Nov. 11, 2009 - Issue #734: Hanky panky

FILM CAPS: The Box

It's easy to write yourself into a box and hard to think outside it when you're making yet another psyche-out thriller—one of those in-your-head and under-your-skin flicks. A classic example is Kubrick's The Shining, with Jack slowly unraveling, his hallucinations unspooling, before our eyes. Richard Kelly stuffs Kubrickisms—that stare from under a heavy brow; the long hallway shot; a dramatic bathroom scene; an Arthur C. Clarke quote along with 2001's single red eye—and a little too much more into The Box, adapted from Richard Matheson's 1970 story "Button, Button." About a couple given a box with a button that, if pressed, will kill someone somewhere but also earn them a ton of money, it was made a Twilight Zone episode in the '80s.

Stephen King disliked Kubrick's adaptation and Matheson disliked the episode's change to his ending. The change remains here, accompanied by more of a background for Arthur (James Marsden) and Norma (Cameron Diaz), a NASA scientist and a private-school English teacher. The period (1976 this time) suburban setting and sci-fi touches recall Kelly's debut, Donnie Darko. But one of the best tricks to crafting a thriller that opens up into something more, something as inescapable as The Shining, is to tuck moments of deeper realism and psychological insight into the corners so they spring out, raising the dread from your mind's underground.

That doesn't happen. Kelly does build the ominous-ness, though occasionally the drawn-out tension feels like watching a story's pages flip past and the score (from members of the Arcade Fire) can be intrusively self-conscious, like a campfire tale-teller adding the "ooo"s of a ghost instead of letting us get into the story already. Generally, though, the creeps and chills, as husband and wife fall into a pit of unease, gather nice and slowly. Disturbing images crop up, from the box-giver, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), to a man simply watching, mouth agape.

Arthur and Norma don't much discuss the ethics of their loaded Hobson's choice before Norma decides. The story comes down as pointlessly hard on women as Norma does on the button—Kelly could've turned their Eve-like doom-bringing into some comment on '70s femininity. But he doesn't use the era for deeper ends, just awkwardly syncs up the existential horror with the Viking Mars program. The story's allegory—for individual selfishness destroying human society—is thrown off-course by this incidental interplanetary intrigue.

Young Walter (Sam Oz Stone) recalls Jack's son but, maybe to avoid him becoming one of those spooky-precocious kids, the story leaves him out in the cold. And there's no warm family dynamic or much sense of the financial walls closing in, so the climactic choice loses its emotional force.
For all its rough edges, The Box wraps up pretty nicely, but it's one of those thrillers that, looking back on it, has some plot ribbons with frayed, fuzzy ends. Yet Kelly toys nicely with the box motif—is this world our future coffin or a portal to a better present?—and gift-giving, especially when Norma's apparent lack of altruism is repackaged and handed back, hitting closer to home. The film's just not quite sharp-edged enough to open doors to images and fears in your head you never knew were there, but now want desperately to lock up.

The Box
Directed by Richard Kelly
Written by Kelly, Richard Matheson
Starring James Marsden, Cameron Diaz, Frank Lengella

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