Moviegoer Diary: Winter Kills, The Box

WINTER KILLS

Plot In A Nutshell
William Richert’s 1979 conspiracy thriller about the brother (Jeff Bridges) of an assassinated president who many years later uncovers his first clue to the identity of the killer.

Thoughts
I watched this one about a week and a half ago, and I really shouldn’t have waited this long to write something about it, because I find that already my memories of exactly how the pieces of the film’s conspiracy plot all fit together. But maybe that’s just as well: even when I was watching it, the film felt more like a series of entertaining but barely connected setpieces than a cleverly worked-out mystery. It’s based on a novel by Richard Condon, who also wrote The Manchurian Candidate — you remember that weird scene where Frank Sinatra meets Janet Leigh on the train and she talks about how her ancestors built this railroad and says things like, “Are you Arabic?... Let me put it another way: are you married?” In Winter Kills, it feels like director William Richert is trying to give every scene the same off-kilter feeling.

It makes for kind of a frustrating viewing experience, but a lively one. One moment, Jeff Bridges is getting shot at by an insane gazillionaire (Sterling Hayden) in an armoured tank; the next, he’s being attacked by a black maid, accidentally ripping her blouse off in the battle, and hurling her, bare-breasted, off a balcony. Nothing that happens really has any consequences — everybody Bridges talks to winds up dead, but Richert seems to regard this as a necessary convention of conspiracy thrillers and plays it for laughs. (Well, maybe not laughs, but at least for a quiet snicker or two as you relish the absurdity of it all.)

The zestiest performance comes from John Huston, who plays the Joseph Kennedy figure, a randy old sonuvabitch who keeps making hilariously unmotivated cracks about what he sees as Bridges’ insufficient masculinity. “Do you get laid?” he asks him bluntly, clearly unsatisfied with Bridges’ low number of sexual conquests. “You know how many times your brother got laid when he was in office? 1,072! And with a schedule like his!” (I associate this performance with the one Huston gave in Myra Breckinridge at the start of the decade — for an old guy, he sure had no problem running around on screen wearing nothing but a silk robe and some skimpy underwear.)

Winter Kills may not be a particularly suspenseful or scary movie, but as a comic-book spoof of Kennedy-conspiracy hysteria, it’s got some pretty audacious moments. And Anthony Perkins’ climactic speech — which he delivers flawlessly even though Bridges has broken both his arms! — is some kind of nutbar classic. It’s too bad Perkins didn’t do more movies; he really had a Christopher Walken-like gift for making every line reading special.

RATING: 3/5

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THE BOX

Plot In A Nutshell
Richard Kelly’s 2009 mindbender about a cash-strapped couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) in mid-’70s Virginia who are approached by a stranger (Frank Langella), given a box, and told that if they push the button on top of it, they will receive $1,000,000... but that a stranger will die.

Thoughts
I just got home from seeing this film with my friend Collin, and we had exactly the same reaction: we didn’t think the plot make one damn bit of sense, but we were able to groove enough on its eerie mood to have a pretty good time anyway.

Does it sound shallow to say that the first thing I really loved about a movie was the wallpaper? Every room in Diaz and Marsden’s house has the funkiest wallpaper ever — I especially liked the brown-and-orange op-art pattern in their kitchen. But all the ’70s production details felt great: the TV sets, with their nearly square screens; the pre-digital clock radio; the old-school switchboards at 911 headquarters, all filmed in desaturated, brown-tinged ’70s-style dinge-o-vision. Kelly must have been in heaven when he got to recreate a NASA laboratory from 1976. Of course, you get the feeling that Kelly is much better at assembling little design details — like the dead, brown tooth he gives Celia Weston’s character or the top-secret government manual Marsden gets his hands on late in the film — than on putting together a coherent story.

Or am I just slow? I don’t want to give away any spoilers here, but neither Collin nor I could makes heads or tails of what the hell Langella’s motives were for half the stuff we see him do, or figure out which characters were helping him or working against him. A sequence with Marsden being chased through a library is pretty creepy (of course, walking through the narrow shelves of old libraries has always given me the shivers), but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you why those people were chasing him, or what they would have done to him if they caught him. And there’s a scene at a motel swimming pool that’s even goofier than the similar scenes from Lady in the Water.

What can you do at the end of this thing but shake your head and hope that someday Kelly will hook up with a writing partner who can channel his ideas into something more controlled and disciplined (and who can gently break it to him that his references to Sartre’s No Exit aren’t as deep as he thinks). But I hope Kelly hangs onto his creative team: production designer Alec Hammond, editor Sam Bauer, and cinematographer Steven Poster have worked on all three of Kelly’s films, and seem tuned into his sensibility. I also like seeing actor Holmes Osborne turn up in all of Kelly’s films — a good luck charm, like that cross-eyed guy is for Jonathan Demme.

And hopefully Kelly will be able to convince Win Butler, Regine Chassagne, and Owen Pallett (variously from Canadian indie-rock powerhouses Arcade Fire and Final Fantasy) to keep writing scores for him, because their music for The Box is terrific — it’s reminiscent of those great, overheated scores Bernard Herrmann was writing at the end of his career, for Sisters and Taxi Driver. It's one of the few recent orchestral film soundtracks I'm actually tempted to buy. Hearing it is almost enough to convince you that The Box is as profound as it pretends to be.

Stray Observations

• Another thing I liked about The Box: the way it achieves the same effect Philip Kaufman created in his 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers — the way a normal setting can shift and suddenly seem thoroughly uncanny when you notice a stranger who won't stop staring at you.

• I also loved the scene where Diaz and Marsden have to mop up all the water dripping from their kitchen ceiling. It's the perfect bit of mundane comic relief after the film's most reality-warping scene, and it suggests that, for all his excesses, Kelly sometimes knows exactly what he's doing after all.

RATING: 3/5