MOVIE REVIEW: The Box

by Jonathan Doyle

Forget (almost) everything you've read about The Box. Slammed by virtually every critic who's come anywhere near it -- including those who like it -- this is further proof that Richard Kelly's films are the wrong kind of critic-proof. With the exception of a few appealingly out-there voices in the American film critic community, most critics have developed painfully conservative, compromised tastes designed to anticipate the reactions of their not-especially-knowledgeable-or-adventurous readerships. As a result, it seems that there's no place for films that value ambition over coherence. This is unfortunate, not only because some of the finest films ever made thrive on uninhibited self-indulgence (Fellini anyone?), but because Richard Kelly is quietly making some of the most striking American films of his generation -- and he's being mocked for it.

Ironically, Richard Kelly pitched this film to the public as an unapologetic exercise in disciplined, conventional genre cinema. In other words, he set out to make exactly the kind of film that audiences and critics adore. However, what Kelly doesn't seem to (or pretends not to) realize is that his sprawling imagination isn't really capable of making conventional cinema. If Kelly really wants to make a commercial film, he should just direct a script written by one of Hollywood's countless, interchangeable screenwriting clones. As far as I can tell, his sensibility could only be made commercial by compromising on just about every front. The good news? There's really nothing wrong with the uncompromising version of Richard Kelly.

Critics are fond of short-cuts. We dive into movies anxious to pick apart their every deviation from tried-and-true filmmaking formulae and, as is probably apparent by now, The Box is particularly susceptible to this kind of criticism. Though it's built on a strong, dramatic premise -- a couple is told that they will receive a million dollars if they push a button, but this will also cause the death of a random stranger -- Kelly undermines that premise by making his protagonists (who are based on his own parents, right down to the father's job at NASA and mother's foot disfigurement) overly sympathetic. Even though these characters push the button, this choice has more to do with caring for their son and/or doubting the veracity of this absurd conceit than bloodthirsty greed. Dramatically, this is a questionable choice, as the protagonists are ultimately punished for little more than a) loving their son and b) their skepticism when it comes to high concept get rich quick schemes.

So yes, the film has its dramatic shortcomings and it plunges into several sci-fi heavy sequences that completely derail its central drama. In a conventional sense, this could be viewed as failure, but Kelly's real intentions are so far removed from conventional cinema that these "shortcomings" are immaterial. Just as the sloppy dialogue and performances in Gaspar Noe's groundbreaking -- yet poorly reviewed -- Enter the Void are ultimately secondary to that film's thrilling exercise in perceptual re-alignment, Kelly's abstracted, semi-poetic horror set pieces contribute far more than any mundane, literal-minded narrative coherence ever could. And even then, the film is not without its real world relevance, particularly in the way its wealth-as-murder gambit evolves during the concluding sequences.

The most unexpected addition to Kelly's creative arsenal is his newfound emotional maturity, which goes down much easier than the jarring broad humor that plagued his two previous films. This is especially apparent in James Marsden's surprisingly strong performance. While this is not the kind of film where you'd expect to find a break-out performance -- the actors in The Box can sometimes feel secondary to the film's visual and thematic ideas -- this could be just the push Marsden needs to attain full-blown leading man status. Cameron Diaz's work is not quite as confident, but she holds her ground nicely.

However, the film's single most impressive quality is Kelly's detailed and playful handling of Virginia circa-1976. From the production design and costumes to the vintage TV clips and Vilmos Zsigmond-inspired visual choices (get ready for some heavy diffusion), Kelly takes the past-meets-the-sci-fi-future virtues of Donnie Darko to new extremes. He also continues using music to striking, period-specific effect. Call me crazy, but I'll take the classic rock strains of Derek and the Dominos, The Marshall Tucker Band and The Grateful Dead featured here over the emo alterna-pop of Donnie Darko any day of the week. Truth be told, both films feature equally well-selected tracks for their respective milieus (bittersweet adulthood vs. misunderstood adolescence).

Even more impressive (and prominent) is the film's deliberately dated (even for 1976) score. Say what you want about Kelly's three deeply confusing films, but they all feature unforgettable original scores. In Donnie Darko, it was Michael Andrews' bizarre cross fertilization of Thomas Newman, Brian Eno and Jon Brion's Magnolia score. Though it went largely unnoticed, Southland Tales benefitted greatly and derived what little emotional grounding it had from Moby's thoughtfully spacey compositions. That said, the score for The Box takes the cake. The Arcade Fire's Win Butler and Régine Chassagne team-up with Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett to craft a Bernard Hermann-inspired score that is borderline campy one minute and resonantly inventive the next. It weighs a little heavily on the material -- which may account for some of the charges of slowness -- but it's also thrillingly imaginative and alive.

Kelly's new-and-improved sense of judgement is apparent everywhere, but this is never more evident than in his utter command of cinematic mise-en-scene. His lack of discipline can be a liability elsewhere, but his visual approach is nothing if not disciplined. Only three films into his career, he already exhibits a stunning command of the medium that he shares with a select list of prematurely masterful American visual stylists, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson and Todd Haynes. However, unlike those filmmakers, he's struggled to make a fully-realized film or find a comfortable niche. His preoccupation with convoluted sci-fi storytelling appears to be his comfort zone, but he's confronted with a peculiar paradox of reception: most people who take science fiction seriously have no tolerance for his artistic ambition and most people who are interested in his artistic ambition are bored-to-tears by science fiction.

This brings me to a comparison that is particularly bolder, but nonetheless apt: the films of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. Even if the parallels stem more from outright imitation than deep-seated artistic like-mindedness, The Box evokes the most enigmatic tendencies of Kubrick's late period marital meltdown dramas, namely The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. In its more unhinged, psychedelic sci-fi flourishes, it even has moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey-style inexplicability and mysticism.

As for the Lynch parallels, even the sequencing of their filmographies is becoming similar. If Donnie Darko is Kelly's Eraserhead-style midnight movie cult phenomenon and Southland Tales is his Dune-style exercise in bloated, artful incoherence, a case could be made that The Box reaches for Blue Velvet-style suburban-purity-gone-wrong in a faux classicist style. The Box fumbles far more than Blue Velvet -- and it's unlikely to win over the art house audience that Lynch's film once did -- but it's a step in the right direction. The real problem (as far as reception is concerned) is that Kelly's films lean more in the direction of Lynch's poorly received, yet artistically ambitious efforts like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway. Even when attempting to make a crowd pleaser, he seems to be exclusively inspired by divisive movies that were widely reviled upon their initial release.

While I'm sure most will dismiss these comparisons and insist that Kubrick and Lynch are way out of Kelly's league, I respectfully disagree. Sure, Kelly has yet to make a work as fully-realized as Kubrick or Lynch's best, but at Kelly's age, Kubrick was just completing Lolita and Lynch was still completing his second film, The Elephant Man. Now, I'll be the first to admit that Kelly has yet to achieve anything as mature or compelling as either of those masterpieces -- maybe he should take a stab at black-and-white -- but I dare say that he's broken more new ground and experimented more wildly at his age than either Kubrick or Lynch had. His results have been incredibly hit-and-miss, but his heart's in the right place.

Critics and industry commentators seem intent on seeing Kelly become the next James Cameron -- because of his preoccupation with CGI liquids, presumably -- but here's hoping he averts that lucrative, but artistically uninspired dead end. Three films into his career, he's tapping into something increasingly sophisticated, original and personal. If he keeps trusting (and focussing) that unwieldy muse of his, it's only a matter of time before the pieces come together and he makes a film that is truly worthy to stand alongside the triumphs of his heroes.