(names but not characters taken from the Mattheson story) around his own,
dedicating the movie to parents Lane and Ennis Kelly, both of whom have
cameos. The warmth he feels toward these characters, and the solid,
lived-in marital chemistry between Diaz and Marsden, is pivotal to pulling
off the enterprise, because we need to care about them to fear for their
safety as the plot takes its' sweet, deliberate time unfolding. The
studious replication of the look and filmmaking style of a 70's B-movie
is also very effective, and Kelly uses the Viking Mars landing as a perfect
backdrop that implies that something momentous (and maybe not good) is
about to happen. Old audio of Gerald Ford explaining that we may
very well discover there's life on Mars is intriguing both because of its'
contribution to the plot and also the way it underscores how distant the
President has grown from matters of science in the intervening decades.
All this is well and good,
but after we've enjoyed being toyed with, creeped out and kept off-balance
for a while, we're going to expect a movie like The Box to deliver
the goods, and it does so with mind-blowing plot developments that explain
exactly why someone would show up on your doorstep with that box and that
offer. *****SPOILER WARNING: READ ON ONLY AFTER SEEING THE MOVIE*****
While Kelly never exactly comes out and says who Mr. Steward's “employers”
are, they're clearly pretty important (they do, after all, “send the lightning”),
and the only reason to doubt he's talking about God Himself is the use
of the plural. The Box is very concerned with matters of higher
powers, technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic, and the
ultimate questions of what happens after you die, all of which fit together
in a tidy test of humanity that would seem oddly comfortable as an Old
Testement parable: “...and so he came to each doorstep, and offered
each in turn great riches if they would only take the life of a neighbor
who was a stranger onto them...” While some will complain that the
movie doesn't answer enough questions, it plays totally fair with the question
you paid to have answered: why make the offer, and how does the offer
work. In fact, I admired the hell out of the elegance of the answer
to the question of who dies and how they are chosen. And while there
are great complexities to the events of the final 10 minutes, I liked that
Kelly doesn't cop out: a deal was made, and God (or the Martians,
or whomever signs Mr. Steward's checks) isn't one to change the rules to
a game He's already started playing. I was also really intrigued
by the thread in which Arthur's boss (James Rebhorn) and seemingly the
entire government become aware of what's happening, but can do very little
but follow along and try to pick up the pieces. One way or another,
this test is going to play out, and even if we pass, it won't be the last
one. *****END OF SPOILERS*****
The Box is a movie
of simple scares and big ideas, a near-perfect hybrid of psychological
horror and the literary sci-fi tradition. It does justice to Richard
Matheson's immortal little zinger of a short story while also spinning
it off in amazing new directions, in a construct that pays homage to the
great television anthology tradition of which he was a vital part.
Come for the scares, stay for the existentialism. Can't ask for more
than that. |
