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The Sacrifice: Richard Kelly’s The Box
The Stop Smiling Review
Friday, November 06, 2009
The Box
Directed by Richard Kelly
(Warner Bros.)
Reviewed by Mark Asch
Any director who includes in his film a high school production of a Sartre play is asking for whatever he gets. So here goes: three films and a full decade into his career and Richard Kelly is still stuck in adolescence. His understanding of religious and metaphysical inquiry strictly comes secondhand, from earlier sci-fi allegories. Philosophical summings-up read like retrospectively embarrassing yearbook quotes: “If the sky were to suddenly open up, there would be no law, there would be no rule. There would only be you and your memories.” (Also: “Pimps don’t commit suicide.”)
Now, in adapting Richard Matheson’s pulp-mag high concept “Button, Button” — if a husband and wife push the button on a mysterious device, a stranger will die, and they’ll receive $1 million — and expanding to feature-length a story previously filmed as a Twilight Zone episode, he’s essentially remade his own Donnie Darko. But, despite or possibly because of The Box’s flimsy frame of reference — and its scrawled-conspiracy plotting, and its quivering portals to “eternal salvation or eternal damnation” — there’s an organic grandeur to it, all richly overcast digital cinematography (by Steven Poster), freighted compositions, and Kelly’s recurring dreams of martyrdom.
As Norma Lewis, bicentennially resplendent in Farrah wings, Cameron Diaz becomes the second of the new Charlie’s Angels to be cast by Kelly as a private school English teacher in white-collar Virginia. Like Drew Barrymore in Darko, she talks a class through the film’s subtext: No Exit is about actions, consequences and extenuating circumstances. Arthur, Norma’s rocket-science husband, is played by James Marsden — up to this point in his career cast mostly as Ralph Bellamy with Gucci-model cheekbones, and here channeling his runner-up wholesomeness into subtle, winning geekdom. (A poster in his basement quotes Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) Like Kelly’s father, Marsden’s character is a NASA engineer; The Box recreates the Langley childhood also recalled in the 80s-set Darko, though with fewer madeleines from its 34-year-old director (background noise comes from sitcoms everyone knows from syndication). The 70s setting, little silver Corvettes and all, partly implicates the kind of conspicuous consumer society in which a two-income household would even consider the button bargain. Mostly, though, it’s for the backdrop of NASA’s first interplanetary landing — if there’s life on Mars, it seems to have to do with the chaos unleashed when the Lewises open the box brought to them by grimly bespoke Steward (Frank Langella).
Darko fans can dedicate websites to sorting through The Box’s school-auditorium reaction shots, costumed figures on poorly illuminated late-night roads, and other returning tropes. More structurally significant, among the Darko callbacks, are the shadowy government involvement in metaphysical happenings, the liquid CGI tentacles wormholing their way through the filmic fabric, and the exposition coming in almost subliminal glimpses of gnostic texts.
The Box is also located somewhere near Twin Peaks, just off Lost Highway or Mulholland Dr. — and not just because of Kelly’s gaping Lynchian fascination with physical disfigurement (Diaz is missing the toes on one foot; half of lightning-struck Langella’s face is CGI’ed away). Catatonic characters blunder into the frame to mutter riddles before bursting into nosebleeds — or wander Living Dead-ly through backyards, cavernous public libraries, and the flickering fluorescent hallways of the Galaxy (yuk-yuk) Motel.