Jeff Nichols (2011)
It’s a good film but you suspect from quite early on that the writer-director Jeff Nichols (whose second feature this is) has boxed himself in – and that, unless he’s a genius, there’s no satisfying way he can bring the movie home. The main character, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon), is a husband and father in his mid-thirties, who lives in a small town in Ohio, where he works as an engineer. Curtis starts having terrible dreams and becomes convinced that an apocalyptic storm is coming. To the consternation of his wife Sam (Jessica Chastain), he takes out a hefty bank loan to build a storm shelter in a field beside their house – depriving the family of the money they need to fund medical treatment for their deaf mute daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). Curtis’s mother (Kathy Baker) was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic when he was a teenager: there’s mental illness in the genes. Is Curtis a case study or a seer? If it turns out to be the former, that will limit the film’s dramatic reach; if the latter, its final credibility.
For the audience of Take Shelter, the strength of this psychological drama depends on how much Curtis’s state of mind rings a bell with us. Maybe people always feel they’re living in an age of anxiety (and that it’s followed an age of relative innocence and security) but it’s hard to argue that we’re not living through one now, thanks to the triple global threats of recession, terrorism and warming. Like Curtis, many people feel at some level that there’s a bad thing coming; the fact that his fears are focused on the weather has a particular resonance. Yet although the film is set in 2010 no one else in it appears to share Curtis’s apprehension of Armageddon. Except for him, present day Ohio is free of the vague fears that we in the audience may have, and which Jeff Nichols feeds off. Curtis starts going to a counsellor; he mentions later that he’s seen her ‘a few times’; but we witness only a brief part of their first meeting. In other words, Nichols contrives a situation in which Curtis is isolated, a voice in the wilderness who doesn’t, in what we’re privy to, have anyone to talk to about his terrors. (I’m not sure why Nichols has him go for counselling at all; if Curtis were resolutely opposed to doing that, the excision of his conversations with the counsellor wouldn’t stand out so much.)
A tornado eventually arrives one night. Curtis takes Sam and Hannah into his underground shelter from which they eventually emerge the next morning when the storm has subsided. The long scene preceding their return to the outside world is compelling. The fiercely loyal wife pleads with her husband to believe that the weather has cleared; she tells him that it will do no good if she takes the lead in unlocking the shelter and venturing back above ground – Curtis has to do it himself. The concentrated acting of Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain reaches its peak in this sequence and the moment when Curtis finds the courage to turn the key is the emotional climax of the film. The world to which the family returns seems reborn, paradisal; the sky is blue and calm. Yet there’s an edge of unease in the quietness: the neighbours are clearing up debris with a kind of stunned cautiousness. People and houses have survived for now but there’s a sense of reprieve rather than of restored safety. It’s a considerable irony that, if Jeff Nichols had ended Take Shelter at this point, he would just about have brought it off. We might have felt that Curtis had fought back against his demons, had been restored to normality (and mortality). Nichols clearly thinks that a we-have-come-through ending of this kind would be too easy, however: there has to be a more explicit sting in the movie’s tail. Curtis, who’s now lost his job, goes on a seaside holiday with Sam and Hannah to convalesce. While the family were in their shelter, Curtis, convinced the storm was still raging, asked Hannah, through signing, if she felt the thunder. She shook her head but now, after happily making a sand castle with her father, she makes the sign he made to her underground. Sam comes to the door of their beach house and nods assent. They all look out to sea and the sight of another tornado on the horizon. This one really does look as if it’s bringing with it the end of the world.
There’s no denying that this final scene is, as it’s happening, effective. And the performances in Take Shelter – which make you root for the LaForche family all the way – give these last moments some depth. Yet although the tone of the finale is solemn, the conception of this just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe slap in the face for the audience seems to belong to a different kind of film – made by a director who likes to manipulate us in a more amused, shameless way than Jeff Nichols does here. These are big reservations and Take Shelter is a smaller film as a result; even so, it is mostly very well done. I felt before seeing it (and I still feel) that Michael Shannon needs to broaden the range of roles he’s taking: this is the third time in as many years that he’s played a decent man torn apart by some kind of obsessive mental illness. Yet Curtis isn’t evidently disturbed to start with and the convincing details of his home life mean that, even when he starts losing it, he still has one foot in a normal world. Directors and actors are often so eager to get to the unravelling of minds that they fail to show you what’s being lost: Nichols and Shannon certainly can’t be accused of that. This makes Curtis’s mania more powerfully upsetting – when he conceals from Sam that he’s wet the bed after one of his nightmares, or when he pens up his much-loved dog (the way the animal shakes in this sequence is distressingly suggestive). When Curtis asks his mother how her illness started and, a little while later, she asks him if he’s OK, Shannon shows fine control in his determined show of sanity.
In spite of her distinctive features and colouring, Jessica Chastain has been remarkably physically different in each of the three roles I’ve seen her in this year. She’s completely convincing here as a blue collar wife, keeping the home going and making a bit of cash selling bags and other things she’s made, at a market where she has a regular pitch. Chastain plays the gallant wife with extraordinary taste. Sam’s love for and exasperation with her husband both run deep; she also has a very credible childishness playing with the child. They sometimes seem like sisters, and Tova Stewart has a nice blend of gravity and giggliness as Hannah. The cast is good all the way through – Kathy Baker, Shea Whigham as Curtis’s workmate and Ray McKinnon as their boss, the actors in the small parts of Curtis’s doctor and counsellor. The sustained momentum of the acting and Jeff Nichols’ direction is impressive even if the claustrophobia of the script – as distinct from that of the characters’ situation – tends to be oppressive. Curtis’s bad dreams are frighteningly alive and there are fine images, shot by Adam Stone, of variously ominous skies. In one extraordinary sequence, as birds fall like missiles from the sky, Nichols momentarily fuses Hitchcock’s avian horror story with the rain of frogs in Magnolia. There are less spectacular but still unnerving sights and sounds too, such as the quietly relentless noise and movement of sand churning through an industrial machine that’s like a monstrous egg-timer.
6 December 2011
