Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/30/07
Confession
time: as The Mist's end credits ominously crawled up the screen
to the continuing ambient sounds of its' shocking ending, I found myself
experiencing an unfamiliar sensation. I was shaking. For the
first time since I emerged from Se7en a dozen years ago, a thriller
had so engaged, terrified and ultimately exhilarated me as to produce an
actual physical reaction. Frank Darabont, known for his work on the
squishier end of the Stephen King spectrum (The Shawshank Redemption,
The Green Mile) and his underrated piece of Capra-Corn The Majestic,
has done a full 180, turning King's 1980 tale of apocalyptic isolation
into a relentlessly thrilling, utterly pitiless horror machine that makes
huge, hard points about our tendency to self-destruct in the face of fear.
Artist
David Drayton (Thomas Jane) lives in a small lakeside community in Maine
with his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz) and son Billy (Nathan Gamble).
When a storm damages their house, David, Billy and hostile neighbor Brent
Norton (Andre Braugher) head into town to buy supplies at the local supermarket.
David and Stephanie had already noticed an odd, thick white mist rolling
in over the lake, and once it reaches town, a panic sweeps through the
streets. Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn) races into the store, blood
on his shirt, screaming about something in the mist having grabbed a man.
The customers seal the doors and prepare to wait out what they assume is
some sort of natural disaster. At least until giant tentacles reach
under the loading dock door and drag a stock boy to his death. And
foot-long bugs start gathering on the windows. And an expedition
to the drugstore next door finds it covered in the acid-coated webs of
giant spiders. With no contact with the outside world, the refugees
become panicked and desperate, and more and more of them turn to Mrs. Carmody
(Marcia Gay Harden), a deeply religious woman whose love of the Old Testament
assumes their plight to mean that the End Times are at hand, and that the
only thing that will keep the monsters on the other side of the windows
at bay is an old-fashioned blood sacrifice.
There's
a lot going on in The Mist both on a storytelling and metaphorical
level, but it is first and foremost a monster movie, and one of the best
ever made. The creatures designed by Michael Broom leap full-grown
from our nightmares, inspired by the pesky vermin of our world, but spun
off in hellish new directions. Just about everything about them is
deadly, and the all-consuming mist is a perfect hiding place for even the
most colossal of beasts (just wait until you see what those tentacles are
attached to...). There's something about spiders, in particular,
that is unsettling in the best of times, and the steroid arachnids drempt
up here are terrifying in their appearance, their viciousness, their awful
life cycle and the simple ubiquity of their diseased webbing (memo to world:
unless they're glistening with dew on a sunny morning, webs are gross).
Kuddos to the sound crew, who fill the stereo speakers with ghastly sounds
made by things just out of our view, as well as Mark Isham, whose intense,
otherworldly score is a huge asset throughout, but never more than in the
final scenes. The monster attacks are shockingly violent and well-staged,
and Darabont's humanist leanings make no one in the store simply monster
food, even when they themselves become a different kind of monster.
Another
reason the tension stays so high is that the cast is so good. I had
high hopes for Jane when I first saw him in Deep Blue Sea, but I'd
been mostly disappointed by his subsequent work. Until now:
his David Drayton is a great unlikely hero, forced to lead simply because
he's thinking more clearly than anyone around him, at least for a while.
The underrated Laurie Holden hits just the right notes of oblivious liberalism
as the local schoolteacher who can't believe the crowd in the store could
become a mob, while DeMunn, Frances Sternhagen and Toby Jones also do great
jobs as “the sane people”. Gamble is tremendous in what must have
been quite a challenging role for a kid. Hopefully his parents don't
let him see the movie until he's a little older...
I'm
always a fan of Marcia Gay Harden, but there's something really special
about her work when her characters are at least a little bit crazy and
Mrs. Carmody is positively certifiable, maybe even before the mist comes.
Watching her transform from a pious outsider to the supermarket's own personal
Jim Jones is a disturbing treat. One of Braugher's great talents
is his ability to seem irrationally pissed off at everything around him,
which makes him perfect casting as a man who refuses to see the danger
in the mist no matter how obvious it becomes. William Sadler has
the good fortune of appearing in the year's two best movies to date (the
other being the yin to The Mist's yang, the hopelessly humanist
August Rush), and does a great job playing
a character who's simply not up to the challenges the situation puts before
him until the weight of it all finally causes him to snap.
It's
been a really good holiday season for movie poster taglines (like Beowulf's
invaluable “Pride is the curse”), and they don't come any more on-target
than The Mist's “Fear Changes Everything”. I've heard the movie compared
to the classic Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters Are Coming to
Maple Street", and while I do agree that there's a definite TZ vibe
at work here, the two stories have a key, powerful difference. While
Claude Akins and company self-destructed under their fears of power outages
designed only to make them afraid, the military FUBAR that unleashes the
mist is indeed the darkest, most intense imaginable threat to the lives
of the trapped shoppers. It's not that they have no business being
afraid, it's that letting fear make their choices proves to be (in most
cases) a fatal error. It's easy (once the movie is over, not much
time for wandering thoughts during its' running time) to let one's thoughts
wander to the mistakes made after 9/11, many of which are hard to justify
now, but for which we always have the same excuse: “We were afraid”.
But under the cloak of the mist, David and the other characters have no
room for error, and while it's easy to understand why they do some of the
things they do, the film's shocking ending (more on it after a clearly
posted spoiler warning to come) makes it only too clear how horribly misguided
those decisions were.
Darabont
really loves Stephen King, and it's interesting to see that he takes to
the writer's dark side even better than his hopeful one: The Mist
does the best job ever of bringing one of King's nightmare worlds to life.
In fact, while I haven't read the novella upon which it's based, I'm assured
by friends who have that he's gone even farther, amping up the horror with
a new ending that, well...
***SPOILER
WARNING: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, READ NO FARTHER IF YOU INTEND TO SEE
THIS MOVIE!***
...does
the unimaginable: it is horrifyingly happy. The film has spent
the previous two hours cataloging all the things that fear does to us:
it makes us turn on our friends, seek comfort in the leadership of the
insanely certain, and do nothing when we must act. But the single
most terrifying thing fear does is it makes us give up. And when
David and his final vanload of survivors give up, they have brought about
a self-fulfilling End of the World in which the dark, merciless film has
inspired us to totally invest. Believe me, no one could be more surprised
than me when the mist finally lifts, and that, the happy ending which David
could finally not bear to let his son hope for any longer, is the biggest
shock; the biggest tragedy, imaginable. The final minute or two (keep
a close eye on those refugees, the identity of one of them, and the choice
they made earlier, is key to the film's message) is one of the best-crafted,
most heartbreaking endings I have ever seen. And the way he acts
it will forever define Thomas Jane in my mind.
********END
OF SPOILERS********
As
you might be able to tell, I was both scared out my wits and really moved
by The Mist. Because it works both as a bone-crunching monster
movie and a cautionary tale for our time, it's horror at its' highest level,
the kind of storytelling Rod Serling would be proud of. Although
his version would probably have had fewer people ripped in two. And
remember, as you clutch your keys in a shaking hand on the foggy walk back
to your car: however unlikely we are to be attacked by extra-dimensional
monsters, it's even more unlikely they'd do it at the same time they had
a movie out. There's nothing to fear, as a great man once said, but
fear itself.
Right? |
