By D.K. Holm
May 1, 2006
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Ash Falling on Seekers
SILENT HILL
Here is my audio review of SILENT HILL.
Silent Hill commits two of the worst sins of a failed horror film: it is both boring and unscary.
Based on a video game that is popular thanks in part to its creepy music and unnerving production effects, Silent Hill also provides an insight into what makes a bad horror film — or a film based on a video game, or indeed even mindless action films — go wrong.
This is all really unfortunate, because the film is directed by Christophe Gans (the great Brotherhood of the Wolf), and the screenplay is credited to Roger Avary (from a story by Nicolas Boukhrief and Gans), who has fallen unfairly into the media role of a man working only sporadically and in the shadow of his former co-writing partner, the much more media savvy Tarantino.
And Silent Hill starts out promisingly. The visuals of the first five minutes are stunning, including a gloomy foresty back yard, a freeway, a bridge, a cliff, and a waterfall. Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) is dashing about in tank top and shorts searching for her adopted daughter (Jodelle Ferland), who is a sleepwalker. In what is to be a distracting and irritating theme of the picture, Rose screams out her name, "Sharon, Sharon, Sharon," continually. The fact that the name occasionally sounds like "Shannon" or "Shawn" speaks either to Mitchell's pronunciation, the film's sound production, or continual rewrites on the script. Or my bad ears. In any case, Rose and her husband Christopher (Sean Bean) finally track down Sharon on a cliff edge and rescue her just before she is about to topple over into what looks like a pulsating mine shaft with a foundry inside. Significantly, there is a neon cross off in the distance behind them. Sharon lies on the ground screaming "Silent Hill," still in a sleep state, which is what the viewers are in danger of entering.
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Rose decides that the best solution to Sharon's night terrors is to take her to Silent Hill, a ghost town in West Virginia evacuated after a mine fire. Disobeying her husband's advice, she drives the girl to the city, but has an accident on the way in. When she wakes up, the world has turned gray, flakes of ash continually fall, and Sharon is gone. The rest of the film tracks her search for Sharon through the abandoned town and what she learns about Sharon's past, and the Nightmare on Elm Street style event that doomed the city.
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As Christopher begins his search for mother and daughter we grasp that Rose is in some kind of parallel dimension, if not outright dead (as the film's conclusion reveals). Silent Hill is also in turn tormented by some huge slayer in a odd metal helmet that looks like Horatio Hornblower's. He also has a huge sword that cuts through metal and he is preceded by a swarm of creepy beetles and a klaxon that warns the town's ghostly residents that terror is on the way. When the siren wails the residents flee to a church and cower.
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Rose is helped in her search by a motorcycle cop who was chasing her and who also crashed. The cop is in the game, too, and here is given a backstory. She is particularly fixated on children in danger. Her name is Cybil Bennet, and is played by Laurie Holden [correcred, Tuesday, May 2], kitted out in tight leather and gloves which make her seem like a female version of a Tom of Finland fantasy (she "arrests" Rose over the missing girl, and Rose spends the whole middle of the film running around in handcuffs). Rose also gets advice from a street harridan who, in keeping with the film's blend of credulity and shock tactics, inspires no suspicions or inquiries on Rose's part as to who the hell she is.
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There is no real narrative here, only a succession of set pieces, like a game or an action film. First Rose is running through the town's streets ("Sharon, Sharon"). Then she is descending a long staircase into a strange warehouse where nude feral children demons roam ("Sharon, Sharon"). Then she is dashing to the Midwich School where she thinks Sharon is hiding. Midwich may be an allusion to The Midwich Cuckoos, which came to the screen as Village of the Damned. In the school bathroom she finds a tortured figure in a stall whose mouth contains a purple piece of paper, but once Rose plucks it out, the paper proves like so much else to be a non sequitur. Finally Rose ends up in a hotel where, a couple of decades ago, a child was burned as a witch. That child's ghost still dwells in the basement of the church and Sharon is her still living twin (I think). More details (if you can call them that) of Sharon's odd past are unearthed by Christopher who, rebuffed by the local cops, raids the public records and the local orphanage.
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The instigator of the witch burning is a female religious cult leader called Christabella [corrected, May 2], and played by Alice Krige (whom I just saw a couple of weeks ago in an episode of Law and Order: Major Case Squad. In the final set piece, a bizarre new witch burning followed by revenge of the hospital bed bound ghost of the original Sharon, follows in the aftermath of Rose and Christabella arguing with each other over theological issues, and the dialogue is … atrocious. As it was in an earlier scene.
Christabella: Are you a person of faith?
Rose: I love my daughter.
Christabella: That's not what I asked.
Rose: Who are you to judge?
Christabella: We judge because the souls of history hang in the balance. Because our faith has never failed us. Our faith keeps the darkness of hell at bay.
Rose: Then use your faith to help me find my little girl.
Christabella: Only the demon knows where she is.
Rose: Then tell me, where do I find this demon?
Christabella: No one has ever returned from the core where the demon lies in wait.
And so on, and on.
You could almost argue that the film is anti religion in ways that numerous recent movies and TV shows have been (the latest season of The Sopranos is one), maybe in reaction to Gibson's Christ, maybe in response to the political climate, which inspires all the Godless heathens in Hollywood to deep reaction. Except for one thing. It's not clear what the film does believe. The film has a habit of breaking the "rules" that guide the internal logic of its world almost as soon as they are enunciated. Rose has to navigate a group of white-garbed nurses wielding scalpels. In a version of Simon Says, they only move when her flashlight is on … except when it isn't on. If Silent Hill can't even follow its own rules, how can we believe it to have anything interesting to say about theology?
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The film that Silent Hill most resembles is a DVD I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, The Dark , which stars Maria Bello as a mother … chasing after her daughter, calling out her name. In that case, it was Sarah. The film also stars Sean Bean, and also concerns a group of religious fanatics whose ghostly incorporality influences the real world, seeking a young girl as sacrifice. And also like Silent Hill , The Dark devolves into a series of disconnected set pieces, filled with dialogue that runs in circles.
Unfortunately, along with the dialogue, the set pieces in Silent Hill have no contiguous connection or rapport with those before or that follow. The overwhelming result is that the film feels almost content free. And the production values cannot make up for the isolated fustian of the various disconnected scenes or the strangled attempts to wrap up the story via lectures and dialogue near the end. It's a silent scream.
Ultimately Rose and Sharon are trapped in the gray nether world. They can see the physical world but can't be seen ("I see live people"). The film leaves them in this plight (which is reasonably analogous to the game's end), but its impact is diluted by the incomprehensibility of what has gone before. In all, getting through Silent Hill is a Sisyphean labor.
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Shopgirl (Touchstone, 2005, 106 minutes, color, R, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 in English, French and Spanish language tracks, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles, static musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, one sheet insert with chapter titles, making of, commentary track, deleted scenes, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, April 25, 2006) proves to be Lost in Translation light. Like Coppola's film, it is a tale of a troubled young woman who falls in with an older man, while already involved with someone more contemporary in age, but also more distracted. Shopgirl, however, came first, in the form of a novel by Steve Martin published in 2000 (Lost in Translation came out in 2003). I doubt that the story influenced the movie, but the movie appears to have influenced Shopgirl the film. It has the same languorous presence, the same knack for music, the same world of glass and steel and windows, of whites and beiges, a place where everything is clean.
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In Shopgirl the Scarlett Johansson equivalent is Mirabelle (Clair Danes, in Cate Blanchett mode), who works at Saks Los Angeles at the glove desk, which few people seem to visit (by night, she is an "artist"). At the laundry one night she meets Jeremy Kraft (Jason Schwartzman, quickly becoming the most annoying man in movies). He is a quirky, odd fellow who is almost like a pond bug. He's brittle and evasive, and perhaps immune to communication. I'd almost suggest that he's autistic, but everyone thinks they are autistic these days, without really understanding the condition. It's the new in disease, like hypoglycemia. They date, then he vanishes. In his absence, Ray Porter (Steve Martin), a computer billionaire, appears in Saks to buy a pair of gloves that he then turns around and sends to Mirabelle. He begins to court her, but tries to make it clear that it is as a "special friend," i.e., intimacy without permanence.
What emerges is a Reality Bites triangle where the movie wants us to like the unstable but exciting weirdo and not the responsible adult. I have no idea why the film wants us to prefer that Jeremy, the autistic void, as Mirabelle's mate. She, though, has her own problems. Having escaped small town America, she has to use anti-depressants to stay a functioning member of society. Later in the film there is a section where she returns home, and we get quick glances at her David Lynchian parents. Meanwhile, Jeremy has entered the cast of Almost Famous, traveling around with a pop star. In broad strokes, the plot of almost exactly mirrors that of Secretary.
What soon becomes clear is that the movie is really about the billionaire, not the shop girl. Martin does a voice over at the start of the film and reads a letter in his character's voice and then does the voice over again at the end, all of which put the emphasis on his character rather then the title character's. This is because not only did Martin write the short book on which the movie is based, but also because he is one of that small clutch of comedians who are sanctioned by the viewing public to be in three movies a year., along with Tom Hanks and Robin Williams. These guys alternate serious roles with comic ones, but the basis of their popularity is the brief window of time when they were hilarious 18 years ago. In honor of that, Jeremy appears at the end in the white suit that was Martin's trademark in the 1970s.
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Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, who practices a form of hero worship on the audio commentary track, alternates between dull uniform establishing shots Saks and clever ideas such as the mirroring of scenes in which men are buying dresses for the women they own. There is also good song selections, including Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want to be With You."
The extras don't make one like the movie much better, and among them is the conventional making of, "Evolution of a Novella: The Making of Shopgirl, plus two deleted scenes("Mirabelle Waits for Messages on Her Machine," "Mirabelle and Ray at Restaurant for Breakfast," and the just mentioned yak track. Also on hand are trailers for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Annapolis, Casanova, Eight Below, Grey's Anatomy Season One, Shadows in the Sun, Everything You Want.
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Jeremy and Ray are the competing seducers in Shopgirl, and Casanova is the seducer in Casanova (Touchstone, 2005, 111 minutes, color, R, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 in English, French and Spanish language tracks, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles, static musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, one sheet insert with chapter titles, making ofs, commentary track, extended scene, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, April 25, 2006). It is another film from the patented hand of Lasse Hallstrom, who specializes in cookie cutter feel good romantic comedies (Chocolat) in the Miramax mode of Shakespeare in Love.
Here it entails a bunch of British actors pretending to be Italian but speaking English. The theme is identity, with various characters pretending to be something they are not, until the end, where everyone switches lives. The filmmakers have only the vaguest idea of who or what Casanova was, and takes the soft sell approach (as opposed to the simultaneous Libertine). They don't appear even to have watched Fellini's Casanova, even though it was filmed entirely in studios unlike the ravishing locations of this film.
The film has a few modest pleasures (Casanova's assistant's use of the royal "we"), and though Heath Ledger is good (he has tightened his jaw and narrowed his mouth to "be" Casanova), one wonders what the reception of the film might have been without the career making precedent of Brokeback Mountain.
Features include various making ofs, "Creating an Adventure," "Dressing in Style," "Visions of Venice," and an extended sequence, "Hidden in Plain Sight," plus an audio commentary track by Hallstrom, and again the trailers are for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Annapolis, Shopgirl, Goal!: The Dream Begins, An Unfinished Life, Shadows in the Sun/Everything You Want, Grey's Anatomy.
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, May 10, at 9 AM, with the critics' ten best lists.
COMING SOON: Oscar winners on DVD, a package of Hitchcock movies and TV shows, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the next installment of the annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!
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