Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
2/28/07
Making
connections: it's what our brains do. Touch the stove, get
burned, don't touch the stove again. Others work hard, others get
promoted, I'll work hard so I can get promoted. Jane and Tom both
know me, Jane and Tom are talking, Jane and Tom are talking about me.
Bob doesn't like me, Bob owns a gun, Bob is trying to kill me. A
simple definition of madness is when the brain can't stop making connections,
particularly when it can't stop connecting things that don't really connect.
Like the connections that start occurring to Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey),
a simple dogcatcher who has the misfortune to read a book called "The Number
23".
It's
February 3, Walter's birthday, and his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) has
bought him an interesting-sounding detective novel about “One man's descent
into madness”. There's a warning on the first page that anyone recognizing
people or incidents inside should read no further, but even when Walter
notices odd similarities between himself and the hero, Fingerling (Carrey
again), he can't put it down. The story follows the Detective as
he meets a Suicide Blonde (Lynn Collins, who plays several roles in the
book sequences) who's covered every inch of her apartment with writing,
all of which concerns, you guessed it, the number 23. She's deep
into paranoid delusions about how everything about herself and her life
can be reduced to that number and that it is stalking her somehow.
Fingerling thinks he's talked sense into her... until he takes the stairs
and reaches the sidewalk at exactly the same time she does by taking the
window. His girlfriend Fabrizia (Madsen again) meets him at the scene
and starts to develop a fetish for pretending Fingerling is trying to kill
her. While he plays along, the Detective starts to develop a fascination
of his own... for that number, along with an increasingly violent jealousy
of Fabrizia's contact with Dr. Miles Phoenix (Danny Huston).
The
more Walter reads, the more he too becomes fascinated by 23: he's
able to break down all his vital statistics into equations that add up
to 23 (or at least 32, 23 backwards). Just like Fingerling, he starts
writing notes on his body, including one Agatha spots on his arm that reads
“KILL HER”. At first she and their son Robin (Logan Lerman) humor
his obsession, but it soon becomes clear that the book, with its' 22 Chapters
and blank final pages, really is trying to tell them something... something
they may not want to learn.
The
Number 23 is, first and foremost, a Twist Movie, which means that your
reaction to it will depend largely upon how you feel about the final revelations
of why, how and by whom the book was written. While I was initially
skeptical as the climactic reveals began, the way the third act plays out
satisfied me pretty thoroughly. Without giving too much away, the
movie's darkness is best appreciated the same way Fabrizia likes her danger...
putting on a good show, but hoping to pull back before things get too nasty.
Key to the movie's success are the performances of Carrey and Madsen.
They make a winning couple, and watching the darkness of insanity slowly
spread through their lives is unnerving precisely because they're just
not the kind of people horror movies happen to. Carrey doesn't try
to tone down his persona, instead letting it draw us in before he starts
to gradually darken.
As
directed by the ever-polarizing Joel Shumacher (Flatliners, Batman
and Robin, The Phantom of the Opera), the film is a bravura
mind-twister. The sequences of the book's action unfolding inside
Walter's mind are trippily overlit, with constant, unnatural camera movement.
In the real world, it's the kind of movie where the wrong turn off the
main road of normalcy reveals side streets filled with hotels and hospitals
that seem to have been decorated by Edgar Allen Poe.
Fernley
Phillips' screenplay is quite clever, although it's not perfect.
A dog who keeps popping up everywhere Walter goes fails both as symbolism
and menace. And a key piece of information that would allow us to
play along and figure out the mystery is unfairly withheld (I honestly
wondered if it was removed during editing to keep us in the dark:
when it's finally mentioned, the movie seems to think we've already heard
it). But once all the pieces are assembled, the puzzle is pretty
neat. And unlike a lot of Twist Movies, the story's point is enhanced
rather than invalidated by knowing what it all means. There's also
a lot of cool Big Thinking about numerology and the way we assign values
like times, dates, and curses to simple numbers.
The
Number 23 is kinda dark, kinda clever and kinda intense. But
it draws its' greatest power from its' ability to make you fear for its'
hero's sanity. Would you know if your brain turned on you and suddenly
nothing was really the way you perceived it? Now THAT'S scary. |
