Shades of Caruso

BFI LFF 2011: Take Shelter / The Artist

Times are tough. The economy looks like a dessicated version of its former self, waiting for rehydration that won’t ever come if our right-wing overlords have anything to do with it. The planet’s surface is hayzum-jayzum; all the water seems to be going to the wrong places. We’re just waiting on collapse. The experience of modern life often seems to be nothing more than bracing for impact, futilely attempting to protect ourselves from oblivion by padding ourselves with information about how bad it’s going to get, how secretly everything is going to be okay; info, misinfo, disinfo, facts that don’t do what you want them to. It’s all fuel for fear, and it’s exhausting.

It’s tempting to think that the pressure of modernity is affecting just you alone, that the constant stressful suppression of the fight-or-flight instinct is something you’re going through on your own, but a shift in the cultural landscape can prove this isn’t a pit of despair for one. Horrible though it might be to think that the collective unconscious is broadcasting waves of doubt and fear, there’s also a kind of solace to be taken from it. You’re not alone in being scared all the time, of dreading the future instead of running toward it with open arms. We’re all in this together, after all.

Dear reader, I ask that you bear with me as I discuss Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, because any objective appraisal is impossible. The 2011 London Film Festival featured a number of movies that featured scenes of poverty (Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai), hopelessness (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Dendera), and existence-shattering threats from within (Shame) and without (The Monk, We Need To Talk About Kevin), while existential threats from the environment loomed large in other movies seen recently (Melancholia, Contagion), but nothing in recent times has shaken me as much as Take Shelter. I’m not using that phrase lightly; as the credits rolled I found myself having the equivalent of a subdued but nonetheless terrifying panic attack. Nichols reached into my brain and squeezed until I broke.

Take Shelter depicts the gradual meltdown of Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon), who begins to experience vivid nightmares hinting at a forthcoming ecological disaster. Visions of terrifying cloud formations and a thick, oily rain that transforms people into something akin to rage zombies haunt him, lingering so long that the sense of foreboding he experiences begins to affect his ability to function. As friends and family begin to appear in his visions as menacing versions of their true selves, Curtis becomes isolated from others, and embarks on a mission to build a storm shelter in his backyard with which he will protect his wife (Jessica Chastain) and daughter. It is this mission that begins to jeopardise his job and social standing, bringing about a disaster in his life less dramatic than the end of the world, but one just as dangerous.

Shannon does blistering, career-best work as a man struggling to cope with the horror of impending doom brought on by circumstances he cannot control. Nichols wisely makes Curtis an active participant, giving him an antagonist to rail against in the form of his genetic family’s history of mental illness. His mother has spent much of her life in sanitariums, and as soon as he begins experiencing the visions he tries to come to terms with them as manifestations of some internal breakdown. He seeks help, reads up on the subject, and refuses to think of his visions as anything other than evidence that the thing he has most feared has finally arrived.

Curtis’ situation gradually worsens as the movie progresses, and Nichols has paced this descent into mania and terror perfectly. There’s nothing flashy about Take Shelter; even the subtle effects work by Hydraulx is cleverly inserted into the movie in an unassuming way. Curtis’ visions are filmed with restraint, but they’re no less efficient for all that. By framing both reality and vision identically, the viewer is wrongfooted constantly. Are the visions bleeding into his reality? Are they coming true? The tension this decision generates is considerable, aided by the slow disintegration of Curtis’ relationships, and the increasingly dire effect it has on his body; one scene involving a seizure is particularly disquieting.

This movie is soaked in dread. As the controversial final scenes come around, the film’s grip on my psyche became oppressive and terrifying. Curtis’ breakdown, and his tragic awareness of the hopelessness of his situation, is so brilliantly realised by Shannon that the movie becomes hard to watch, made even more painful by the stunning empathic work by Jessica Chastain, here required to be more than the saintlike mother of Malick’s Tree of Life or the cliched, almost omnipresent shrewish obstacle-wives of so many lesser movies. The pain that this family suffers — emotionally, physically and psychically — is rendered with a careful eye by Nichols, though never dispassionately.

This is a powerful movie, an emotionally devastating experience given greater significance by its perceptive channeling of wider societal concerns. As the credits rolled I realised I was breathing way too hard, shaking and even crying. As I say, this is a purely subjective reaction and I don’t expect anyone else to react in the same way, but Nichols’ superb control over the unravelling narrative, and his subtle but disturbing use of nightmare imagery reminded me of the most upsetting works of David Lynch. That’s not to say he does anything to ape or even reference the great surrealist’s art, but he has an affinity for disturbing atmospherics, depicted here with clinical rigour, that brought about the same existential terror I felt during Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me or Mulholland Drive.

Spoilers between these bold sentences: read at your peril! I also reacted strongly to Curtis’ desire to take responsibility for his problems. He’s not content to let this terror just sweep him away; he rails against it as hard as he can, seeking out help and questioning the nature of his affliction for as long as he can, but it’s not enough. He succumbs when confronted by his former friend Dewart (Shea Whigham, giving one of his customary brilliant performances), loudly proclaiming that a storm is coming. It’s an electrifying moment; the careful build-up of tension is suddenly gone and Curtis gives in with something that looks almost like relief, taking on the role of apocalyptic preacher with gusto. It only lasts a moment, though, and he then realises how much he has lost by revealing his madness/clairvoyance, and how far he has strayed into the landscape of the insane.

But has he? The final scene of the movie seems ambiguous, though Nichols has said in an interview that it isn’t meant to be. Nevertheless, his intention with the final moment matched up to my interpretation, which is that Shannon’s fight to fix his own problem is lost, but he gains something more profound. His visions have led him to reject the love and support of his wife, but at the end, no matter whether the finale is a dream or reality, his wife is still there for him, and he accepts her completely. He’s no longer alone, and in that there is hope. That’s all that matters.

This is the inspirational message I’ve taken from it. Curtis can do nothing to deflect what’s coming, be it madness or apocalypse. He tries and fails, because there are always outside threats we can do nothing about. Agonising over the economy or the environment or the imminent destruction of compassionate policy thanks to the demented obstructionism and selfishness of the right-wing forces that seek to punish the unfortunate; none of this accomplishes anything. Curtis is fighting a losing battle, and for those of us who feel similarly terrified of what’s on the horizon, it’s hard to watch someone go through the same thing.

And yet we’re not alone. Take Shelter spoke to me more than almost any other film released in the past few years, because it presented me with the nightmare I’ve been having for a long time, and just as Curtis has Samantha by his side, I have my wife, and my friends, and Jeff Nichols and everyone who sees and responds to this magnificent movie. It’s small consolation, but it’s enough. Spoilers end!

Take Shelter might be the best movie I saw at the festival; it’s certainly the one that elicited the strongest negative reaction from me (not necessarily a bad thing). However, my lack of objectivity makes me wonder if this is the right choice. It felt as if it had been made for me (please forgive my arrogance), and I can’t predict what others think. The Artist, on the other hand, is easy. This is a movie that can make a sourpuss fall in love. It’s impossible to convey, with words, the power of Michel Hazanivicius’ delightful love letter to the silent era, because he has managed to capture sheer happiness with his camera, and the experience of seeing it in a roomful of people is one of the purest joys a filmgoer can experience.

The gala presentation of The Artist was attended by stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, producer Thomas Langmann, and Mr. Harvey Weinstein himself. He, of course, did most of the talking, giving a long speech that seemed to consist of an epic anecdote about how brave he is for deciding to distribute the movie. I’m not sure this qualifies as brave; yes it’s a silent black and white movie set in the Twenties and Thirties, but choosing to pick this film up is an absolute no-brainer. I’m sure there were many UK distributors in the audience that night, and by the time the final credits rolled, they would all have been clamouring to pick it up.

Hazanavicius’ homage to the silent movie era pays tribute to the format, but also to the aesthetic of the time, mixing broad humour and melodramatics in perfect harmony. The plot, drawn from A Star Is Born and Singin’ In The Rain, involves preening superstar George Valentin (the delightful Dujardin, channeling Gene Kelly) at the moment that silent movies become a thing of the past. We see him just as his star is about to wane, though he remains as oblivious to the imminent success of the talkies as he does to the disintegration of his marriage to Doris (Penelope Ann Miller).

It’s at this moment that he meets Peppy Miller (Bejo, also a delight), who luckily capitalises on their chance encounter to become a star in her own right. She is young and eager enough to embrace the new filmmaking technology, and her star ascends as George’s fades, but her love for him remains a constant. Only his bitterness and stubbornness keeps them apart, just as it isolates him from others and brings about a dark period of self-pity. The parallels with Take Shelter, and Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai — which also features a lengthy melodramatic sequence in which poverty threatens to destroy our protagonist — are notable. There have been complaints that the section of The Artist showing George’s fall is too long; they obviously haven’t seen the seemingly endless misery-porn segment of Hara-Kiri, which destroys any audience sympathy and patience.

But whereas those two movies depict a grim vision of a fate that is impossible to escape, The Artist is uplifting, showing how a stubborn, proud man can be transformed by love, and how there is always something hopeful just around the corner. I won’t give away too much about the glorious finale, other than to say it lifted my spirits and made me want to dance out of the cinema. I know I wasn’t alone in this; the audience applauded throughout. It’s the ultimate crowdpleaser, a true celebration of the magic of the communal experience of cinema.

More than that, it reaffirms a belief I hold, but often forget thanks to my naturally pessimistic nature. George sows the seeds of his resurrection by being open to new experiences, even though that openness is a consequence of his flirtiness and not anything more noble. He helps Peppy, giving her the beauty spot that makes her famous (in her first starring role in Beauty Spot, which was the working title of this movie). George might not learn to be open to new experiences early on, but it is this behaviour, initially displayed accidentally and eventually intentionally, that saves him. It matches up with this recent, brilliant Derren Brown experiment which shows that we make our own “luck” just by altering our mental state. It’s a kind of low-level magical thinking, to embrace the world and its opportunities; truly preferable to my default negativity.

It also shows how an idea can flourish over time, how artists influence other artists and create a self-generating flow of culture that they can dip back into whenever necessary. It’s George’s idea for the beauty spot that pushes Peppy into the limelight; he selflessly donates something to her, and eventually reaps the rewards for his generosity. Art begets art; culture grows from what came before, and if you’re smart enough to adapt to it, then you can keep contributing. George’s only failing is short-sightedness. Once he opens his eyes, and accesses another part of his personality, he comes back stronger than ever. The greatest artists of our time have benefited from this flexibility; The Artist is a beautiful depiction of this truth.

I cannot recommend The Artist highly enough. It’s possible to dismiss it as fluff, as some already have, or to say that there’s very little to it that hasn’t been done before, but it’s commendable even if only for Hazanavicius’ clever use of the format; one title card toward the end of the film is one of the best jokes of recent times, and brought the house down. And please, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t respond to pretty much the greatest performance by a dog in years — God bless Uggie, who plays George’s onscreen partner The Dog — then you’re taking things way too seriously.

More importantly, it’s worth noting that sometimes a homage is more than just empty posturing; it can also be a statement of intent. The Artist might be a beautiful, pitch-perfect homage, but Hazanavicius is obviously aware that cinema is in the throes of a similar transformation to that which occurred in the 30s, and has made a timely movie that wears its period clothing lightly. As Anne Billson said to me this morning, “It’s pastiche, but transformed by a modern sensibility.” We see an industry in tumult, and know that the same thing is happening now. The Artist celebrates cinema of both eras, and acts as a connective tissue between both timeframes.

As talkies changed cinema then, 3D and IMAX and digital projection is changing cinema now. A cynic might say that The Artist is just cinema looking at itself in the mirror, but it’s not gazing with narcissistic and empty adoration. It’s chanting an affirmation, sending out a rallying cry to filmmakers and audiences to prepare for a new era. Embrace the new technology, re-engage with the idea of a collective audience, use the new tools to tell new stories, or tell the old ones better. The best is yet to come.

November 24, 2011 - Posted by admiralneck | Contagion, David Lynch, Dendera, Derren Brown, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, Harvey Weinstein, Jessica Chastain, London Film Festival 2011, Magical Thinking, Michael Shannon, Michel Hazanavicius, Shame, Takashi Miike, Take Shelter, The Artist, We Need To Talk About Kevin