Kelly’s Box a Button Worth Pushing
A million dollars. That’s the amount the hideously scarred Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) will give Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) if one of them pushes the button inside a tidily constructed little wooden box. The only caveats? They have 24-hours to make a decision. Also, one person, whom they do not know, whom they have never met or ever seen, will die.
Frank Langella, Cameron Diaz and James Marsden in Warner Bros' The Box
What would you do for material gain? That’s the central question behind Donnie Darko and Southland Tales writer/director Richard Kelly’s latest supernatural enterprise The Box. Based on the short story “Button, Button” by the great Richard Matheson the film is a gigantic whirligig of decision and repercussion, a person’s actions affecting the reactions of more of those around them then they ever could have realized.
The buzz on this one has been all over the map, Warner Bros. ultimately not choosing to show it to press until the day before opening. Kelly’s rep has been that of a visual wunderkind full of great ideas with no concept of how to coherently flesh them out. His first two movies cast a near hypnotic spell even if the both of them make little to no sense, their emotional heartbeats so erratic finding them is about as easy as discovering that proverbial needle in the haystack.
All that said, I liked The Box. The film mesmerized me, held me captivated in the palm of its hand, and while some of it is borderline pretentious and other portions come perilously close to being nonsensical I found Kelly’s work to be a sublimely emotional winner. This picture moved me and made me think, and while the items on the filmmaker’s mind aren’t exactly earth shattering to me they were deeply affecting all the same.
Not that the director still doesn’t need to know when to show restraint. His Stanley Kubrick meets Alan Resnais meets Ridley Scott meets Rod Serling aspirations aside, the guy likes to go more than a bit overboard. It’s almost as if he has these stupendously great ideas while filming deciding to throw them into the subsequent picture without really considering how they fit into the narrative, and while many can’t help but look cool on paper in practice they come across as more then a bit silly.
Additionally, Kelly is very fond of introducing characters only to do nothing of any value with them. A figure lurking at the periphery here tries to become a major third act player only to be dismissed with a relative wave of the hand (or ringing of a bell), while a dogged police detective and father-in-law doesn’t do any of the things a person with both of those labels would if they existed in the real world.
Still, this is the movie where I think the filmmaker actually shows he has talent and not just potential. Large portions are absolutely terrific, a surreal menace pulsating throughout that consistently kept me off guard. I wanted to know how Diaz and Marsden were going to escape the mess they found themselves in, was curious to learn the secrets behind Langella’s innocently malicious machine. The twists around every corner continually gave me pause, the otherworldly denouement far more chilling than it admittedly had any right to be.
In a way, you could classify The Box has the third chapter in Kelly’s end of the world trilogy. However, if our collective demise was stopped in Donnie Darko and brought to fruition in Southland Tales the conclusion here lies somewhere in the middle. Arlington Steward’s test has no easy resolution and it arguably has no end as well, humanity’s willingness to side with right over wrong directly related to the seemingly hopelessness of the situation a person finds themselves in at the time of its offering.
For my part, I think that ambiguity is why I liked the movie so much, why I let it captivate and enrapture me even when its pretensions stretched my own credulity to their breaking point. Right here, right now, things are tough for everyone, finding a paycheck about as simple as the finding weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq. But I like to think people, no matter what their faults or situation, will by and large do the right thing, making The Box a human parable I feel audiences should definitely take the time to open.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
Additional Links:
