As we've seen in many of the films of 2011 ("The Tree of Life, "Melancholia") there seems to be this new ever constant worry that
something bad is about to happen. With the floods, earthquake, tsunamis,
and even the supposed potential of the Mayan 2012 deadline, there is a
heightened paranoia that has permeated and ingrained itself upon our
lives and culture, and now into our cinemas. Two of this year's biggest Sundance titles, "Take Shelter" and "Martha Marcy May Marlene" tackle this obsession and fear in different and rather personal ways.
In "Take Shelter," writer/director Jeff Nichols looks at these prevailing insecurities through
the eyes of Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon), an Ohioan construction
worker, husband, and father to a young deaf girl, who begins having a
series of intense and vivid dreams involving the wild and disastrous weather, his dog, and
even his family turning on him. He tries to deal with these fears, much
to his wife's dismay, by buying gas masks, stockpiling canned goods, and even refurbishing the storm shelter in the
backyard of his small farmhouse.
After the jump...Martha Marcy May Marlene
Casting Michael Shannon as a
potentially mentally unhinged individual is like casting Meryl Streep to
play a real person; it's never a bad bet. But unlike many of his other
previous performances ("Revolutionary Road," TV's "Boardwalk Empire"), this one is so subtle, so subdued, you see his
own personal terror as well as his unraveling mind. You can see the
disgust in his body language as he feels compelled to buy another gas
mask or even more canned goods. He watches his paranoid schizophrenic mother, and sees how desperately he doesn't want to become her, but faces head-on the tasks he has at hand.
The now ubiquitous 2011 It Girl,
Jessica Chastain (star of seven different films from 2011), plays his wife Samantha, and balances her fears and
worries about her husband's obvious downward spiral with the practicality and levelheadedness of trying to get him well. She seems to think that by systematically taking him to therapy, literally showing him that things haven't changed, and telling him everything's okay, that it will be. It's such a welcoming, straight-forward, and naturalistic performance that feels so radically different compared to her showy and sexy turn in "The Help" and her graceful cipher in "The Tree of Life."
The film has some beautiful
camerawork including some pretty seamless visual effects, but it's
nowhere near deserving of the 2 hour running time. Certain scenes feel
far too long and eventually repetitive, and it pulls a "Lord of the Rings" and has one too many endings. Ultimately it's a film that
gracefully and spookiness hits at the heart of where the world is, and
maybe, just maybe, where it might end up going.
In a slightly different kind of way, writer/director Sean Durkin's "Martha Marcy May Marlene" details the end of a world too. But instead of a cosmic apocalypse involving the weather and the environment, the film showcases the shattering of the world of young woman whose recently escaped a cult and how (while flashing back to her time there) is trying to readjust to life amongst the rest of the "normal" world.
Durkin has done the incredibly difficult. He has created a film that is able to sustain its generally eerie mood for the whole running time. Even the story shifts back-and-forth (thanks to some flashy yet incredibly potent editing) between Martha's life at the commune and her reintroduction in society with her estranged, affluent sister (Sarah Paulson) and her husband (Hugh Dancy), we never get the sense that she's ever really comfortable with any of her surroundings. She's always watching, always thinking about the next move.
That's thanks to Elisabeth Olsen's truly star-making performance. Everything
from her arrival to the mysterious farm in upstate New York and her
trying to sleep through the night, to watching her wield a gun for the
first time, we as the viewer are as unsure and nervous about every experience and that happens to Martha (renamed Marcy May by the cult leader played by Oscar nominee John Hawkes) as she is. She's able to grab and hold the audience rapt, but not in large-scale histrionics or over-blown monologues, but rather with quietly chosen movements of the eyes, quivers of her lips, or shakily spoken words.
Eventually though, the film's purposeful vagueness on the exact details of what Martha's mind has become is its downfall. The structure is so taut, so structured, and the editing is so quick that this story, which tries to be more open-ended and tonal, can't seem to keep up and eventually dissipates completely. The final twenty minutes is supposed to be a incoherent rush of "is she going mad," "does that person look familiar," or "are they in danger," but instead plays too loosely and too dimly to feel truly illuminating in any way.
Adding these films alongside "The Tree of Life" and "Melancholia" as visions of the world on the brink of something disastrous could be seen as the over-blown attempts of filmmakers to grasp at straws of what is going to happen, but in the case of "Take Shelter" and "Martha Marcy May Marlene" for each of their young filmmakers, their visions seem to be the culmination of something more; a personal journey that is both cosmic and pyschological, otherworldly yet incredibly insular.
Grades: Take Shelter: B+ Martha Marcy May Marlene: B
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