Well folks, tomorrow night I see this one for myself and I've been awaiting it with a certain amount of trepidation. I liked David Self's original script, but I heard about a lot of rewrites, Jan DeBont... But then rumors of Spielberg's attentive hand creeped in, and I began wondering if perhaps this could be one of them... Poltergeist deals... Well, Moriarty likes it. He knows evil when he sees it... Here the old bloke be...
Hey, Head Geek...
"Moriarty" here.
There's quite a bit of activity in the Moriarty Labs
tonight. We're in the middle of upgrading our
security system. There was nothing wrong with the
system already in place, but I'm feeling a little
paranoid tonight. I'm fairly sure there's been
someone in here, spying about. I'm not pointing any
fingers, Eugenio Zanetti, but I am deeply unnerved by
how accurately the Labs have been reproduced under the
guise of "sets" for the new DreamWorks version of THE
HAUNTING.
Oh, sure, there's a few differences. Bruce Dern is
definitely not my groundskeeper, and the giant
portrait of me that dominates the Grand Hallway is
much more flattering than the one of Hugh Crain.
There's no getting around the fact that all the crazy
architecture, the pointless rooms, the freaky
statuary, the ornate madness -- well, we got that in
spades, man.
I guess I should back up a moment here and explain
that earlier today, I was just spending a few quiet
moments alone in the Labs when the phone rang. An
acquaintance of mine with whom I've had various
illicit business dealings over the years was on the
line. Last I heard, the man was in Vienna, but he
sounded close. When he told me he was outside Harmony
Gold, I was stunned. The Labs have a great vantage
point from which I can look down at Hollywood (despite
being located underground for the most part -- you
figure it out), and I can practically throw something
and hit Harmony Gold. I hurried to join my friend,
who was busy bribing the doormen openly as I arrived.
We moved inside, found our seats, and sat back as the
lights went down on the first finished screening of
this, the newest Jan De Bont film.
This is a movie that's had an incredible production
schedule, but the rush doesn't show onscreen at all.
In fact, I'd say this is the most control De Bont has
shown yet as a director. I'm not crazy about the
exposition at the beginning of the film, but it does
pay off handsomely later with a visual surprise. It
all seems a bit perfunctory. Still, we're talking
about five, maybe ten minutes before Eleanor (Lili
Taylor) finds herself driving up to the main gates of
Hill House. From that moment on, what you're treated
to is a well-sustained slow burn that pays off with a
smart, successful FX show ending. This is a film that
knows exactly what it is, and simply respects the
audience enough to play by the rules very, very well.
De Bont isn't making THE SHINING here. This isn't a
film that is more metaphor than horror. This is a
classically structured haunted house film that learned
its tricks well from Robert Wise's seminal '60s
adaptation of the same source material. When it cuts
loose in the last 20 minutes with a conclusive,
aggressive display of the full power of Hill House, it
didn't feel to me like a cheat at all. Instead, I was
ready to finally come face to face with whoever was at
the heart of the titular haunting, and the work Phil
Tippett Studios has done in bringing that
confrontation to life is really rather remarkable.
Let's look at the cast for a moment.
Lili Taylor is
the center of the film, and the weight of it is
ultimately on her. If she doesn't succeed, the film
can't succeed. She has some remarkably complicated
changes to go through as a character, and she manages
to maintain her tightrope walk straight up to the end.
Taylor has always been blessed with an inner light, a
quality that really pays off here. There's both
innocence and insanity in what she has to play, and
there's one shot of Lili that really broke my heart.
I believed her Eleanor, so I believe it when she is
haunted.
Liam Neeson is gold, and he knows it, too.
The role he's playing isn't especially demanding, but
an actor of lesser charisma would be lost. Neeson
brings that movie-star aura of his to bear here, and
there's still a hint of Qui-Gon Jinn about him. One
good scene near the film's end finally peels back a
bit of that cool Irish reserve, and it's fun to see
him erupt.
Catherine Zeta-Jones is good as Theo, the
bisexual artist who becomes Eleanor's best friend in
the House, but she's not great. Part of that is the
role. Theo doesn't have a lot to do.
In fact,
neither does Owen Wilson's Luke (his real-life
brother's name... boy, I bet that never got confusing
on the set). Both of them are just in the movie to
give Eleanor someone to bounce off of while she
unravels the mystery of the House. Owen Wilson brings
a hell of a lot of charm to the role, though, and like
Neeson, he ends up looking good as a result. It's him
the audience likes, and he's natural enough to
convince us when the scares hit.
And hit they do, with concussive force. Go see this
at the best auditorium you possibly can, and find one
that is playing the film in Dolby EX. Like Robert
Wise, De Bont depends in large part on the use of
sound in this movie. Things move behind walls, just
out of sight, and they bump, rattle, and growl thanks
to the awesome work of Gary Rydstrom. The man who
made audiences think they were deaf with last year's
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN has done a wonderful job of
building and playing with a total soundscape. Many of
the sounds were recorded and played back to the cast
while they were actually on-set, in character.
There's some beautiful jumps in the film, and it helps
that the cast is a little edgy themselves. De Bont
plays it fairly straight for the first half of the
movie, then gradually steps things up. When all hell
breaks loose in the movie's last movement, Rydstrom
really goes to work, as does Tippett Studios. Their
work distorting sets and bending walls and ceilings is
seamless, utterly convincing in most places. Most of
what you've seen in the TV spots is from one
concentrated stretch of film, and I'd advise you all
to look away over the course of this week as the spots
go into heavy saturation. Wait for the film and
you'll enjoy the material so much more in context.
Michael Kahn, Spielberg's longtime collaborator, does
some great, subtle work editing this picture, and
helps goose every scare just a bit, up a notch.
Enough cannot be said about the contribution of
production designer Eugenio Zanetti, whose massive
sets for Hill House feel like a real space, lived in.
This is the house Hugh Crain would have built for his
wife and all those poor doomed children. The way the
entire design of the place keeps folding in on itself,
how everything seems to lead back to Crain's massive
portrait, like every hallway is connected by one spot,
one picture -- it's right. It's seductive, it's got a
beauty to it, but it's deranged in some small ways
that add up to a general unease. I think this is the
kind of work that the Academy will have to recognize
at the end of the year. Hill House isn't just a
setting for the film, it's a character, the second
lead after Taylor, and if it didn't work, the film
would be absolutely pointless. Zanetti seems to have
gotten into the head of Hugh Crain, and he's done a
wonderful job of setting up a world in which all the
moments of this movie could take place. A veteran of
such films as RESTORATION, Zanetti brings an almost
obsessive eye for detail to the picture. I hope Jan
De Bont thanked him every day.
Oh, yeah... I almost forgot Jan De Bont. Here's a guy
who blew his Hollywood heat in a big way with SPEED 2.
Poor bastard. That movie would have sunk anybody who
tried to make it. De Bont's first SPEED is a
calorie-free little trifle that succeeds largely based
on the chemistry between his leads. TWISTER
benefitted from a killer teaser trailer campaign, an
irresistable premise, and those amazing ILM tornadoes.
Beyond that, though, it was hollow, without any soul,
and it looked like De Bont was going to be a guy who
could do big and loud and not much else. After seeing
this film, though, I'd say he's capable of more.
There's some really nice quiet stuff in this film. I
think there's a few expository scenes where the pacing
is just terrible, where the actors don't click, but
there's more control overall, and the net effect is
very enjoyable.
De Bont really seems to enjoy suggesting things to the
audience as the film unfolds, and the story itself has
to do with suggestibility. I learned a lesson about
how easy it is to convince your mind of something
tangible but impossible when I was a kid. I was at
camp one summer, and the guy I shared the tent with
was a SF/fantasy freak like me. We would read H.P.
Lovecraft at night, trading good stories back and
forth. One particular night, the two of us were
trying to fall asleep, and we had the back flap of the
tent, the flap by our heads, hanging open so we could
see the night around us.
At the time, there was an urban legend going around
the camp, a Tennessee spot called Skymont, that a
Scout had died in our campsite. The older Scouts used
the story to torment the younger Scouts. It was our
year to be tormented, so we were simply doing our best
not to think about it. My friend Chris was on his
back, staring straight up the trunk of the tree that
was nearest him when I heard him whisper, "Fuck me..."
"What?" I asked in a normal voice. Chris lashed out
and punched me, then pointed up the trunk of the tree.
"The Scout," he hissed at me. I thought someone was
sitting in the tree, watching us, but I couldn't
figure out why, or how they hadn't seen Chris punch
me. I checked for myself, and for a moment, the hair
on the back of my neck stood up. I was riveted,
trying to process what I was seeing.
Sitting at the juncture of two larger branches, nearly
30 feet off the ground, at a spot no human could have
reached without injury or death, sat a Scout dressed
in a uniform that was clearly older than any of us.
He was motionless, staring off, away from our tent,
but there was something about his very posture that
was sad. As I watched, waiting for him to move, I
could even see his back move slightly as he caught
each breath, as he inhaled, as the wind ruffled the
leaves...
The leaves?!
I looked again, and I realized that the Scout I was
looking at was a trick of the moonlight and the
leaves, a bizarre accident that would have only worked
from the perspective Chris and I shared. I told Chris
what I saw, speaking out loud despite his desperate
hissing, and he finally moved around, saw I was right.
We were both even more impressed after we found out
it wasn't a ghost. For the rest of the week, we could
see the Scout every night when we looked at the right
spot. Even knowing the trick, I fell for it on some
surface, visceral level. Chris (and the story
floating around camp) had placed just enough of a
nudge in my mind that I had filled in the rest.
THE HAUNTING may not be warmly received by purist fans
of either the original film or the Shirley Jackson
novel that inspired both movies, but it will reward
most viewers. It's a popcorn Hollywood haunted house
rollercoaster, and it's a nice indication of what De
Bont might be capable of in the future. He even found
a way to slip in his traditional strange tip of the
hat to Stanley Kubrick (there's one in every De Bont
film so far), this time using a cast member as the
reference. I enjoyed the film, and I make no bones
about it. I fully anticipate that 99.9% of all
negative reviews you read about this film (and 85% of
all positive ones) will feature at least one full
paragraph that makes meticulous comparison of the
virtues of BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (nice weekend, Ed and
Dan) and this film. I say they're both so different
that it's futile. It's like comparing Godard's
ALPHAVILLE to THE PHANTOM MENACE. They're not playing
the same game, even though you could group them in the
same basic genre.
Anyway, I've got to go start sewing together another
patchwork beast from all the odds and ends here at the
Labs for my column tomorrow. Expect a look at the
suggestions you had for MPAA reform among other
things. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
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