It is difficult to imagine anybody being keen on seeing a film entitled as blandly as John Carpenter's 1982 horror remake "The Thing." Nevertheless, no work of art should be judged on this criterion, and the film more than redeems itself for the flub. Such is regrettably not the case with writer/ director Richard Kelly's latest feature "The Box," whose majority of a two-hour running length is just as inept as its title.
To be sure, the sci-fi thriller, based on the Richard Matheson short story "Button, Button" starts out with promise. Indeed, the promise is in the premise: an average couple is faced with a moral dilemma that is both larger than life (at least larger than their own) and life-threatening. Moreover, in subtext, much of this movie is about life's many dilemmas. And the moral quandary at its core is in many ways caused by the economical quandary of the aforementioned average couple, Norma and Arthur Lewis.
To backtrack, Norma (Cameron Diaz) is a schoolteacher who learns that she is no longer getting a discount for her son's expensive tuition. Arthur (James Marsden) is a NASA worker whose ambitions of becoming an astronaut are unexpectedly shattered. To top it off, Norma is awaiting surgery for a foot deformed by a grotesque medical accident in her teens.
Anon, the inciting incident: the titular "box," the MacGuffin, is dropped off at couple's doorsteps, within it contained an almost comical device with a big red button. After much speculation, a mysterious man named Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) shows up the door. He startles Norma with his black fedora and half-burnt face (Ã la "Two-Face") but is allowed in. At one point, Norma asks Steward if he is there to sell them something. "In a way, yes," he answers. And as with any salesman, he brings along a deal and a catch to go with it.
Introducing the central dilemma, Steward explains that upon pushing the big red button, Norma and Arthur will receive one million dollars in cash. Concurrently, somebody whom they don't know will somehow die, someplace or another. He leaves them with a day to make up their minds.
As mentioned, this initial situation is well-executed, intriguing and promising, and there is a nice will-they or won't-they suspense building up at this point. In fact, a foreboding mood supported by composition as opposed to gore is one of the films merits. But after the button is inevitably pushed, the film begins a steady degeneration, and sometime around the halfway mark it becomes so silly and bizarre that the promise is not only broken but first made contrary and then obliterated.
To be fair, every film should probably feature a bit of the bizarre. By stirring awe, inciting humour or providing backdrop, such deviation could be welcome. Many filmmakers have mastered the bizarre in various forms: there is the Fellini bizarre, or the the surrealism that stems from dream-like sequences; there is the Coen brothers bizarre, the quirk that mostly roots off of their characters; there's also the Charlie Kaufman miscellaneous bizarre. Ironically, even director Richard Kelly was highly successful in delivering this technique with "Donnie Darko" and its wonderful eccentricity. However, Kelly wholly miscalculates it here, carelessly replacing the bizarre with the wild and baseless, perhaps assuming the audience won't notice.
Then there is the lost art of the plot twist, also handled with ineptitude in "The Box," even though Kelly appeared to have mastered it too in "Donnie Darko." It is not enough for a twist to be merely unexpected; it must also be believable and make narrative sense. The one we are met with in this film is so undeveloped, outlandish, confused and indecisive that the plot no longer twists but outright tangles and then self-strangulates.
It should be noted that "The Box" is not marketed as a sci-fi thriller. The actual sci-fi elements (corresponding with the "plot twist") enter intrusively and without warning around the halfway mark. One can say that that the movie pulls a "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" at this point, albeit with much less skill.
But not everything is hopeless. Technically, this is a a solid, nicely composed effort, beyond a slight over-dependence the slow dramatic zoom. There is plenty of symmetry in the framing, likely inspired by the great Stanley Kubrick, although it is not always of the Kubrickian variety. Only one well-done sequence in a library comes close to mimicking the atmosphere in, for instance, "The Shining."
Beyond the premise and the technical effort, an indubitable asset is Frank Langella. The acclaimed character actor from last year's "Frost/Nixon" is particularly good as the "mad hatter," the two-faced soft-spoken antagonist. Conversely, Cameron Diaz speaks with an over-the-top southern accent that distracts from her performance, while the rest of the cast is a mixed bag.
At one point Steward is asked, in reference to his experiment,"Why a box?" He replies with insight into the prevalence of boxes in our lives, unflinchingly noting that "your home is a box" and that "your car is a box on wheels" and so on. All I can add to that is this: while sitting in a dimly lit box and looking at the face of a box projected from the box behind me, I had the unpleasant sensation thatÂ
my buttons were being pushed.
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