SALON

Friday, Nov 6, 2009 1:06 AM UTC

The creepy suspense inside “The Box”

"Donnie Darko" director Richard Kelley delivers at least one-half of a sophisticated, old-fashioned thriller

By

Topics: The Box, Movies,

The creepy suspense inside Frank Langella, Cameron Diaz and James Marsden in "The Box."

About a third of the way through “The Box,” I had a distinct sense-memory flash. For just a moment, I was 10 again, halfway through an episode of Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery,” a show my older sisters had repeatedly warned me not to watch, and it was too late to turn it off and forget what I’d already seen. Going forward — something I’d surely regret later, sometime around 3 a.m., when every other human being in the world except me would be sound asleep — was the only way.

“The Box” isn’t as downright chilling as “Night Gallery”; its writer and director, Richard Kelly, is clearly going for more of a discomforting “Twilight Zone” vibe, not surprising since the movie is based on a 1970 short story written by Richard Matheson (“Button, Button”), which was in turn adapted into a “Twilight Zone” episode during the show’s 1980s incarnation. But the first half of “The Box” — plus parts of the second — works as a lyrical summation of everything Kelly, the director of the strange and heartfelt cult hit “Donnie Darko,” as well as the more sprawling, confounding, “Southland Tales,” is good at: He builds and sustains a complex, indefinable mood, a sense of regret for deeds that haven’t even been committed yet; he offers a vision of the past as a concrete place that can be revisited, unironically and not just in our hazy memories; and his visual sense — from the way he uses the actors’ faces to make offhand but resonant observations about morality and conscience, to his portrayal of an airplane hangar as a cavernous, unwelcoming faux-heaven — is sophisticated without being too fussy.

Kelly is devoted to telling his stories visually — except when he’s not. And the second half of “The Box,” unfortunately, underscores everything Kelly, as a filmmaker, wants to be and just can’t: His desire to overcomplicate and overexplain threatens to crush the delicacy of his other gifts. At the ominous beginning of “The Box,” we meet a Virginia husband and wife, Arthur and Norma Lewis (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz), and their 11-ish son Walter (Sam Oz Stone). The year is 1976. Arthur is a NASA engineer, with a specific and somewhat dreamy interest in Mars, who hopes to become an astronaut. Norma teaches English at a private high school. The Lewises live in a nice home and seem reasonably comfortable, but they face certain circumstances that suggest their expenses are about to mount. One morning, a brown-paper-wrapped box lands on their doorstep, accompanied by an engraved note. The note explains that a Mr. Arlington Steward will call upon them later that day, at 5 o’clock. And inside the box is another box, a ’70s-looking wooden gewgaw topped by a clear glass dome, beneath which is located a mushroomlike red button.

As Norma and Arthur examine that box, Kelly and cinematographer Steven Poster refuse to show it in close-up: I fell for the trick, finding myself wanting to lean forward to get a better look at it. Later, the box itself will become less of a mystery — its austere eeriness pales in comparison to that of Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) who, as promised, shows up later that day. Arthur hasn’t yet returned from work, so when Mr. Steward arrives at the door, Norma greets him alone, noticing immediately — it can’t be missed — that most of his lower jaw has been eaten away: The tissue and bone revealed beneath — what we can see of them, in the glimpses Kelly gives us — is soft, pinkish-brown, vaguely wormlike, an unnerving image but also a strangely poetic one. Mr. Steward tells Norma that if she pushes the button on that box, she and Arthur will receive a million dollars in cash. At that time, someone — a person, he assures them, whom they do not know — will die. If they choose not to push the button, Mr. Steward will reclaim the box and pass it along to someone else.

So much of “The Box” is deftly unshowy; it builds suspense the old-fashioned way, sometimes seeming more like a movie actually made in the ’70s than a contemporary one set in that era. Kelly uses long takes — accompanied by Win Butler, Régine Chassagn and Owen Pallett’s chilly, atmospheric music — to capture every shadow of emotion crossing his actors’ faces. Both Diaz and Marsden give fine, low-key but resonant performances here. Langella, too, is stunningly creepy, particularly in his scenes with the couple: His Mr. Steward has a dewy, malevolent elegance. Kelly pays close attention to period details, giving us just a glimpse, for example, of the famous ’70s “Crying Indian” anti-pollution PSA. But he treats none of these details — not even the deco-mod wallpaper in the Lewises’ kitchen — as quaint oddities. Most of these are details Kelly can’t even remember firsthand (he was born in 1975), but he’s both affectionate toward them and respectful of them. One of his strengths as a filmmaker is that he maintains, as the critic Howard Hampton once said, a sense of the past as a real place. For him, it’s not an amusement park.

Kelly tries to gather so many ideas under this movie’s umbrella: He has strong ideas about the necessity of compassion in everyday life. He wonders what awaits us after death. But he can’t flesh out all of these ideas properly, or even haphazardly. What’s more, in expanding Matheson’s story, he seems driven by a desire to overembroider and overstate. The film becomes bogged down in unnecessary minutiae, too much of which feels borrowed (“lifted” might be a better word) from the glory days of “The X-Files.”

But when “The Box” is great — and for long stretches, it is — it’s quite remarkable to watch. Perhaps most significantly, “The Box” is a portrait of a solid partnership being tested in a particularly horrific way. In a late scene, Norma and Arthur slow-dance at a wedding to Scott Walker’s version of the Tony Bennett hit “When Joanna Loved Me.” The underwatery, otherworldly vibe of Walker’s voice seems to waft from another dimension itself, as Arthur holds his wife close and tries to tell her about a glimpse of the afterlife he’s just been given. It’s a place, he tells her, “where the sidewalk ends and despair no longer governs the human heart.” That’s a line the strange and wonderful Scott Walker might have written and sung himself. And it’s “The Box,” at its best, in a glass-domed nutshell.

Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 13 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations