Review: The Box

If its all right with you guys, I’d like to talk a bit about The Box, if only because no one else is. Richard Kelly’s third movie (after Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, two of the most thrillingly messed-up movies of this decade) got poor reviews and even worse box office returns and it never even entered the public consciousness enough to fade from it. I was always going to see this movie because:

A.) Donnie Darko is in the conversation for the best movies of the 2000s
B.) I love me some Richard Matheson (who wrote the short story this is based on)
C.) Win Butler, Regine Chassagne, and Owen Pallett did the score

Now this movie is not entirely successful. In fact, it may be a total disaster. And yet, I loved it. Or, at the very least, I loved watching it. I think, were it not for a major flaw, this movie could be a perfect companion piece to Donnie Darko. I’m eventually going to get into spoilers, but I’ll try to hold off for as long as possible, and I’ll warn you before it happens.

So, The Box. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’re familiar with the rudimentary moral dilemna presented to a bourgeois Virginia husband and wife (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) in 1976 by Frank Langella, playing a creeped-out man with a Two Face-style facial deformity. Here’s a box with a button inside. If you push the button, you get a million dollars; but someone, somewhere who you don’t know will die. Without giving it away, the button action takes about a half hour before that conflict is resolved and the film becomes…something else.

Without question, the movie’s biggest problem is casting. Between this and Southland Tales, I’m having a hard time figuring out whether Richard Kelly doesn’t work well with actors, doesn’t quite understand the concept of good and bad actors, or if he is simply trying for something different (its also entirely possible that the studio took one look at this script and said there’s no way they’d make this movie without a star, which is an antiquated notion of thinking about selling a movie. I’ll suggest that if you put Jon Hamm and Mary Louise Parker in the lead roles, not only would you have had a better movie, but you’d have one that more people would have gone to see). Given the Sci-Fi B-movie flourishes that pepper the rest of the film, I’m actually okay with Marsden’s performance. The guy seems like the kind of actor who would have been all over the place in the 1950s; he has the generic good looks and vague gravitas that would go with The Blob or Invastion of the Body Snatchers (the character he plays is a scientist who is also applying to be an astronaut…that’s just too perfect). But Diaz’s range is way too limited and she’s just too bad an actress. Every emotion – fear, sorrow, pity, anger – comes across through the same dumb facial expression and it really narrows the impact of the movie. That said, Langella is absolutely perfect. His calm tone is extremely eerie and I’m glad to see Langella continue his late-career peak.

But put all that aside and you have a fascinating, intricate, meticulous film. The movie pokes at religion, science, paranoia, and conformity. Sure, on a basic level its a simple critique of middle class consumerism and selfishness, but it also continually laps around a reading that straighforward. Richard Kelly has said in interviews that this movie is a more commercial, mainstream film and there’s something so fantastically deranged about the fact that he seems to sincerely believe that. This film is every bit as ambitious and out there as his other two, if packaged in a nicer looking box (boo hiss).

I’m also thinking Kelly is showing himself more and more to be a science-fiction version of Quentin Tarantino. He packs this film with stylistic flourishes that throwback to the great sci-fi of the Eisenhower era, while also paying homage to Close Encounters, Cat People, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and, admitedly, completely ripping off 2001, but what are you gonna do). Kelly takes the schlocky genre conventions of a style that is near and dear to his heart, and fuses them with high philosophy, advanced quantum physics, and the more literary edge of Phillip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke (the latter of whom is namechecked, at least providing a citation for the 2001 rip-off). The period details are also lushly realized and I got a whole Mad Men vibe from the whole thing (in fact, substitute 1976 for 1963 and pulpy sci-fi for soap operas and you’ve got a pretty apt metaphor for what Kelly is going for here)

Before I start talking about the movie in greater detail (he said, 725 words into the essay), I’ve got to mention the score. As I mentioned up top, Kelly got The Arcade Fire’s braintrust (Win Butler and Regine Chassagne) as well as their frequent collaborator Owen Pallett (better known as the guy from Final Fantasy) to write the music and Oh My God, that score is just perfect. I would pay $8 to go sit in a dark movie theater and just listen to the score and it would slay me as much as it did when I was watching the movie. Maybe I’m just a sucker for Mellotron, but well done.

I’ve seen a lot of horror movies this year, but The Box was the first movie to genuinely frighten me in forever. I’m not saying you’ll love it – the pace is glacial, the twists bizarre, and the acting below average – but it is a fascinating film that should absolutely be part of the conversation this year. And, once you’ve seen it, check out the second part of this review, because:

SPOILERS ARE ABOUT TO FOLLOW FOR THE MOVIE, THE TWILIGHT ZONE EPISODE, AND THE MATHESON SHORT STORY. SPOILERS. SPOILERS

All right, you still with me? Because let’s talk about what happens once the couple pushes the button. In the short story, the twist is that the husband dies and the Langella character says “did you really know your husband.” It sounds like a cop-out (and it probably is) but it kind of works when you re-read and look at the couple’s argument about whether or not to push it. The Twilight Zone episode (which is from one of the reboots, not the Serling one) ends with the Langella character taking the box back and saying it will go to someone they don’t know - a baser, more satisfying ironic punishment. The Box nods at both of these and seems to adopt the Twilight Zone ending; however, by the end of this post, I will convince you that is not true.

But before I get there, what the fuck? The second act of the film basically turns into Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as Marsden and Diaz deal with the fact that everyone they meet in the town seems to have been turned into a creepy “employee” of Langella’s alien/diety. Given that its set in Langley, a federal government town, how interesting is it that the movie depicts government employees as mindless automatons committing morally questionable activities in the name of some vague greater good. Sure, Marsden works at NASA, but they’re still building technology that will be employed by the military, and there’s plenty of CIA and NSA employees there too. Add to that the fact that the movie is set right after Watergate and it stars Richard Nixon as the leader of the widespread conspiracy. I think Kelly’s acknowledging the military-industrial complex and the dehumanizing effect of constant war and being a part of the machinery that feeds said constant war (after all, what is 21st century warfare, but the pushing of a button to kill somebody somewhere who you don’t know for profit?) (also, what’s Langella’s character’s first name? Arlington!).

Except that the film turns again, as we learn more about the nature of Langella’s character. Kelly’s script suggests that Langella (or at least his “employer”) is either an alien or a god without clarifying which it is because, to paraphrase the Clarke quote, there’s pretty much no difference. That civilization is so advanced its abilites are no different than magic and, while they may not be humanity’s creator, they can certainly destroy us if they want. The moral test, the bolt of lightning, and the motif of deformities (Diaz’s foot, Langella’s face, the son being struck deaf and blind) all conform to a sort of Biblical notion of God’s will and wrath that is a fixture of Judeo-Christian philosophy, but the Viking and NASA connection certainly point at extraterrestial life.

For a little clarification, let’s look at the scene in the library. First, on a visceral level, I don’t think I’ve been that creeped out by anything since Ringu or Mulholland Drive. The army of people following him, the droning score, the creepy 70s architecture and design of the library (and the fact that library stacks are empty, creepy places to begin with) all freaked me the fuck out. In the end of that whole sequence, Marsden ends up picking the right chamber and gets “eternal salvation.” But is that really what he’s getting? Or is that just an easy way for the space-gods to explain what’s happening in that sequence. In 2001, pretty much that exact same shot stands for evolution and higher understanding – more like Nirvana than salvation – so that could be what Kelly is doing here. But Marsden and Diaz spend the whole movie looking for salvation: they push the button to try and save themselves, they hunt for Langella to try and save themselves, they even end up offering up Diaz as a sacrifice - to save their souls as much as their son’s vision and hearing. Maybe this movie is suggesting that salvation is actually not that great of a thing. Presumably all the “employees” go through the same experience as Marsden (I read that scene in the wind tunnel where the government guy explains to a group of new recruits that they’re going to feel like they’re being drowned as suggesting that those people go through portals like Marsden does in the library) (of course, its entirely possible that they go through the WRONG portal, but then how would they know to tell Marsden to pick #2 if there are 3 choices?) and it leaves them as empty, lobotomized shells. Salvation leads to nosebleeds, creepy vacancy, and a life of enslavement. I know Kelly plays with religious imagery a lot in his films, but this movie almost seems anti-religion to me, where God himself recruits a bunch of slave-like followers to torture humanity and determine whether or not to wipe them all out for being impure (God is less of an omniscient father and more of a genocidal dictator) (if there is a God, then I’m going to Hell for writing that sentence).

Which brings us back to the moral dilemna we started with. If you push a button you will recieve great rewards, but you will kill someone you don’t know. Who pushes the button? Who dies? Kelly’s ending is Matheson’s in reverse; instead of her husband, the person Diaz doesn’t know is herself. [Blogger's note: When I was re-reading this, it seemed a little imprecise. Just to clarify, Diaz pushes the button and the person some who dies as a result of that action is Diaz herself ; it just doesn't happen till the end. She doesn't know herself. It's essentially the same twist as Matheson's story without the Langella character putting a button on it] Sure, when you read the story, you think that you would never actually push the button (or maybe you think you totally would without hestitating). But you can’t really know how you’d behave until you actually recieve that offer. Will your primal, human need for self-betterment and our ability to compartmentalize and distance ourselves from the consequences of our actions if said actions are impersonal enough (the whole guy-in-a-suit-tells-you-to-push-a-button-with-devastating-consequences set-up is straight out of Milgram) or will the reality of the fact that you’d be murdering another human being stop you? How can you know what you’d do if you felt like you had no other choice? Admitedly this is not an original concept either, but Kelly buries it under so many layers of weirdness and obfuscation that it at least feels more profound than it is. I also think he’s basically mocking the whole premise of his movie. After all, what’s the point of building a movie around a moral quandry when the resolution of that quandry is “you don’t know anyway.”

I think I love this movie after working through it here. A lot of it is derivative of Kelly’s earlier work (especially Donnie Darko), but the themes go in a totally different place. Donnie Darko is a movie about belief; The Box is a movie about doubt. Doubt in the government. Doubt in science. Doubt in God. Doubt in ourselves. Kelly misses a little on the human side (although I blame the performances more than the writing), but he’s juggling so many big ideas and concepts that its hard to notice. The fact that Kelly somehow conned a major studio in giving him the money to fully pursue his vision (and, if nothing else, this film is gorgeous to watch and experience; from the lush set design to the creepy atmosphere to the dramatic tilts and pans, Kelly has a much better command of the frame than he’s been getting credit for) is a beautful, beautiful thing.

Jonah’s Score: Either a 36 or 92. I’m not sure which.

Tangled Up in Wires Grade: Uhhh….