thriller

Prisoners (2013)

André Crous

Denis Villeneuve’s dark film about obsession is not his best, but story’s complexity makes for a riveting tale.

prisonersUSA
3.5*

Director:
Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriter:
Aaron Guzikowski
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins

Running time: 155 minutes

The final minutes of Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s sombre Prisoners are as dark and thrilling as anything that precedes them, but their impact could have been infinitely more powerful had Hugh Jackman’s character not been so incredibly thick.

Jackman plays Keller Dover, a manly family man with a remodelling and repairs business who in the film’s opening scene accompanies his son, Ralph, on his first deer hunt and does his best to make the youthful teenage boy feel he is now in some way being initiated into manhood. Keller tells Ralph how his father used to always be prepared for everything, good or bad. In other words, a real Boy Scout. Of course, he will soon face a situation he has no idea how to handle.

But there is something off about Keller. He is intensely serious about everything, his body literally taught with tension, and in a pivotal scene early in the film, when he is searching the house and we get the first glimpse of his basement, the camera lingers just long enough for us to notice a gas mask hanging in the corner.

Halfway through the film, when we return to the basement, we get a better view of the neatly arranged stock on the shelves and have the disturbing impression Keller is a survivalist. Prisoners doesn’t elaborate – the film is more show than tell, and you need some patience for this simple yarn spun out over two and a half hours – but one questions what purpose this information serves our understanding of the plot’s central event, other than to make us increasingly uneasy.

This central event is the abduction of Keller’s and his wife’s young girl, Anna, together with Joy, the young daughter of the Dovers’ friends, the Birches, with whom they spent Thanksgiving when they thought the children could quickly go back home to look for an SOS whistle.

Villeneuve already signals in a scene very early on that we should be suspicious of a caravan that is parked in the neighbourhood. We cannot see who is inside, but we know it is an ominous vehicle because we get at least two shots from the point of view of someone unknown on the inside. Luckily, Ralph sees the caravan, and when his sister disappears, he mentions it to his parents, who inform the police.

The police track down the caravan soon enough, but the driver, the young man Alex Jones, seems to be either on drugs or otherwise handicapped, and as he tries to flee, he rams the vehicle into a tree, obviously making his involvement in the disappearance of the girls seem all the more likely. But with him clamming up, the police thinking he is merely mentally handicapped, and the law requiring either arrest or release after 48 hours of detention, he is let go, which angers Keller to no end.

This is where he takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of his daughter’s disappearance. But life is not so simple, and while we have grave suspicions that Alex had anything to do with the abduction, one or two tiny but not insignificant moments make us question what he is thinking, or at least what he has seen and may not want to share because of whatever fear he has.

In the end, the film turns out to be infinitely more complex than we may have anticipated, and there are countless incidents or images that seem to be loose ends – or worse, dead ends – that we may never tie together. But slowly, things fall into place. The theme of a maze, made visible by one particular loony whom we and the police notice once word spreads of Anna’s and Joy’s disappearance, is very appropriate here.

The major investigating officer is Detective Loki, and as played by Jake Gyllenhaal there is some trace of his character in Zodiac, as the normally cool and rational individual becomes very attached to the investigation, to the point where he may very well take the law into his own hands if he feels it is not proving to be effective enough on its own.

As the snow falls in rural Pennsylvania and hope disappears of ever finding the two innocent girls, the action escalates, mostly due to Keller’s and Loki’s growing obsession with finding the perpetrator of the crime. However, Keller’s obviously strained relationship with his wife (we almost never see the two of them together in a scene) and Loki’s past, which we can surmise has been filled with sadness even though we have no idea what is at the root of this sadness, are left unexplored by the film, and ultimately leaves us more unattached to the narrative than we ought to have been.

Villeneuve has made some wonderful films in the past, including the widely acclaimed Incendies and the extraordinary Polytechnique. Both of them were violent films, but they were told with great style and a sense for telling a story in an interesting way. Although Prisoners is far from those highpoints, it is a work most directors would be proud of, and despite the slow pace of the storytelling (we only grasp the meaning of the title almost right at the end thanks to a newspaper headline), it remains a strong presentation of an investigation where leads seem to be in such short supply.

Grand Piano (2013)

André Crous

grand-piano-2013USA/Spain
2.5*

Director:
Eugenio Mira
Screenwriter:
Damien Chazelle
Director of Photography:
Unax Mendía

Running time: 90 minutes

Eugenio Mira’s Grand Piano has a central conceit that has been incredibly effective in other thrillers, most notably Speed, Nick of Time and Phone Booth, but it squanders the potential of its idea by drowning it in style and spectacle without eliciting any fear or thrill in the viewer (not unlike the disappointing single-setting but visually extravagant Buried, which producer Rodrigo Cortés directed). In fact, one character’s actions during the climax are so wildly melodramatic, we cannot help but laugh at the utter absurdity of the staging and the lack of credibility.

The plot sees prodigious piano player Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood), who has not performed in five years after having had a breakdown during his last show, coming back to the stage to play the piano his late maestro, Patrick Godureaux, so cherished. He is expected to play a piece titled “La Cinquette,” which will require him to do strenuous finger movements at a superhuman pace right at the end of the piece, and he is understandably stressed out.

In an effort to calm him down, his conductor tells him that no one expects him to play perfectly and that the audience never notices tiny screw-ups in a piano performance anyway. However, Tom is about to get the fright of his life when he takes to the stage and opens his sheet music. There, in bright red ink, are little scribbles that tell him to play every single note perfectly lest his actress wife, Emma (Kerry Bishé), beaming with pride from her seat in one of the boxes, gets shot to pieces by a state-of-the-art laser-equipped rifle.

Tom suspects this is a joke, but when he notices a little dot of red light dancing around the piano, and then on his wife’s face, he breaks out in cold sweat. In one of many moments that repeat throughout the film, he runs offstage to audible gasps from the audience, while the orchestra continues playing, to his dressing room, where he finds more evidence that his life is in danger, as well as an earpiece to follow the instructions of his would-be assassin, voiced by John Cusack.

For the rest of the film, Tom will be sitting in the spotlight, from the looks of things speaking to himself but actually communication with the man he cannot see and whose intentions he knows nothing about, except that they may lead to his own assassination. But both this mysterious man and Tom are very talkative, and it would seem little concentration is required to play all the right notes, or perhaps this pianist is just unusually gifted, as there is a continuous back and forth between the two with no sign of Tom, whom the voice in his ear provocatively, playfully and punnily refers to as “a man of note,” missing a beat, or more importantly, a note.

But what starts out as a very strong premise for tension is properly drenched in style, as Mira’s camera flies across the stage with wild crane shots, again and again surging over the orchestra towards Tom and whooshily swirls around his one-in-a-million piano that contains the key (another pun the film plays with a bit too often) to his survival.

Elijah Wood’s big eyes are perfectly suited to the material, as the obvious curiosity he exudes fits with the enigma his character is trying to get a grip on. However, the character of his wife, Emma, is a big joke, and in a last-ditch attempt at tension during the climax, she is central to one of the most bizarre moments in the entire film, as she seems to pleasure herself with a song, performed impromptu for an adoring public, while her husband is running around trying to save them from looming execution. This detour into insanity will either have the viewer in stitches or make her cringe with embarrassment, as we simply cannot fathom how a story with such a serious premise could plumb such depths of farce.

Grand Piano has spectacle but no tension. We do not share the point of view of the audience but rather of the pianist, who on top of playing the most difficult piece of his life, seems to cope very well indeed with having his and his wife’s lives threatened by a lunatic who seems to be very handy with a gun. But wait until you hear what the assassin actually does for a living — one can hardly things could get much more preposterous! If Mira had defined his film more clearly as comedy, perhaps it would have been more enjoyable, but the strange combination of a life in danger and hilarious comedy in the final act makes for an uneven viewing experience that few members of the audience will find satisfying.