Denis Villeneuve (2013)
This is powerful ammunition for those who say that American television drama is now consistently superior to its cinematic sister (even those who cite Homeland as evidence). The film has a big budget. Five of the actors have been nominated for at least one Academy Award in the last decade (and one of them has won). It’s the first English language movie by the French Canadian Denis Villeneuve, whose previous feature Incendies was also Oscar-nominated, for Best Foreign Language Film of 2010. Prisoners has a ‘challenging’ theme – child abduction (two girls of six or seven years). But you know what you’re in for from the very first words heard, a man’s voice intoning the Lord’s Prayer. He doesn’t sound either like an individual praying or like a churchman leading a congregation. He sounds like what he is – a less than adroit actor (Hugh Jackman) acting the reading of the Lord’s Prayer, investing it with grave, passionate significance (as if an actor was needed to supply this). It’s big-screen Poetry Please. The weather in Prisoners, set in rural Pennsylvania, is relentlessly appalling – as always, a sign of things being deadly serious – and the cinematography by Roger Deakins (who’s been nominated for more Oscars than all the cast put together although he hasn’t yet won) is consummately bleak. The continuity is questionable: midway through, snow comes and goes quickly then a bit later someone says ‘Snow’s on the way’ as if it that would be something new. But no matter: this indicates that events are going to take a grimmer turn, and they do. The film is insanely long (153 minutes), ponderous and overwrought yet it’s getting mostly good reviews. (I was genuinely relieved that David Edelstein’s wasn’t among them.)
It’s often hard to hear what the cast are saying but they can’t be blamed for trying to muffle the lines. The screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski is technically an original but it borrows from various well-known films of the fairly recent past. The loss of a daughter turning her father into a yelling avenger recalls Mystic River (Prisoners achieved the near-impossible by making me wish at times that I was watching Clint Eastwood’s film). Locking up the man whom the avenger, Keller Dover (Jackman), is convinced is responsible for the crime but whom the police haven’t brought to justice brings to mind the incomparably superior The Secret in Their Eyes (2009). When the protagonist, in search of the abductee, gets buried underground by the villain, it harks back to The Vanishing (1988). At one point, the local police chief tells Loki, the detective in charge (Jake Gyllenhaal), that ‘budgets are tight’. The topically constrained resources come in handy in all sorts of ways. They mean that lone wolf Loki can do nearly everything, however obviously life-threatening it is, on his own. They also suggest the police haven’t the means to carry out adequate testing for forensic evidence. It transpires that, just as it seemed at the outset, the two missing girls were persuaded to get into the camper van driven by the original suspect Alex Jones (Paul Dano), although for an innocent purpose – yet Loki told the girls’ families early on there wasn’t a hair or a fingerprint to link the children to the vehicle. The script is a ludicrous mess: at police headquarters, there are only a couple of uniformed officers in sight (and many more unmanned computers – in the sequence in which the frustrated Loki decides to smash his to bits). Yet, each day and night, massed ranks of the force are out looking for the girls – this is where Keller Dover is meant to be when in fact he’s terrorising Alex Jones. Loki mistakenly arrests Bob Taylor (David Dastmalchian), a creepy nutter who kills himself while in police custody; next day, another cop turns up to announce that Taylor is innocent and Loki has to admit that he’s dead too. This is a bombshell to the other cop even though we’ve seen it as a newspaper headline a couple of screen minutes earlier.
The two children Anna (Erin Gerasimovich) and Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons) wander off unsupervised and vanish while their parents and elder siblings are chilling out after Thanksgiving lunch together. The thesis of Prisoners appears to be that the trauma of losing a child in such circumstances turns a father into a crazed vigilante even if, as in Keller Dover’s case, he’s a religious man (though I missed any illustration of Keller’s faith after the opening Lord’s Prayer). It turns out that the girls were abducted by a woman (Melissa Leo) who, with her (late?) husband, was also responsible for the disappearance of plenty of other children in the area in decades past. When this woman explains her motives to Keller, she says she’s ‘waging a war against God – so that people like you become demons’. (This is so bizarrely pathological it seems worth more than a florid one-liner but Denis Villeneuve quickly moves on.) Keller’s metamorphosis into a loony avenger at first shocks the other parents yet it proves infectious. When Keller reveals to the other girl’s father Franklin (Terrence Howard) that he’s keeping Alex Jones captive (in an empty house bequeathed to Keller by his father), Franklin understandably thinks his friend has gone bonkers and tells Keller he just can’t do that – yet he keeps returning to watch Keller’s brutal interrogation and torture of Alex. It might seem surprising that Franklin, anguished and confused, doesn’t immediately confide in his wife Nancy (Viola Davis) before she’s taken to the house with the two men. She’s horrified not only that Alex is being held prisoner but at the face wounds inflicted on him – yet, because all that any parent in her situation would care about is getting her child back, Nancy immediately shows Alex a photograph of Joy and begs him to help find her, even though his eyes are much too swollen to see through.
Keller’s wife, Grace (a good name for the spouse of a believer), doesn’t take part in any of this. In the real world, you hear parents whose child has disappeared say on television things like ‘I just want to fall asleep and wake up and it’s all over’. (I can’t resist saying that’s how I felt watching Prisoners.) Grace (Maria Bello) takes (a) this literally, (b) to her bed, (c) plenty of sleeping tablets. She’s unconscious for much of the proceedings although she wakes up after Bob Taylor has been prowling around the house before exiting through a bedroom window. It’s late November or early December but, when she sees the window wide open, Grace shows no sign of surprise. She calls her son Ralph (Dylan Minnette) and he doesn’t either: ‘I’ll just close that window’, he says. Luckily, Grace wakes up from her self-induced coma to take the call telling her that Joy, the other couple’s daughter, is alive. (I’m beginning to understand the richness of the religious dimension of Prisoners as I type these names.) There’s no counselling for the two families and they steer easily clear of media coverage. Just as the police numbers vary greatly according to the needs of the moment, so does evidence of the local community come and go. They have candlelit vigils but neither family seems to have any other friends (or indeed any other family). Denis Villeneuve and Aaron Guzikowski may feel they’re paring the story down to its essence – the existential aloneness of parents in this situation – but the set-up is hollowly pretentious. It’s an irony that the only thing that keeps you watching Prisoners is wanting to find out what actually happened to the children, as you would in a much humbler crime thriller.
I often wanted to look away from the screen because people were bashing other people’s heads in but in Hugh Jackman’s case I looked away in embarrassment. The discrepancy between his physical size and lack of emotional power is sad: Jackman snarls and shouts but he’s weak even as an over-actor. (At one point he shouts in a rich baritone as if to remind you he can at least sing.) His characterisation is socially woolly too: Keller’s a carpenter (like Jesus!) but Jackman doesn’t suggest any kind of working man. As Loki, Jake Gyllenhaal has an impressive twitch, an eyecatching tattoo on his neck and, as usual, audience rapport but the character has no context. The bereaved families are told at the start of the investigation that Loki has never failed to solve a crime – he might at least be cocky in order to be deserving of his comeuppance but he’s not. (Keller’s daughter Anna also escapes with her life eventually, and thanks to Loki, but otherwise the investigation is a series of blots in his copybook.) It’s depressing to see Viola Davis getting nothing better than this only two years on from The Help. Her deep emotionality flashes through in some moments but she seems uncharacteristically strained in others: it’s as if this completely truthful actress recognises, and bridles at, the falsity of what she’s involved in here.
10 October 2013
