Moviegoer Diary: Bigger Than Life, Outlander

BIGGER THAN LIFE

Plot In A Nutshell
Nicholas Ray’s 1956 drama about a mild-mannered schoolteacher (James Mason) who gradually turns into an arrogant psychotic when he begins taking cortisone pills to combat a rare muscular disease.

Thoughts
In honour of Father’s Day, which is coming up in a couple of weeks, here’s Bigger Than Life, one of the great scary-dad movies of all time. The scene late in the film, with James Mason, out of his mind on cortisone, keeping his son up way past his bedtime, refusing to even let him eat dinner until he correctly solves a math problem, does an especially uncanny job of captures the mood of those horrible moments from childhood when you simply cannot acquire the skill your parents are trying to teach you, and you can feel them turn the full glare of their anger and frustration and disappointment upon you. Nicholas Ray films the scene in a wildly expressionistic manner, with the lighting low and Mason’s huge shadow thrown against the wall behind him as if he were Nosferatu, but the intensity of the staging feels completely appropriate to the emotions involved. It’s a horror scene. (Bigger Than Life would make a great double bill with The Stepfather, the witty horror movie from the ’80s starring Terry O’Quinn that, like Bigger Than Life, remains tragically unavailable on DVD.)

Mason represents a bit of an odd casting choice in a movie that sets out to create such an all-American setting — his British accent is never explained, and it’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances could have transplanted this tweedy, bow-tied fellow to this Midwestern high school. (Actually, he’s apparently been living there since his teens — he was on the football team in his youth, and if you can picture a teenaged James Mason as a football player, you’re taking something a lot stronger than cortisone.) Still, I think the oddness of Mason’s presence, his undisguisable Englishness, works in the film’s favour, especially in the scenes where his character begins having delusions and grandeur and openly insults his students and their parents during open house night at the school — after all, haven’t those Brits always regarded Americans as yahoos?

Of course, Mason (who produced the film) winds up displaying a level of arrogance that goes far beyond mere British snootiness — most memorably in the scene where he attends church with his family, his arms folded in contempt as he listens to the sermon, even refusing — much to his wife’s horror — to obey the priest’s command to “bow your heads and pray.” Soon after, Mason really goes nuts and tries to sacrifice his son to God the way Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac — and even though you know that there’s no way a Hollywood studio in 1956 would allow a character to actually follow through on such a plan, the fact that Bigger Than Life merely raises the possibility, that it merely shows Mason breaking off a scissor and making the attempt, is genuinely shocking and unsettling. (Thank God Walter Matthau, in one of his very first film roles, is there to stop him!)

And not even the happy ending can chase the dark clouds away from the implications of this story: Mason’s psychosis might not return, but the emotions that he revealed under the influence of his medication — his contempt for his wife, his disappointment in his son, his belief that he was cut out for something greater in life than a low-paying job as a glorified babysitter — seem rooted in truth. And there’s no pill that the doctors can describe that will make them go away.

Bigger Than Life was a revelation for me — like The Three Faces of Eve a year later, a vivid portrait of the madness lurking just under that Life magazine image of American suburban contentment. It’s the work of a master.

RATING: 5/5

* * * * *
OUTLANDER

Plot In A Nutshell
Howard McCain’s 2008 Vikings-vs.-aliens epic about a spaceman named Kainan (Jim Caviezel) whose ship crash-lands in eighth-century Norway, and who must then unite two warring Viking tribes to defeat the bloodthirsty creature that crashed along with him.

Thoughts
To be honest, I didn’t watch this one all that carefully — I put on the DVD as I was making dinner last night. (I had White Chicken Chili, and I added too much cayenne pepper.) But I have to admit: every time I looked up at the screen, something pretty entertaining seemed to be happening: either John Hurt was hamming it up as an aging Viking king, his grey beard gathered into a pair of majestic braids; or Jim Caviezel was running around a mead hall, stepping on top of the other men’s uplifted shields, like an ancient Norse variation of crowd-surfing; or Ron Perlman was showing up with a bushy beard and a shaved head, like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Will Oldham, smashing two giant hammers against either side of someone’s skull and crushing his head like a grape. There’s really only one woman in the film, but she’s played by Sophie Myles, who is very pleasant to look at. And the production values look quite high — even the creature (which Kainan calls a “Moorwen”) has an interesting, unusual look, with a long, swishing tail, and veins all over its body that glow an intense, hellish red, like the coils in a really good electric space heater.

It’s too bad Outlander never got a proper theatrical release — it’s not anything special, but it certainly seemed a lot more spirited and entertaining than, say, Terminator Salvation. And I’ve long contended that there is almost no movie in existence that wouldn’t be improved by the addition of Vikings.

RATING: 3/5