Beware of suspicious packages, and don't always be so quick to open them........
Cameron Diaz ... Norma Lewis
James Marsden ... Arthur Lewis
Frank Langella ... Arlington Steward
James Rebhorn ... Norm Cahill
Holmes Osborne ... Dick Burns
Sam Oz Stone ... Walter Lewis
Gillian Jacobs ... Dana
Celia Weston ... Lana Burns
Richard Kelly’s new grand magnum opus, The Box, flirts with the reality of everyday life in a snowy and welcoming Richmond, Virginia, circa. 1976. The film is about, as you may have already heard, a happily married couple (with a youthful son) who one day receive a mysterious package on their doorstep from a man with a severely burned face. Inside is a red button just waiting to be pressed. If the young strapped for cash couple decide to push it, they will be given one million dollars in cash, no questions asked. There is, of course, a catch. Upon pressing the button, someone, who they do not know, will be killed; they will never know who it was and they will never be blamed for it. After much contemplation, the couple presses that damn red button and live to regret it.
How funny and ironic is it that the film, at this point anyway, is Kelly’s most conventional and realistic concept to date? Adapted from a short Richard Matheson story, “Button, Button”, Kelly introduces a surrealistic ambiance over a nice and quiet suburban setting; similar to Donnie Darko, The Box implodes cosmic forces on small town U.S.A. And then, the movie tries to be something larger, something more profound and (religiously?) relevant, and it finds itself crashing and burning like the plane engine that landed in poor Donnie Darko’s bedroom some years ago. What happens in the second half of The Box left me disappointed, frustrated, and angry.
Exposition, we have been taught various times by our high school English teachers, can be an important and useful tool for a writer in crafting a story. Expanding your concept with backstory and/or tidbits of characterization can greatly improve the overall range of your piece, and the more we know about our characters — and our characters’ roles in relation to each other — the better. It deepens our story’s narrative. Mr. Kelly, at a Q&A session I attended after a screening of The Box at Lincoln Center, noted that the characters of Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) were based on his own parents, right down to their occupations and (some of) their distinct physical features. He made this movie for them, one could say.
In this aspect, exposition plays as Kelly’s good ally. We like these characters and are intrigued by their other worldly situation at hand. We feel empathy for them as well. Norma works at a classy private school and receives a tuition discount for her son. Starting next semester, this perk will be discontinued. Arthur, working with NASA and credited as a co-designer of the first machine to take photographs on Mars, dreams of going up in space one day soon, but he fails the psychological portion of the exam. Norma has a disfigured foot (she is missing four toes after a tragic accident involving her older brother) and walks ever so slightly with a noticeable limp. She wants to get surgery but it is too expensive for a family just living from “paycheck to paycheck”. These characterizations are well thought out, and Kelly thanks, at least in part, his mother and father for letting him put their lives into a darkly, twisted tale such as this.
The concept is a little far-fetched, true, but because it is played so seriously and practically in the first half, we accept and go along with it willingly. Frank Langella, playing the classic Vincent Price kind of role, as Arlington Steward, certainly seems strange, and his appearance is disturbingly alarming, but the film isn’t necessarily vilifying deformity. After all, Norma is deformed in some way herself, and we are to see her as a loving and nurturing caregiver. Mr. Steward’s facial features are startling (a toned down version of Two Face in last year’s film, The Dark Knight), but maybe that’s why we first accept him. Sure, some text at the opening of the film warns us to be afraid, very afraid, but maybe this man, with a briefcase and a box in hand, merely wants to help others; think the classic movie cliche of the loving crippled. The town has a 1950s movie like warmth to it, and perhaps Mr. Steward is our story’s Tiny Tim. Boy, was I wrong.
What transpires in the second half of this wrongfully misguided film is so frustrating that I gave up and felt cheated. Kelly, wanting to take his idea of exposition even further, decides to tell us why — and sort of, how — Mr. Steward has this control over life, death, and everything else on Earth as we know it. What starts out as an intimate character drama with one hell of a conflict becomes all about the conflict and less about the characters.
In explaining Steward’s mystical powers, Kelly goes via the ominous solar system to provide an answer. He expands his scope so wide that we’ve lost sight of the original story at hand; a cross between Alex Proyas’ Knowing and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Invasion, the movie morphs into an absurd body snatching, nose bleeding tale of eternal damnation. And to think, if Steward had avoided that lightning bolt, none of this would’ve happened in the first place.
The film grows so preposterous that you wonder if Kelly is doing this intentionally to anger his fan base. Southland Tales was, in one cast member’s opinion, impenetratable, and it felt like everyone was in some distant, far off world, and not 2008 Los Angeles. The film desired to be a political satire but turned out to be an anti-Republican, end of the world Blitzkrieg. Kelly is somewhat of a political filmmaker, or maybe he just really wants to try and be one. In Darko, his references to Dukakis and The Star Spangled Banner (playing on the scrambled television sets) were soft spoken and light. In Tales, the political agenda was anything but subtle (although I do question the almost Shakespearean meaning of, “he was a pimp and pimps don’t commit suicide”). The Box seems more aligned with Darko, and while that is for the better than for the worse, its politics and allegiances are unclear. Gerald Ford is shown multiple times on television, and we also get a stock footage shot of the Twin Towers. I questioned their startling placement. Is this a flaw of the filmmaker or of this reviewer’s own inadequacy? The jury will be back in an hour.
The last ten or so minutes of the film really work, as it gets back on track with its sinister opening tone. The story comes back to the family’s house, away from the dumb water vessels of the afterlife (looking like the liquid wormholes in Darko), and once again focuses on character and a tense situation. Mr. Steward presents the couple with another life-altering decision, and the movie finds its footing, albeit a little too late. Still, the film ends satisfyingly, at least in my strangely macabre opinion.
I haven’t talked much about the performances, but they are all as good they possibly could be. Diaz handles a fairly awkward and absurd scene early on (in which a deranged student demands that she take off her boot and show her foot to the class) fairly well, and although her accent is at first a little too strong, she gives a sincere performance. Marsden, an actor formerly unknown to me, also gives a capable, likable, and humorous performance, and as the son, Sam Oz Stone has some heartfelt moments in the finale. And Mr. Langella? Fairly creepy and calm, the actor is able to make the events occurring on screen seem somewhat plausible, that is, until you actually stop to think about them. The supporting players are also okay for what they are given to do, but just wait until you see what they are given to do.
The Box starts off well enough and then becomes nothing more than a cinematic car crash, and you know what they say about people’s fascination with car crashes. It isn’t the out and out disaster that Kelly’s sophomore effort was, but it is immensely disappointing nonetheless. Kelly has a directorial style on display here that is commendable, and his sense of mood first rate. Lynchian lite, maybe. He has the skills but isn’t quite sure how to use them. Like M. Night Shyamalan, I think it’s time for Kelly to start working with other people’s screenplays; an auteur does not literally have to be one.
The 411: The Box is more than half a good movie, but not much more. What starts off like a good Twilight Zone episode (because, you know, it was one) quickly deflates into a poor sci-fi would be epic. There is nothing wrong with being abstract, and I find myself encouraging filmmakers to be so, but it may be time for Kelly to jump in the wormhole and try out a different genre. After conquering the 70s, 80s, and 00s in his previous movies, I suggest he next tackle a buddy comedy set in 1995. Two surfer dudes and, okay, maybe one giant rabbit.
