Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
3/22/09
I've said it before and I'll
say it again, the two movies most responsible for modern Hollywood filmmaking
are Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense. While the later
popularized twist endings to a previously unprecedented degree, it also
opened the door for a subgenre I call The Question Movie, a story that
presents a bizarre or inexplicable phenomenon and asks you to sit patiently
for 90-140 minutes waiting for The Answer: what exactly is going
on here? Question movies are fun to think about before you see them,
and fun to play along with while they're unfolding but, truth be told,
it's really hard to come up with an Answer that's actually gonna satisfy.
Give Knowing, the long, long-gestating screenplay (check out that
writing credit, I might have done some uncredited work on this one and
since forgotten about it!) that's finally been filmed by Dark City director
Alex Proyas, this much: the way it ends is certainly no cop-out.
But it also makes this a movie whose final 10 minutes are substantially
different in tone, style and scope from the 110 that proceeded them, leaving
me feeling a bit empty about the entire enterprise. I admired the
craft and conviction of Knowing, and can't say I had a bad time,
but will probably disappoint all but a select few moviegoers who'll really
admire its' audacity.
It's 1959, and a newly built
elementary school is being dedicated with a time capsule. The students
are asked to draw pictures of The Future, but one, Lucinda Embry (Lara
Robinson), has instead filled a sheet of paper with numbers. After
the capsule is buried, she's found locked in a closet scratching a number
into a door with her bloody fingers. 50 years later, MIT Professor
John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) is going through the motions after the death
of his wife. He's got to try to pull it together for his hearing-impaired
son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), whose class opens the capsule. Each
student gets one picture: Caleb gets Lucinda's numbers. John
sees the sheet, and upon accidentally sitting a coffee cup on top of it
sees an odd sequence of digits circled: they list the date and death
toll of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Feverish research reveals that
the list is filled with numbers corresponding to tragic disasters and accidents
from the last 50 years, along with three that have not happened yet.
In short order, they begin, a horrific plane crash and subway accident
happen just as the numbers promised. John learns that Lucinda died
years before, but finds her daughter Diana (Rose Byrne) and her daughter
Abby (Robinson again) living in the shadow of Lucinda's prediction that
her daughter would be among the dead on the final date on the paper:
10/19/09, which is just days away. And there's more: like Lucinda
before them, Caleb and Abby are haunted by The Whispering Men, a group
of gaunt, long-coated men who gather outside the Koestler home and show
him horrific visions of death. Exactly what will happen on October
19, and if there anything John can do to stop it?
Give Knowing this
much, it's gonna give more than a few people pause when 10/19/09 rolls
around. For most of his running time, Proyas whips up an impressive
atmosphere of dread, an important component of any successful Question
Movie. The numbers make a great setup, since there's something about
having your doom written down in cold, irrefutable statistics that makes
it alarmingly palpable. The atmosphere ladles on realism as well
as it can, and the action sequences are impressively raw: the plane
and train crashes are brutal, and a vision of dying animals running out
of a burning forest is also well-done. One thing that makes the two
disasters stand out is the attention paid to the performances of the extras:
ordinarily a crowd of extras running to/from their doom is just a mass
waiting to be devoured by special effects, but here you can really feel
each individual death in a way that ups the horror considerably.
Proyas is aided by a wonderful
performance by Cage, who does fearful despair as well as anyone.
John is truly a man struggling for a reason to go on, and his combination
of fear of the future and hope that the numbers will prove that there is
some order to the world that took his wife is extremely well played.
Kuddos also go to the art direction team that threw together one of the
most spectacularly depressing homes ever committed to film.
The trouble with Knowing
starts with the fact that the rest of its' performances are not particularly
strong. Byrne is stuck with a rotten character, but does nothing
to enliven it: Diana's lived with Lucinda's crazy prophecies all
her life, but never seems half as interested in them, even once they start
coming true, as John is after just a couple days. I hate to call
out a kid for a bad performance, but Canterbury is pretty much just eyes
open wide in terror or not open wide in non-terror. And Alan Hopgood
does nothing with two really pivotal scenes as John's father, a Reverend.
On the plus side, while Robinson makes almost no impression as Abby, she's
quite good in her opening scenes as Lucinda. And I really liked Nadia
Townsend in her couple scenes as John's sister.
It seems like the roles of
John's family were meant to be bigger, but there are a lot of things about
Knowing that seem like they were supposed to be something different
than they turned out to be. It's a movie that, once all its' cards
are on the table, lead me to ask if any of its' events actually affected
its' outcome. And there are odd side alleys like Caleb's hearing
problem, which doesn't once prevent him from understanding anything anyone
says even when he's not looking at them. It's ultimately a long way
to go for a vaguely corny recurring motif of he and his father communicating
in sign language he doesn't need.
I love Alex Proyas' body
of work: The Crow and I, Robot were rock-solid entertainments
and Dark City is one of the greatest Sci-Fi movies ever made.
But I do wonder if he was the right man for this job. It's his first
movie cast predominantly with non-veteran actors and the performances are
not what one would hope for. And for all its' darkness (which he
handles well), the movie's more uplifting elements play with a certain
flat detatchment.
And I can't really get into
all this any further without this:
****NOW COME THE SPOILERS:
READ NO FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT BIG TIME HINTS AT HOW KNOWING ENDS****
OK, now that it's just you and me who saw the movie, have you ever seen
a film that spent more of its' budget (aside from Cage's always formidable
entourage) on the last ten minutes? That's some mighty impressive
FX work from a movie that before then is two horrific crashes away from
Sundance. The problem with those climactic minutes is twofold.
On the one hand, while I'd pretty much narrowed the identity of The Whispering
Men to two possibilities, BOTH of which proved to be correct in their own
way, the movie just hasn't worked hard enough to earn that particular climax.
Given what they prove to be, the fact that a key sequence revolves around
them stealing a car is simply absurd. In fact, pretty much all action
involving them is pointless because in the end they were just gonna do
what they did. In support of those climactic revelations (or is that
Revelations?) Proyas has filled the periphery of scenes throughout with
portents of every kind of global doom, from Global Warming to Global Terrorism,
that he can find to keep us off the trail, and I'll buy the argument that
what he's really doing is suggesting that Judgment is at hand. But
a single underdeveloped conversation with John's Dad and a little classroom
philosophizing about determinism vs. randomism do not themes make.
On the other hand, the movie's just not very good at visualizing the panic
one might expect to see leading up to The End. Its' mobs of looters
are busy but polite, at odds with the great work from those earlier extras
I mentioned. That John can simply drive through the mob-packed streets
over NYC without coming upon so much as an overturned car in his path seems
kinda silly. If those rioters aren't fueled by apocalyptic rage,
why aren't they at home? Cage's final scene is effectively staged,
but it would have played better if the subplot with his family had been
better executed. One last note on the ending, there are two striking
shots near the end that seem to cancel each other out: are we to
assume that Man's New Beginning includes GardenS of Eden? ****END
OF SPOILERS****
There's a thread on IMDB's
Knowing message board headlined “I'm sick + tired of Hollywood exploiting
the end of the world” (thanks for feeding me lines, “curlyryan”), and there
is a bit of Apocalypse Fatigue at play here. As much as I admired
many of the movie's individual setpieces, my mind did tend to wander to
other places (War of the Worlds, Signs, The Forgotten,
the pilot episode of Lost) where very similar scenes and themes
were done even better. I'm still gonna recommend Knowing,
because it's quite entertaining for the bulk of its' running time and I
didn't so much hate the ending as simply find it unimpressive. And
you can't say that Question wasn't Answered. And then some. |
