The ads for Red State have been upfront about the fact that writer/director Kevin Smith is an unlikely candidate for a gritty, ultraviolent genre film; the hangover of the 90’s indie film boom is noted for his indifference to cinema as a visual medium (self-confessed; I’m not being mean) and reliance on ‘witty’, pop-culture-reference-heavy dialogue that always calls attention to its ‘wittiness’ (OK, I’m being mean there). The film’s opening portion, which follows a group of sex-obsessed teens, displays Smith at his most grating and tin-eared as writer of speech – there’s the constant sense that we’re watching placeholders for his lovingly written vulgar banter, rather than flesh-and-blood characters whose fates we’re supposed to care about.
But then, maybe we’re not. There’s a constant sense of remove throughout Red State – especially its larky, willfully anticlimactic ending – and it’s what makes the film Smith’s most interesting work to date, even if it’s altogether unsatisfying. You can’t fault him for not trying to engage with hotbed political and religious topics, but just as his 1999 Dogma traded sincere religious critique with preaching to the converted, so too does Red State collapse under the weight of its pandering, and a lack of trust in his audience. Smith pretentiously divides the cast into three distinct sectors: ‘sex’, ‘religion’ and ‘politics’; it’s telling of his myopia that in a film which strives for contemporary resonance, ‘politics’ is represented by a very bald invocation of the infamous Waco siege of 1993, as an ATF Agent (John Goodman, in top form) is called upon to perform a full-scale raid on the Church where the film’s action takes place in. In this respect, it’s merely lazy and apathetic – or rather, another Kevin Smith joint after all.
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Has Errol Morris’ moment passed? It’s a thought that came to mind while watching Tabloid, his thoroughly entertaining and thoroughly hollow screen treatment of the notorious “Mormon sex in chains case” of 1977. A textbook tabloid story, it involved the exploits of Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who kidnapped a Mormon missionary, chained him to a bed in a British cottage, and eventually raped him. The salacious and bizarre appeal of the case remains undiminished, but that seems to be the only reason for Morris to dust it off for a new generation; for this reason the film would seem an empty exercise from any other filmmaker, let alone one whose The Thin Blue Line (1988) led to the re-opening of a Texas murder case and subsequently the reversal a man’s death sentence.
Morris’ goal for the film is to one-up the British rags who milked the story dry in its day. Built around a long interview with the fascinating McKinney, he accentuates the wacky contours of the story to a giddy hilt – rapid-fire montages of headlines and photographs are present throughout – all while letting his subject bare her soul in a way that the tabloids of the day couldn’t allow for. Even then, the bid for pathos in the film’s final stretch feels too little and too late; an obligation in contrast with the revelry displayed beforehand. More worryingly, Tabloid casts into relief a latent tendency for tabloid sensationalism that has been in Morris’ filmmaking starting from his 1978 debut Gates of Heaven, which examined a small clan of kooky owners of deceased pets, to his unilluminating 2006 Abu Ghraib doco Standard Operating Procedure. Had Rupert Murdoch’s name appeared in Tabloid’s ‘thank you’ section of the credits, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.
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Michael Shannon… goddamn. The actor has been a consummate scene-stealer in a number of recent films, including manic turns as Kim Fowley in The Runaways and Dicaprio and Winslet’s unhinged neighbor in Revolutionary Road, the latter of which he earned him an Oscar nomination. Take Shelter marks Shannon’s second collaboration with writer/director Jeff Nichols after 2007’s underseen Shotgun Stories, and is an even more potent vehicle for the actor’s unique mixture of cagey stillness and live-wire energy.
Here he plays a family man plagued with nightmares and hallucinations of an oncoming apocalypse in his Texan hometown – tornados, storms, swarms of birds, and an unearthly petrol-colored rain that turns man and animal alike into creatures of violence. Shannon’s performance forms a totemic depiction of American anxiety and masculinity in crisis, and as his conflicted wife, Jessica Chastain makes her predicament as deeply felt as her counterpart. Together, they make the film a terrifying and sad tale of mental illness’s toll on a family.
Take Shelter is ostensibly a psychological thriller, but it’s an unmistakably non-sensationalist one, whose genre conventions never comes at the expense of character nuance. Likewise, whereas many young American filmmakers seem hell-bent on announcing a trademark style in the form of a cavalcade of stylistic tics, Nichols’ approach to his material is skillfully plainspoken, creating CGI sequences that rarely call attention to their virtuosity. A close-up of a gas pump display’s gallons/dollars digits escalating at different speeds in separate windows encapsulates the film’s unshowy, grounded representation of a mind out of sync with the world around him – though it could just as well be the other way around.
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