The Box: Apocalyptic Anxieties And Desires

Published on: 10th November, 2009

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
– Arthur C. Clarke

“Are you saying that the death of one species is less tragic than another?”
–Karen Pommeroy from Donnie Darko

“Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval.”
– Fortunio Balducci from Southland Tales

There should be a special rung in Hell for those who dismiss the films of Richard Kelly. We do not deserve Richard Kelly. I am sure Richard Kelly never set out to be the cinematic chronicler of America’s mental well being after 9/11, but he seems to have captured the raw nerves of fear, anxiety and trembling in all his films. Of course, this was never one of his goals, but his first film, Donnie Darko was released in the aftermath of that horrific day in 2001. The film developed a much deserved cult following on home video. The film’s cult status paved the way to his much maligned second, but equally brilliant, Southland Tales in 2007. I am of the opinion, if you are going to go down the rabbit hole for Southland Tales, you better be prepared to go all the way in its defense.

I always get dirty looks when I display my admiration and affection for this film. The film captures America in the post-9/11 era better than any film since that fateful day. Kelly ratchets up his obsessions with the end of the world even more so than he did with Donnie Darko. The film comes with all the baggage we expect from Richard Kelly, but we get even more. The film is one of those cinematic love/hate letters to Los Angeles which exists somewhere between Alan Rudolph’s Welcome To L.A. and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. The film is also a stunning homage to all of the films that influenced Richard Kelly; especially Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. I will say that Richard Kelly understands The Manchurian Candidate far better than Jonathan Demme ever did. The film is also a loving tribute to works of Philip K. Dick. Richard Kelly has developed an infectious obsession with the end of the world. He cements this worldview with his third film, The Box, based on Richard Matheson’s short story, “Button, Button”. Richard Matheson and Richard Kelly seem like a good fit. After all, Richard Matheson is the author of “I Am Legend” which has been adapted into film three times. One can only imagine how wild a Richard Kelly adaptation of that story would be.

The desperation of avarice is at the heart of The Box. This avarice leads to chain of events that are unpredictably creepy and absorbing. Richard Kelly’s new film works on a number of levels. It succeeds more than it fails. As with Southland Tales, there is an excess of ideas at work in the film. This is one of his greatest strengths, but also one of his greatest weaknesses, but I would much rather have an overflow of creativity than a shortage of it. The film takes place in the Virginia suburbs in 1976. A suburban family is our vessel into this maddening world of anxieties and desires. Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) and her husband, Arthur, (James Marsden) seem like a relatively happy middle-class couple raising one child, Walter (Sam Oz Stone). Norma teaches at a private high school while Arthur is an engineer at NASA, who is hoping to become an astronaut. According to Norma, we learn they are living paycheck to paycheck; they are living beyond their means. As the film opens, a mysterious early morning knock wakes them from their sleep. A box wrapped in brown paper has been left at their front door. The box has been left by Arlington Steward played to creepily perfection by Frank Langella. His face is disfigured on his left side. The box comes with an offer. The box has a red button on top of it. If they push the button, they will get a payout of one million dollars; but it comes with quite a stipulation. Once the button is pushed, someone they do not know will be killed. Norma does not seem to be that disturbed by this condition. And once she pushes the button, their lives will never be the same again. This is where the film moves wildly away from Matheson’s short story and becomes Kelly’s grand vision. Pushing the button can mean a lot of things. Once you fire a gun, your life will never be the same, but here given Mr. Kelly’s obsession with all kinds of doomsdays—perhaps, pushing the button is a metaphor for the ultimate red button– nuclear war! Once Norma pushes the button, complications become the order of the day. Their lives are thrown into a whirlwind of madness involving the Mars Viking Mission, murdered wives, conspiracies, and some very strange portals. The film’s second half is very familiar ground for Richard Kelly. The Box feels very much like the third film of a trilogy that began with Donnie Darko and continued with Southland Tales. Kelly has definitely established a worldview. He is not so interested in genre so much as he is in creating his own universe. With these three films, he has definitely created his own universe as Kevin Smith has done with his films and as Quentin Tarantino has done with his films. The worldview in this trilogy involves anxiety about impending doom. The characters are not waiting for the end, but figuring out how to live during the end.

Performances are essential to a Richard Kelly film. I am not sure if anyone gives a false performance in Donnie Darko. There are so many standout performances in the film; I am not sure where to begin. Southland Tales may be Dwayne Johnson’s best role to date as his Boxer Santaros seemed to be channeling Ralph Meeker from Kiss Me Deadly and Laurence Harvey from The Manchurian Candidate. There are a string of terrific performances in the film, but his Boxer is the standout.

In The Box, the performances are top notch. While Cameron Diaz certainly has a natural comic sensibility in films such as There’s Something About Mary, My Best Friend’s Wedding, the Charlie’s Angels films, She’s The One and Very Bad Things, it is when she goes serious that she truly shines. Her performance as Lotte in Being John Malkovich was an unexpected step in the right direction. She was better than anyone was willing to give her credit for in Gangs Of New York and she helped make Vanilla Sky into something more than just an exact remake. Yet, In Her Shoes remains one of her best performances. She was perfect as Maggie. Still, not even she or the other A-list talent in front and behind the camera could save My Sister’s Keeper from being stuck in the television movie of the week mode. In hindsight, it might have been wise to have avoided The Sweetest Thing, The Holiday and What Happens In Vegas. In The Box, her performance as Norma may be one of her best as she navigates this new world that Arlington has offered her and Arthur. Yet once she pushes the button, this is a side of Ms. Diaz we have not seen. Going in the serious mode should be a priority for all of her future roles. She has done the comedy and for the most part done it well, but Kelly brings out a vulnerable wickedness once she pushes the button. The resulting money from the act will set them up for the rest of their lives. The morality of her act does not seem to concern her, but it does concern Mr. Steward as we learn later in the film. James Marsden is wonderful as Arthur. Marsden has terrific chemistry with Diaz in this film. I believe that Norma and Arthur serve as a tribute to Mr. Kelly’s real parents. In its own way, this is a wild tribute. James Marsden is best known for playing Cyclops in the X-Men films, but has also appeared in Enchanted, Superman Returns, Hairspray and others, but I actually think this is strongest role since the X-Men films.

It is Frank Langella’s Arlington Steward that is the film’s moral center. His disfigurement is the result of being struck by lightning. It seems that disfigurement is a common motif throughout the film. Whether it is Steward’s face or Norma’s deformed foot, the characters in the film share a common link through physical and mental disfigurements. Throughout the film, I got the feeling that Steward was hoping that Norma or Arthur would not push the button. The red button on this box is presented as an experiment, but it is really a test for humanity– a test that humanity keeps failing as we see throughout the rest of the film. It is an interesting commentary on Kelly’s part that it is the women who are the go-getters in the film. It is Norma who is stressing out about the finances in the film. It is ultimately her decision to push the button. I find this an interesting observation on Kelly’s part that the women in the film are the ones pushing the button. What does this tell us about Kelly’s attitude toward women? This box with the red button is a Pandora’s Box that should never have been opened. The resulting whirlwind changes the lives of the Lewis family forever. Langella’s Steward can be seen as Death or even the Devil in the film, but he may be the only character in the film that has any kind of moral center. Frank Langella plays the part with great ease. He brings the same solemn gravity to the role as he did playing Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. I am not sure anyone else could have played Steward with the same kind of magnetism. Some of the supporting performances in The Box are very good. Richard Kelly regular, Holmes Osborne, is very good as Norma’s father, Dick Burns. James Rebhorn is very good as Arthur’s NASA supervisor, Norm Cahill. Sam Oz Stone as their son, Walter, gives a touching and vivid performance. Is this how Richard Kelly pictured himself as a youngster?

As with all Richard Kelly films, there is an underlying fatalism that creeps just beneath the surface waiting to burst out. When the fatalism becomes a reality, his films go into a kinetic overdrive. Some have called The Box odd and boring. The odd part is to be expected, but the film is never boring. The Box packs an enormous suspense factor creating an addictive desire to see what comes next. Of all his films, this is most true of The Box because the film, like his others, does wink at other films, but it is the films he has decided to take from that are of most interest. The Box has shades of The Parallax View, Obsession, Blow Out, Lost Highway, The Shining and even a touch of Damien: Omen II for good measure. If I did not know any better, I would have thought David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick had directed The Box. There are some Lynchian touches in the film, but the film has a deliberate Kubrickian style to it as well. Did Stanley Kubrick plant himself in Richard Kelly’s mind somewhere along the way to cinematic Valhalla? At times, it seems that Kelly is channeling Kubrick in this film more than others. While there are certainly some Lynchian touches in all three Kelly films, The Box contains several scenes that just scream David Lynch. Yet, it is the scenes in the motel in the film’s second half that remind me of the hotel sequences in Kubrick’s The Shining. There is a scene where Arthur travels through a portal that echoes Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but while Kubrick and Lynch are differently on Kelly’s mind, there are two other films that Kelly feels a need to be referenced at all costs. If Southland Tales used Kiss Me Deadly and The Manchurian Candidate as templates, then The Box is using Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out as reference points throughout. I mean this as a compliment. Richard Kelly, along with Quentin Tarantino, is interested in more than homage; it is as though they want to hijack certain sequences and make them their own.

Richard Kelly cannot do it all by himself. Perhaps, he needs someone to help him in the writing department. Richard Kelly never met an idea he did not like and while I am all for an excess of creativity; he still needs a writing partner to help him shave away some of the excess. An overabundance of creativity is better than a scarcity of it. It also helps to have a reliable cinematographer to make your film look as beautifully haunting as it does. Steven Poster has been with him through all three films. Poster’s camera work compliments the Seventies feel that Kelly was aiming for perfectly in The Box. It is a very valuable partnership that pays huge dividends at the end of the day. Their partnership reminds me of that between director, David Gordon Green and cinematographer, Tim Orr– they work very well together, I would hate to see them separate. It is not just look of the film, but equally important, it is the film’s soundtrack that captures the essence of the film. Several members of the band, Arcade Fire, are responsible for the film’s gripping soundtrack– Win Butler, Owen Pallet and Regine Chassagne. The score has a deliberate Bernard Herrmann feel to it, specifically his score to Brian De Palma’s Obsession. It is telling that the members of Arcade Fire have created a truly haunting and riveting film score in the tradition of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood’s score to There Will Be Blood.

If there should be a special rung in Hell for those that dismiss the films of Richard Kelly than it is only fair there should a special rung for those of us who adore his films. The Box is not perfect, but it is far better than anyone is willing to give it credit for. The film’s greatest fault may be Richard Kelly’s hyper imagination. His imagination is in overdrive. I am amazed at how much he wants to put into each film. I thought that one of the reasons he put so much into Southland Tales was because he thought he may not direct another picture again. He has been given another chance with The Box, but the reception has been mixed to hostile from what I can tell. I feel very passionate about his vision, it is infectious. There are other directors that I feel very passionate about as well, but Richard Kelly is a special case. I believe he has an original worldview and vision. This is a filmmaker I want to grow old with. I hope that there are still many more Richard Kelly films to come. Movies would be poorer without him.

Readers Comments