The Tie That Binds: MASS

In Mass, the heartbreaking American issue of mass shootings is examined from various perspectives in the course of one fraught conversation. (The title is more complicated than one might assume at first glance—a ritual, an extent, a weight.) It sees one of these tragedies—how sad a viewer can’t say with any certainty which one of many this story is inspired by—only through spoken details and respectfully without flashback. A middle-aged couple who lost their teenage son in a school shooting some years earlier arrive in a church basement to meet the parents of the teenage boy who was the shooter. Both couples have suffered tremendous loss, and naturally there’s regret and anger, too. A therapist has said this might help them. These characters’ lives are forever bound together by the shooting. But what will they get from such direct confrontation with what has so irreparably torn their sense of normality, and with what can never be undone? This is a movie about profound cross-currents of grief and guilt.

First-time writer-director Fran Kranz, a veteran character actor best known from genre efforts like The Cabin in the Woods and Dollhouse, has created a clear-eyed work of moral perspective and intense sympathy. The movie is deceptively simple. It’s set largely in one room. It’s visually restrained, with simple staging and lots of close-ups. It has barely any score. It has just four actors for most of its run time. And yet it builds out an entire emotional architecture in which to explore, a prism methodically turned until we can see all the angles without feeling preordained or overly schematic. This isn’t cheap tell-both-sides didacticism; nor is it full-throated activism. It’s strongly and persistently human. There are no clear solutions, leaving all involved struggling to understand, after all these years, the point at which their lives were violently changed forever. It becomes a quartet of a character study in a confined space, exploring what one must tell oneself to survive the unimaginable. One subtly heartbreaking exchange: “How could you believe that?” “Because I wanted to.”

The performers—Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton as the victim’s parents, and Ann Dowd and Reed Birney as the shooter’s—enter the picture calm and cautious. They clearly carry heavy burdens, but are tentatively polite, unwilling at first to open up lest they break right away. They all want to simply come to a new understanding of a tragedy that haunts them. As the conversation unfolds, in the kind of heightened realism to dialogue and monologues that would make this a powerhouse of a play, we see how each new decision to share something deep from within themselves is a choice, until it’s not. Characters burst forth with sorrowful contemplations, or retreat into defensiveness. The energy in the room shifts and stirs. The movie sits patiently in this hot-button issue, clearly saddened at the inability to make it right.

Because the movie is so stubbornly resistant to visual flourish—with really only one or two touches, like a narrowing aspect ratio in a moment of intense emotion, or a cutaway to a ribbon on a fence as a kind of pregnant pause—there is a continual focus on the dance of words between its characters. They give and take; they push and they retreat; they cry and they try to clearly express their deepest feelings. The encounter ends with a moment of one final unexpected, astonishing honesty, followed by a fortuitous moment of grace. (That Franz chooses that time for a last moment of staging and sound to build a lovely effect makes it all more softly surprising—and just right.) It doesn’t solve everything, or even anything. But it holds out hope of a possibility. And that’s almost a blessing in and of itself.

Sick Daze: A CURE FOR WELLNESS

A Cure for Wellness ends up another Hollywood movie about why being a workaholic is bad. And yet director Gore Verbinski makes the whole baroque horror atmosphere and plotting so intensely odd and unsettlingly drifting that I can’t help but admire it. Even as I found myself asking, “Why am I seeing this?” during the movie’s winding, repetitive middle, I couldn’t look away. (Well, except for the part with the aesthesia-free dental drilling. I had to squirm and squint then.) It’s set largely at a massive Swiss sanitarium set up in a sprawling nightmarish castle (one which houses centuries-old secrets, no less). There you can check out, but you can never leave. So discovers ambitious finance guy Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) when sent to retrieve his company’s missing chairman. The old man (Harry Groener) has been holed up in this place receiving aqua-therapy: steamed, dipped, dripped, and dunked while drinking plenty of fluids. And yet he never seems to get any better. And the head doctor (Jason Isaacs) insinuates he won’t any time soon. And the nurses won’t seem to call Lockhart a cab. And then he somehow topsy-turvy ends up a patient there himself. Now we’re all trapped, wondering how there could possibly be a way out of this Kafka-meets-Kubrick hall of body horrors.

As it begins we see dark ominous low-angle shots of a midnight modern cityscape, towering skyscrapers like one with a single glowing office in which a harried guy checks stocks and answers emails until he dies of a heart attack. It looks like a 90’s Fincher effort – mostly The Game – or the technological/supernatural isolation and paranoia of Verbinski’s own (great) The Ring. (He’s once again working with that film’s director of photography, Bojan Bazelli, brining the beautiful film in a similarly drained sumptuousness.) But by the time the young protagonist arrives at the health spa castle in the picturesque Swiss Alps, the whole production slips easily into a modern-day Gothic horror. (It’s not only the repeated eel imagery giving the movie its slithering, inevitable forward motion.) The place has a dark history, old lockets, hidden rooms, secretive groundskeepers, eerily unbending rules, stern authority figures, and a pretty, pale young woman (Mia Goth) with a mysterious past. Lockhart is drawn deeper into the hallucinatory hallways (think a Shining hospital) and the spooky subtext as doctors don’t quite say all they mean, and teeth fall out, urine samples have icky substances floating in them, and fellow patients are increasingly confused or confusing.

Running well over two hours, the script by Verbinski and Justin Haythe (Snitch) takes its time doling out clues and suspicions, only fully unspooling its knotty, baroquely upsetting backstory in its final moments. This gives most of the film over to atmosphere, wandering down the same halls, seeing increasingly suspicious behavior and ever more unhinged gross medical procedures. Here modernity has been thoroughly colonized by the Gothic imagination. Verbinski’s strong command of tone and genre has befitted his career resuscitating old modes with a twist. He’s made a ghost story (The Ring), westerns (Rango, The Lone Ranger), pirate movies (the first three Pirates of the Caribbean), madcap slapstick (Mouse Hunt) and screwball heists (The Mexican), all old-fashioned forms told with newfangled vernacular. With Wellness he drags Gothic trappings into now, tapping into a potent feeling of gaslit befuddlement. He conjures an atmosphere of unspeakable wrongness, allowing an in-over-his-head protagonist to wandering the clammy corridors and sweaty stones with increasing unease. He’s slowly losing his mind, unable to put the pieces together, pacified only by flirtations with the mystery girl and the stunning mountain views. He could very nearly forget why he’s there, but for the sudden dips into disturbing escalation: locked in a sensory deprivation chamber, hallucinating a deer in the steam room, hearing odd whistling rattles from around corners and down dark vents.

The people running the spa are quite transparently up to no good, and their constant lies and obfuscations when asked direct questions don’t seem to matter. So what if Lockhart knows they are lying when their cult of wealthy health nuts is happy in a cocoon of misinformation? There’s a perceptive strain of anti-intellectualism hiding under mindless quantification happening here, wrapped up in a nasty, pulpy mystery. (Timely, no?) It answers the question of why we’re watching this queasy blend of inevitable and adrift plotting in the same way as the question of why our protagonist doesn’t just leave. We’re all too curious to see how this thing turns out. For a finale, Verbinski has the movie devolve into a faintly more standard grotesque scramble, with vulnerable nubile flesh juxtaposed with a monster’s drooping, drooling face while the hero takes decisive action. But the filmmaker maintains such a vice grip of stunning imagery and sustained, teeth-gritted gross-out tension, straight through to the final shot, that it’s hard to shake the film’s sinister insistent spell. It’s as slithery as a bathtub full of eels wriggling around a bathing woman who peers over the edge with an inscrutable stare. The movie is full of such mesmerizing, disturbing allure. It is masterfully directed mush.

Baby Bourne: ABDUCTION

Every movie is allowed a certain amount of implausibility, with the exact amount tied directly to the level of entertainment value. I suppose one could work out an exact formula that could determine the precise figures, but that’s beside the point. It’s all objective anyways. Everyone has his or her own internal meter to determine this sort of thing. The new teen-oriented action thriller Abduction broke my implausibility meter early and often. Just when it gears up for some big action sequence I found myself tripped up by the little details asking: Who? How? Why? Especially “why?”

The movie tries to make Taylor Lautner, the werewolf from the Twilight movies, into a star capable of taking center stage. He stars as Nathan, an average, if a bit on the wild side, teenager who discovers that a childhood picture of his is on a missing person website. Soon, two goons show up at his house and kill his parents (Jason Isaacs and Maria Bello, putting in little more than cameos) who, before they died, confirmed that they aren’t his real parents. Then one of the goons spits out a dying warning. “There’s a bomb in the oven.” Kaboom. The house blows up sending the fleeing Nathan and his study partner (Lily Collins) into the backyard swimming pool. They run to a nearby hospital where they call 911. “Are you okay?” the operator asks. “A little shaken up,” he replies. Talk about an understatement.

Somehow Lautner finds an unconvincing way to play rattled. He’s a pretty young man who, in his best moments of acting in the film, invites a similar amount of sympathy as a whining puppy. The plot thickens around him as the hospital fills up with dangerous people who want to attack him for some reason. Alfred Molina barks from a CIA control room while Michael Nyqvist stalks the halls with his vaguely villainous henchmen. Luckily Sigourney Weaver shows up to drive the teens to safety, claiming that she’s a friend of Nathan’s real parents. It’s all so very convoluted that she can hardly explain it to them, practically shouting that both men are up to no good but for separate and competing reasons, so trust no one. Then she makes them jump out of the moving vehicle.

Somehow the two teens stumble around and figure out how and why to show up on time for the competent scenes of action required of a potentially propulsive thriller. There are hundreds of bloodless gunshots fired throughout the film, a squeaky indifference to consequences. Sure, everything this kid believed has quite literally exploded out from under him but, hey, at least he still has his hot cheerleader study partner at his side and a sweet leather jacket on his back. He’s only a little shaken up. And he can more than take care of himself, possessing as he does a set of combat skills that seem at once learned and mysteriously second nature. He is like a baby Jason Bourne, so it’s only fitting that the girl says he looks like “Matt Damon meets…you.”

Director John Singleton, recently of Four Brothers and 2 Fast 2 Furious, keeps things zipping along painlessly enough, I guess. The screenplay by Shawn Christensen is a jumble of semi-nonsense. It’s the kind of movie where computers are magic boxes that can do anything required of the plot with just a few keystrokes, characters suddenly possess knowledge they couldn’t possibly have gained, and a bomb can mysteriously appear ready to blow up inside an oven and destroy an entire building. To say the movie has a few plot holes would be an understatement. Between the creak of cliché and the whiff of straight-faced, unintentional silliness, the best we can really hope for is watchable.

It’s almost there, but for the fact that the talent just isn’t into it. Singleton may be coasting on competence in the direction department, but it’s the cast that really assists the film in sinking to the level of its script. Lautner’s trying his hardest, at least I think he is, and Isaacs and Bello are fine in their brief moments on screen. It’s Molina who seems inert, Nyqvist who seems distracted, and Weaver who has a curiously flat affect. Or maybe they think they’re in a comedy? Abduction may have been intended to be a ludicrous teenybopper distraction and a potential star-maker, but in reality it’s just a nice paycheck for a bunch of folks who deserve better. Watching it is painless and useless in the same proportions.