Jeff Nichols (2016)

Spoiler warning:  This note reveals plot details which I may have got entirely wrong …

In this, his fourth, feature, Jeff Nichols seems to be trying to fuse ESP/ET elements and believable familial drama.  He attempted something similar in his second feature, Take Shelter, but the troubled state of mind of that film’s protagonist kept the audience uncertain as to whether his visions amounted to clairvoyance or paranoid fantasies.  In Midnight Special, the supernatural abilities of Alden, the eight-year-old boy at the centre of the story, are experienced by other people:  the beams of piercing blue light that his eyes keep emitting appear to be an objective reality.   An investigating officer from the National Security Agency, initially sceptical, is convinced that Alden is (as the boy says he is) from another, superior world – to which the child eventually returns.

Nichols’s ambition is admirable and I’m loth to admit how disappointed I was by Midnight Special.  It’s almost a relief that part of that disappointment comes from failing to get the film at the most basic level.  The migraine-threatening flashing lights forced me to keep closing my eyes.  I doubt I could make out a tenth of what was being said – a real regret, given the usual quality of Nichols’s dialogue.  However, these sensory obstacles, because they mean that I can’t do justice to the movie, also allow me to hope that it’s better than it seemed.  This could be a vain hope, though.  The $18m production budget for Midnight Special is greater than the aggregate costs of Nichols’s three other films – and it shows, not always in a good way.  A vast CGI landscape of the super-terrestrial plane, which eventually appears, has a mainstream science-fiction expectedness.  This ensures a finale that’s anti-climactic as well as protracted.  I got the sense that the sci-fi and chase-movie genre trappings of the piece were increasingly obstructing what Jeff Nichols has previously done well.  The film has naturally been compared with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET but Steven Spielberg, for all his technical skills, has always been relatively simple-minded in dealing with human relationships.  It was this, in combination with Spielberg’s visual imagination, which helped Close Encounters and ET to work so well.  They came over as single-minded too.

There are good things in Midnight Special.   The film begins with Texas television news reports of Alton’s disappearance.   A man called Roy Tomlin is wanted by the police in connection with this.  The TV news is being watched by two men, one of them Roy (Michael Shannon).  His accomplice (Joel Edgerton) is called Lucas – a state trooper and a friend of Roy since childhood.   The boy Alden (Jaeden Lieberher) is with the pair.  Our expectations of the behaviour of child abductors and their victims are quickly confounded:  Roy, in particular, is kindly protective of the boy.  It transpires that Alden is his son and that they’ve been living as part of a religious cult in rural Texas.  The cult leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), who has recognised Alden’s out-of-this-world powers, wants him back, and quickly.  An early sequence in Meyer’s office captures nicely the blurred line between running a religion and running a business.

Roy’s first destination with Alden is the home of the boy’s mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), who hasn’t seen her child in years – it seems Sarah has never been a member of the cult.  Roy (who shares his name with the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters) and Lucas (who shares his name with George) intend then to get Alton to an as yet unknown location by a specific date.  Cult members believe that, on this fast approaching day, a supernatural event will occur.   In the course of their search for Alton, the FBI also do some investigating of the cult.  The NSA man Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) explains that Meyer’s sermons and the dates on which they were delivered, according to Alton’s prophecies, are encoded with secret government information, communicated by satellite.  Shared concerns about Alton on the part of agencies both secular and non-secular, a possible connection between the Bible Belt mindset and a capacity to believe in (in Jung’s phrase) ‘things seen in the sky’ – these themes give Midnight Special a promising dramatic basis.  But things either don’t come to fruition or I couldn’t follow how they came to fruition.

The actors’ skills and Nichols’s skill in directing actors aren’t wholly submerged.   He gets a good performance from Jaeden Lieberher as the pale, worried-looking Alton.  Lieberher’s naturalness gives the extraordinary boy an appealing vulnerability.  Kirsten Dunst plays Alton’s mother straightforwardly and well, although the narrowness of the role means that Dunst inevitably has to do brave-faced melancholy over and over.  Joel Edgerton’s face is more expressive than usual but he’s the hardest of all to hear (it’s particularly frustrating that he drops his voice midway through a line so you never get the end).  As the dapper cult leader, Sam Shepard is, as usual, quietly compelling – too quietly on this occasion, though:  he runs Edgerton a close second in the inaudibility stakes.  Adam Driver gives Paul Sevier a good balance of awkward wit and contained astonishment.  (I didn’t understand, when an army of FBI men and other officials want to interview Alden and he insists on talking to Sevier alone, how the latter then managed to smuggle the boy out of the building without any of these others noticing.)  Since Midnight Special is, for this Jeff Nichols fan, a change for the worse in several ways, it’s fortunate that the director still has Michael Shannon as his main man.  He has one of the most remarkable, emotionally eloquent faces in contemporary American cinema[1].  Eloquence is badly needed here.

13 April 2016

[1] For an excellent description of Shannon’s face (and head), see Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Midnight Special – http://tinyurl.com/zq5w4ea.