Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

 

Horror times two, with a side order of drama
Two stories of the supernatural, a melodrama from a Hollywood pro, and a small film about the perils of the literary life make up our agenda for this month.

The Last Winter
Larry Fessenden has developed a reputation among film people as a careful and effective horror film director, following more in the footsteps of Val Lewton and Hitchcock than in those of more recent directors of teen gore-fests and their inevitable and seemingly endless sequels.
Fessender’s earlier films, all low-budget independent films, have demonstrated a consistency of vision and a concern for the environment. They include No Telling, Habit and Wendigo; and The Last Winter expands and develops their themes.
Fortunately, Fessenden (co-writer, director and producer) creates characters and plots that incorporate his concerns without beating the audience over the head with his message. He just scares them into believing it. Fessenden also is a character-actor and appeared as the first man Jodie Foster shoots in The Brave One.
Most reviewers accurately linked The Last Winter to Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World and its remake, John Carpenter’s The Thing. All three are set in the Arctic (with Iceland standing in for Alaska in Fessenden’s film), and all three are claustrophobic studies of a small group of people trapped in a deteriorating situation where something is stalking them.
In the earlier films, the menace came from outer space in the forms of a blood-drinking vegetable and a shape-changing alien who assumes the shape of a dog and then a human being. Fessenden’s menace, which never is totally explained, seems to be something from the earth.
The permafrost is thawing and releasing air (and who knows what else) that has been frozen for millions of years. Even the resident ecologist has no idea what is going on, but the evidence is clear: something is happening, and its effect is spreading outward from their site.
The plot and the characters all are fairly simple, without being simplistic. Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) works for North Industries oil company, which Congress has authorized to drill in one of the last pristine areas of Alaska, and he is determined to bring in his equipment and do what he has been hired to do. Unfortunately, the temperature has been fluctuating wildly, and the ice roads for the equipment refuse to freeze.
Monitoring Pollock and the company is James Hoffman (James Le Gros), who has been hired by North Industries to watch what happens, sign off on everything and not interfere. Hoffman believes strange things are happening, but he’s not sure what. To further complicate matters, Abby Sellers (Connie Britton), Pollock’s second-in-command and former girlfriend, has started sleeping with Hoffman, although her motives may not be purely romantic.
When Hoffman opposes Pollock’s plans to abandon the ice roads and use heavy rollers to bring in equipment, Pollock has him fired and orders a plane to take him from the camp.
Max McKinder (Zach Gilford), a young man whose father is a friend of Pollock, begins to see and hear things the others haven’t noticed, and he is drawn to the capped and abandoned test well drilled twenty years before. He refuses to eat and stares out the window at the snow, hearing galloping hooves and seeing ghostly animals. Crows appear, caw and disrupt papers at one of the day shelters and devour whatever meat is available.
Gradually, the other people at the camp start behaving strangely—Hoffman’s assistant develops a nosebleed that won’t stop, the mechanic begins compulsively tearing down the motor of a snow-cat, and even Pollock wakes up one night to find he has wet the bed.
A disaster further isolates the camp and sends Pollock and Hoffman off to get help. The film really ends twice; the first ending is fairly predictable, given the deteriorating situation, but then a coda adds a further chilling touch to the film’s message.
The acting is solid. Although the major characters are fairly predictable, they are better than the stereotypes often used to personify positions in a film that wants to make a point. The minor characters, by adding believability to the situation, make up for any weaknesses in the major characters. The photography nicely isolates the characters, showing them as blots or smudges on the blank landscape.
Fessenden doesn’t flinch from showing burned bodies or a mutilated corpse where appropriate, but unlike most current horror directors, he doesn’t dwell on them. They are there simply as part of the film’s content. The film’s only significant shortcoming is the computer-generated effects. The dreamlike, not very frightening creatures who appear near the end will project a kind of ethereal beauty to some viewers (they may be ghosts) and a laughable quality to others.
The film’s strengths are its suspense, visual quality and ability to make a point without insulting the audience. For a low-budget horror film, these are no small accomplishments, and if this genre appeals to you, take a look at Fessender’s film—he may emerge as the new Hitchcock or Carpenter.

The Orphanage
Last year’s Pan’s Labyrinth, whether labeled a fantasy or a horror film, deserved the praise and awards it won, and first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage is cut from the same cloth. Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan’s Labyrinth, as well as the two Hellboy films and the underrated Devil’s Backbone, is listed as “producer” and “presents” The Orphanage.
The DVD extras, the director and crew express their appreciation for del Toro’s support for the project. Bayona, veteran of television work, displays high professional standards in his first feature film and places himself consciously in the tradition of the “classic” ghost story—i.e., one that relies on the eerie and unseen rather than on gore and dismemberment.
Laura and her physician husband Carlos have purchased and refurbished the rambling orphanage where Laura spent part of her childhood, with the intention of turning it into a home for children with physical or mental handicaps. They have an adopted son, Simón, who tests HIV positive, although he is unaware of it and shows no obvious symptoms. Simón has imaginary playmates, and when he and Laura go to the beach, he leaves a trail of shells so his imaginary friend from the beach can follow him home.
On the day of the arrival of the first children, Simón and Laura have an argument when the boy wants to show her the “little house of Tomás,” his imaginary playmate from the beach. Simón runs away from her in anger, and only later does Laura realize he has disappeared. She searches for him frantically, a search that extends for days and then for weeks.
Was he abducted by the mysterious old woman who came to the door on the morning of the disappearance, the same one Laura sees later in the yard? Has he gone to the beach in search of his friend and drowned? Who is the strange small figure wearing a hood whom Laura sees standing at the end of the hall and who flees when she approaches? These and other questions are answered slowly as the history of the orphanage after Laura’s departure comes to light.
To try to find out even more, Carlos agrees to let Laura hold a seance, but the results are disappointing. How these various plot lines and characters intertwine and finally are resolved creates a tense and unpredictable conclusion.
All of the acting is excellent, with Belén Rueda, a Spanish television actress, outstanding as Laura; Montserrat Carulla frightening as the old woman, Benigna; and Geraldine Chaplin taking over the screen in her brief appearance as the medium, Aurora.
The director has been explicit about his attempt to create a classic Hollywood ghost story, and, although the actors speak Spanish, he has succeeded. An orphanage with its transitory inhabitants, like a hotel, is a perfect place for a tale of the supernatural, and Bayona has created a great set for his orphanage, one that becomes a major character in the film as the camera explores the long corridors with closed doors, closets, winding staircases, basements, attics, abandoned areas and adjacent storage buildings. To further augment the plot, he adds several references to Peter Pan, Lost Boys and the desirability of growing up
The film’s only weakness is that it has a completely devastating, realistic conclusion, but then modifies that position with some supernatural scenes (which are not inappropriate), and then adds a further coda to try for an ending that, while not happy, leaves Carlos with a smile on his face. For maximum impact, the director should have stopped after the first conclusion, or, if he felt compelled to extend and soften the final situation, to conclude after the second set of scenes.
Nonetheless, The Orphanage is one of the best ghost stories to appear on the screen in quite some time. It is in Spanish, with English subtitles. Guillermo del Toro’s similar film, The Devil’s Backbone, is reviewed in the October, 2002, issue of this publication online.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Veteran director Sydney Lumet, eighty-three, no longer needs to prove himself, but his direction in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead demonstrates he hasn’t lost a bit of the professional ability he demonstrated in Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and numerous other highly regarded films.
In his most recent venture, Lumet takes a strong script by Kelly Masterson, condenses it, and unnecessarily strips away elements to create a melodrama so intense it is pushing into the area of tragedy. Centering his action in the drama between two brothers, a father and mother, and a faithless wife moves the story closer to the conflicts of classic Greek tragedy although the action is completely contemporary.
Two brothers in financial difficulties plan the perfect crime: to rob the jewelry store owned by their parents. No one will get hurt, the loss will be reimbursed by insurance and the brothers will have funds to cover their financial shortcomings. Unfortunately, the robbery doesn’t follow the plan for various reasons and goes horribly wrong. In Greek tragedy, the ultimate cause of what happens frequently is debated on stage—is it a character’s flaw, the gods intervening to punish or save someone, or simply fate appearing in the form of bad luck that takes the hero down? Character and bad luck still are viable sources for the problems of the modern people of this film, with bad luck perhaps outweighing their character flaws.
The acting throughout is powerful and tense, staying just this side of being overdone. Philip Seymour Hoffman, as older brother Andy Hanson, is excellent in a negative role, but his emotional reactions make him almost sympathetic. Ethan Hawke, as younger brother Hank Hanson, is full of fear and nervous tics as he tries to handle a situation clearly beyond him. Albert Finney, as the father, growls his way through the early part of the film, so stricken with grief he can barely function; but in the last third of the film he pulls himself together and methodically seeks revenge. Marisa Tomei is excellent in a supporting role as Gina, who shares the beds of both Andy and Hank; her reactions to and interactions with the brothers add greatly to the effect of the story. Supporting actors, such as Rosemary Harris as the mother, fill out a superb cast.
Little more can be said without giving away too much of the plot. While the story definitely is downbeat, it is beautifully presented and worth the attention of viewers who would enjoy films such as Lumet’s earlier Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Starting Out in the Evening
Starting Out in the Evening exemplifies what the small independent film does at its best—it catches a few moments of human experience that are valid, but frequently overlooked, and holds them still for examination. It presents characters so complex that the plot conflicts and themes often are impossible to separate from the individuals. It may give some insight into a social, political, or economic group that we might not otherwise encounter. Andrew Wagner’s quiet adaptation of Brian Morton’s novel about an aging writer gives us all of these and more.
Leonard Schiller has published four novels, of which two sometimes are regarded as masterpieces, although critics argue about which two. All of them are now out of print. Schiller, a Jewish novelist in his seventies, is of the generation of Bellow, Mailer, Updike, Cheever, Welty or O’Hara, and he has spent the last ten years of his life writing his fifth novel, with little progress. Nonetheless, every day he sits down at his desk and puts in the specified time at his manual typewriter.
Schiller’s wife is dead; his unmarried daughter, Ariel (Lili Taylor), who teaches Pilates, comes by regularly to check on him; and they sometimes attend readings or other literary functions together. Into this controlled and uneventful lifestyle comes Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a graduate student in her twenties, who admires Schiller’s novels and wants to write her master’s thesis on him. Will he agree to a few interviews? She hopes to publish some parts of the work as articles and perhaps revive interest in Schiller’s work, as well as, of course, advancing her own career.
Schiller at first resists—he doesn’t want to interrupt his writing, he is too old, he doesn’t care about commercial success, etc.—but eventually he succumbs, finally giving her the key to his apartment to use whenever she is in the city. She, in turn, “borrows” a picture of him taken when he was a young man, for she is in love with the man she thinks he was then.
Through blunt and often self-serving questions, she probes his writing history, his use of autobiography, his source of ideas, his family relationships and his current writer’s block. What she finds out is what all interviewers of writers are forced to conclude—beyond the mechanical details, writers know very little about how they do what they do and often very little about what it means.
She slowly draws out of him that he neglected his wife and daughter to devote time to his writing, and that may have led to some problems in those relationships—perhaps explaining why his daughter is in her forties and unmarried, although she wants children. While the relationship sounds one-sided in favor of Heather, Leonard takes her to dinner, receptions and parties and obviously enjoys the attention she devotes to him.
Balancing this relationship is one between Ariel, Leonard’s daughter, and her current boyfriend, Casey (Adrian Lester), from whom she has been separated for more than a year after a tumultuous break-up. But now he is back in town, and they both feel the old attraction. She is in her forties, feels the clock ticking and wants to have children. He doesn’t, and that problem, which caused their first breakup, still holds them apart. The attractions and repulsions between Ariel and Casey parallel those between Leonard and Heather, and the rest of the film is devoted to how these four adjust to or reject each other.
The only problem with the film is the degree of intimacy between Leonard and Heather. We never see them undress together, although they lie on a bed; if their relationship goes beyond the platonic, we, fortunately, never find out. It obviously was an issue that had to be addressed, but the director discreetly draws a curtain about it, to the audience’s relief.
Frank Langella is excellent as Schiller, as are Taylor and Ambrose as the two women, while Lester is fine as the boyfriend Casey, especially in a scene where he has to help Schiller. The film has a number of interesting discussions about literature and the writing life that occur naturally as Heather interviews Leonard. Well-photographed, well-written, well-directed and well-acted, the film generally is a pleasure from start to finish.
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found at www.mmnow.com Top

 

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