A misconception I often see made about movies is that their worth is based upon their ability to be enjoyed. I respectfully disagree. A movie's worth is based upon its ability to make you feel something. Prisoners is not an enjoyable film. It's bleak, uncomfortable and uncompromising. You're not supposed to enjoy it. It intends to make you feel the way a parent does when faced with the reality that their child has been abducted: lost, helpless and filled with directionless rage, and it does this very well in every department but the narrative. It's smart, but it's so busy jumping between smart topics that it fails to resonate with any of them. Prisoners is hands-down the most expertly crafted episode of Law and Order I've ever seen. It was a wild ride, but I'll have forgotten all about it by next week.
Prisoners questions what a person will do to reclaim someone that they love. In the first fifteen minutes, the young daughters of two Pennsylvanian families disappear. The prime suspect is the mentally-disabled, RV-driving Alex (Paul Dano), but Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is unable to compound any evidence on him and is forced to let him go, at the behest of Keller (Hugh Jackman), the father of one of the girls, who begs him to keep Alex in lock-up for one more day. When the judicial system fails him, and with his statistical knowledge of mortality rates when it comes to child abductions, he takes the law into his own hands by kidnapping and torturing Alex for the location of his daughter. As the days creep on, neither Keller nor Loki get any closer to the girls, and we the audience watch a small, rural American neighbourhood eat itself alive in defeated grief. Feel-good romp of the summer, folks!
God's pretty important to everyone in Prisoners. When there's a cross hanging from almost every rear view mirror, with Loki going so far as to have one tattooed into his hand, you know you're dealing with a town that's pretty good at keeping the faith. You'd think then that these would be some pretty decent, good-hearted people that believe in universal love and forgiveness, right? Well, it seems almost everyone in this town is just using God as a way of shirking responsibility. The film opens with Keller reciting the Our Father before teaching his son how to shoot game. Fair enough, he's apologising for the death he is about to cause but acknowledges its necessity so his family may eat. But later in the film, he has Alex boxed up in a shower. He's rigged the hot water system so there's only two temperatures: freezing and scalding. He drops to his knees and starts reciting the Our Father again, but stops when he has to forgive those trespassing against him. His blind belief aside, he doesn't actually know whether Alex abducted the girls, or whether he even knows where they are. The responsibility for Alex's well-being lies upon his head at this moment, but that's too heavy a burden for Keller. So he quickly scores some absolution so he doesn't have to feel bad about it. Later in the film, when the serial abductor is finally revealed, she claims her multiple crimes to be a Holy War against God for allowing her son to die of cancer. In making children disappear, she forces parents to become faithless to get back at the deity that took her child from her because grieving was too difficult. No-one in this town is willing to accept responsibility for anything, and for most of them it's because there's a book that tells them they don't have to.
As well as religion and responsibility, Prisoners deals with a third theme: futility. As soon as it began, I felt trapped. I felt claustrophobic and helpless, like a rat stuck in a maze constructed without an exit. How appropriate then that the serial abductor's MO is placing children into a pit with a book of mazes, allowing them to leave once they've completed all of them - an achievable feat if it weren't for the last one being unsolvable. Huge praise to cinematographer Roger Deakins for creating a visual feast that made me feel utterly devoid of hope. Claustrophobia exudes from every frame: it was filmed in an aspect ratio lower than most films today, the Pennsylvania location is a bunch of close-together, similar-looking houses surrounded by dense forest and many camera angles consist of either extreme close-ups, shots angled upwards from a hole or external shots of people in boxes, be they offices, bedrooms or basements. It works thematically, too. Revisiting the opening scene, as soon as it begins you know that the deer is dead. You're just left waiting for the deer to be aware of it. That bleeds into the rest of the film. You know, without a doubt, this cannot end well for anyone. Keller may get his daughter back, but he's going to have to answer to his own abduction of Alex. The girls may be found, but there will be long-lasting psychological impacts to the horrors they were subjected to. Keller sums it up best when he says, "Pray for the best. Prepare for the worst." You spend the film holding onto hope that there's a happy ending on the horizon, but deep down you know that's just a childish belief and you've already reserved yourself into defeat.
Ultimately though, Prisoners jumps so erratically between these different ideas that I was left wondering what the point of it all was. Is America's reliance on God ultimately a crutch? Are we doomed to self-destruction until we can stand up and accept responsibility for our own actions? Is the downfall of society a township's widespread misinterpretation of the "How To Not Be A Cunt" handbook? The answer's probably all three, but its frustrating for a film so strung up on criminilasing irresponsible people to cower in the corner when questioned and say, "Not my problem." You can tell this screenplay desperately wants to be told it's clever, and it is, but it hasn't yet graduated from the school of crime show writing, and it's here that my problem with crime shows becomes apparent. When you're only given 40 minutes to hop into the mind of a criminal, you don't have time to do any more than scratch the psychological surface before it's time to make way for next week's serial masturbator. Prisoners has 150 minutes, and it still doesn't get there. When you give serious thought to the criminal and their motive, it makes the film seem kind of...goofy, not to mention some of the gargantuan plot holes. But at the end of the day, we come back to my opening paragraph. A film's worth is measured on its ability to make you feel something. Prisoners succeeds in that, with all of its flaws. It can go home, head held high, knowing that Criminal Minds only wishes it was this good.
Talk with me about movies and eventually the subject of 3D and my total disdain for it will surface. A lot of people said they felt the same way until they saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo. I wouldn't know; I saw it in 2D on DVD and didn't feel like I'd missed out on anything. As far as I could tell, the movie was brilliant without it. There's no denying the technology is impressive, however, and maybe if I'd seen Hugo at the movies I'd be singing its three-dimensional praises like I'm about to do for this movie. It seems what we're seeing now is the end of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture era and the beginning of the Wrath of Khan era. The tech demo is over. Now the artists can start playing with it, and next up to bat is Alfonso Cuaron with Gravity. I'm going to get something out of the way really quick: I loved Gravity. Bear that in mind as I say two things I never thought I would about a film that I loved:
1. You will only ever watch it once.
2. You will have wasted that one chance if you don't see it in 3D on an IMAX screen.
One of Gravity's greatest strengths is its simplicity. It's hard to be this simple, to strip away all temptations of deeper character complexities so that the audience may immediately empathise and identify with them. It's very important that the audience has this connection straight away in Gravity, because when Sandra Bullock's Ryan is cartwheeling through infinite space, we're supposed to be in that suit with her, wondering how the fuck we're going to survive this. Ryan is an impossibly rigid professional rookie on her first space walk who focuses unnecessarily on her job because she's haunted by the death of her daughter. George Clooney's Kowalski is an impossibly charming seasoned veteran on his last space walk who's never gotten over the view of Earth and likes listening to country music in his helmet. Ground Control is an impossibly warm and familiar voice on a routine space walk played by Ed Harris, the same Ground Control voice in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff. We know people with these personalities, some of us may even be these people, and it's through that familiarity that we immediately impress ourselves upon them. You'll never stop and say, "They'd never do that" because the characters have zero complexity; they're driven completely by the compulsion to survive, which is exactly how you'd like to think you'd be.
On top of survival, Gravity deals with themes of rebirth. The death of Ryan's child resulted in a type of death for her as well. She confides in Kowalski that when she's on ground, at night she drives endlessly and listens to any radio station she can tune in to, so as to tune out her grief. She swallows herself in work so that she never has the ability to acknowledge mortality. Put simply, she's dead on the inside. And it's only when she's faced with the very real possibility of her own death that she realises her (and our) desire to survive. And so when the satellite is beset upon by the field of space debris ten minutes into the film, Ryan overcomes her emotional death by being born again. The evidence is everywhere: Kowalski somehow colliding with her after she tumbles way out into space, the way a single sperm in a few hundred million finds the egg, Ryan floating in anti-gravity and curling into the fetal position as she boards the ISS, finally back in the womb, even her going through labour as the landing pod hurtles down towards Earth, bringing her once again into the brave, new world. But perhaps the greatest example comes at the film's conclusion, when Ryan emerges from the pod, into water. She reaches land and, overwhelmed by the gravitational pull, can't even push herself up. She literally learns to crawl again, before she can walk.
So now that all of the pretentious theming discussion is concluded, we can start talking about the heeps sik graphix. Gravity could have been set anywhere. Alfonso Cuaron made a fucking genius decision to put it in space. When you're dealing with that much negative space (pun always intended), any foreground element is going to seem like it's coming out at you. When you pair that with what technology is capable of today, you're finally achieving those "GOSH! WOW!" moments you saw in those old, cheesy 3D movie ads. I'm unashamed to say during a scene where debris was rapidly colliding with objects and flying towards the camera, I flinched. A lot. But where Alfonso Cuaron truly excels with this is that he doesn't let the 3D just be a gimmick. It becomes an essential component to the emotional connection we have with the film. When Kowalski sacrifices himself, realising he and Ryan are going to float away into space if he doesn't release the tether holding the two of them together, he slowly recedes into the distance, forever a stark white spot on a black canvas. He's there. He's just right there, and it never feels like if we didn't just reach out a little further that we couldn't save him. But we can't, and neither can Ryan, and the visual effect makes it hurt that much more. Another brilliant example comes later, when Ryan has finally made radio contact with someone only to find they're unable to understand English. Language barriers are broken however, when Ryan hears the cries of a baby and the barking of a dog. Together, they bark and howl as Ryan resigns herself to death and allows the oxygen to be drained out of the pod. She begins to cry, and her tears collect into a single sphere that lifts off her face and into the foreground, taking the camera's focus and frosting up in front of us. I'm crying as I type this; it was a stunningly beautiful little moment achieved only by 3D.
Gravity reminded me a lot of Jaws. Apart from one direct reference, at its core I see them as very similar films for this reason: they're both about human beings struggling to survive an environment that is simultaneously familiar and alien. Most of Jaws takes place on the ocean. We're surrounded by it, it's very much a part of our existence, but we're completely out of our element in it. We're slower and unable to breathe in it. On the ocean, we're the inferior species to the shark. We desperately want to think we can survive the ocean though, and when we do, we feel like we've been born again, like our existence has been validated. In Gravity, the shark is replaced by the debris field. Completely unbiased and unforgiving, it hurtles around and around the Earth's circumference, wreaking havoc on whatever falls in its path every time it comes around again, just like the shark. But we're human. We're out of our element, but we're human. This life has meaning. We can get through anything. We're strong. We're survivors. We're The Goddamn Batman. Right? The credits for Gravity started rolling. I exhaled deeply and leaned forward. As I did, I realised that my hands were adhered to the arm rests, my back was sweating and the only thought running through my head was, "I made it." That's a pretty good endorsement of this film. It was an exhilarating, unbelievably tense, life-affirming examination of human survival that I will never watch again.
P.S. I couldn't find a place for it, but an all-too-brief heaping of praise has to be given to the sound design. The trailers would have you believe Gravity was going to ignore the audial restrictions of space, but that is not so. Space is silent, and we only hear environmental sounds through the vibrations that would be heard inside of the character's suits. As a result, drama is intensified through the soundtrack, an incredible ongoing instrumental score that occasionally sweeps into an overbearing cacophony as the film calls for it. Truly, it has to be heard to be believed.
