Irregular Exorcise: THE POSSESSION

What’s stuck in the public imagination from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, still one of the great horror films, is all the paranormal effects work: the spinning head, the growling voice, the twisted limbs, the levitating bedroom furniture. So it’s no surprise really that a great many exorcist movies that have followed in the decades since have focused on delivering a clattering cacophony of horror at the expense of the whole experience, even though that's not exactly entirely what made that film so effective. Director Ole Bornedal’s creepy possessed-little-girl movie aptly named The Possession has a screenplay from Juliet Snowden and Stiles White (they of Knowing) that has learned all the right lessons from The Exorcist by placing its emphasis on the all-too-human characters who are just living a normal life before strange events start to work their way into the fabric of everyday life.

At the film’s start we meet an ordinary family. The father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a college basketball coach, arrives to pick up his two daughters for his night with them. The older daughter (Madison Davenport) is a drama queen in her early teens. The younger daughter (Natasha Calis) is an energetic vegetarian animal-lover. He and their mother (Kyra Sedgwick) have been divorced three months now and he’s finally moving into a new house. This has understandably put some strain into these young girls’ lives. Their mother has been dating a dentist. Their father is fielding calls from an out-of-state university that wants to encourage him to coach a bigger team at a more prestigious school. Times are tough, but life moves on. These characters are convincingly drawn and well acted, parents and kids alike. If it weren’t destined to become a horror film, this could easily have become a nice, tender little family drama.

But horror it is. The younger daughter picks up a strange wooden box at a yard sale and convinces her father to let her buy it. Now, this box has been seen in the opening scene causing a frail old woman’s violently implausible collapse that saw her flung across the room, so we know nothing good will come of this. Sure enough, the daughter starts misbehaving. First, she’s merely mumbling to herself, but as time goes on, she starts to cultivate a cold, hollow stare and an eerily slippery memory. At the breakfast table one day she stabs at her father with a fork. Later, she’ll be found sitting on her bed, cradling the box, covered in moths. In both cases, she claims to have no memory of the incident. Young Calis gives one of those perfectly creepy child performances that the horror genre provides from time to time, able to shift effortlessly from scary monster to adorable little girl in the span of half a second.

As the creepiness escalates in standard horror movie ways – mysterious movements, dark shapes, flickering lights, and some skin-crawling body horror effects – the divorced parents are pushed further apart. The mother doesn’t want to believe that her sweet little girl is being taken over by some force emanating from the box, even if that’s not exactly what anyone is articulating. The father, on the other hand, takes this box to local experts who inform him about the folklore surrounding the box. Don’t open it, he’s told. It’s too late for that. Again, creepy stuff, but what makes this all work so well is the focus on character. If it were forced to rely simply on the well-crafted spookiness, the movie would fall a little flat. The complications and shading that come from good actors giving good performances help make the film far more frightening than it otherwise would be.

In a way, it’s a film about the anxieties of parenthood. Morgan’s character seems like a good dad, funny, patient, and tough when he needs to be. The fear that The Possession taps into is that of psychic-spiritual damage to a child, not through any wrongdoing on the part of the parents, but from forces beyond parental control. This young girl is just south of adolescence, on the cusp of uncontrollable changes. During this time her parents won’t always be able to figure out what’s wrong with her, what influences she’s exposed herself to. That’s natural, but the paranormal circumstances reveal this anxiety prematurely to both the adults and the child herself. Look at the scene where the little girl looks in the mirror and sees something in the back of her throat, a great horror jolt and a key piece of thematic detail. That’s what’s scary here beyond the impressive effects and creepy atmospherics that increasingly take over the film until it concludes in a standard, but nonetheless effective, sequence that finds a likable Hasidic rabbi (one played by the musician Matisyahu, no less) performing an impromptu ceremony in a last-ditch effort to set things right. The box closes the girl off, drives her parents away, and takes control of her. Her family is helpless, confused, frightened and because the movie has taken its time to create characters worth caring about, it’s all the scarier. 

Blood, Sweat, and Tears: LAWLESS

John Hillcoat’s Lawless has all the right ingredients to become a great movie, but lacks the focus to truly capitalize on these assets. His earlier films, muddy, blood-soaked outback western The Proposition and bombed-out, hardscrabble, post-apocalyptic The Road, were films so downbeat, atmospheric and tangibly grim that by the time the end credits rolled I felt like I had dirt crunching under my fingernails. Lawless, a promising based-on-a-true-story drama about three small-town, deep-South, bootlegging brothers in the age of Prohibition, is well cast, well photographed and contemplatively paced. By the end, though, it’s only conjured up a level of surface grime and narrative muddiness. It’s a nice try, but all this craftsmanship has gone into a finished product that’s mostly inert.

The moonshine-cooking brothers at the center of the film are a tough, monosyllabic World War I veteran (Tom Hardy), a brutish, bearded alcoholic (Jason Clarke), and a squirrely, dopey hothead (Shia LaBeouf). They run their operation with the full cooperation of the local sheriff, but one day, in swoops a preening big-city representative of the law (Guy Pearce, sans eyebrows). It’s a setup not unlike a Western, with charismatic guys strutting around, hands on their hips, fingers brushing just above heavy holsters. There are pretty women – a recent arrival who works the bar (Jessica Chastain) and the preacher’s shy daughter (Mia Wasikowska) – a local cripple boy who helps out the criminals (Dane DeHaan), and a stately, blunt crooked official (Gary Oldman). Then, here comes the stranger who threatens the small town’s lawless, but weirdly stable, state.

The script by Nick Cave (a musician who also wrote the fiddle-and-banjo folk-music score) is full of vague, evocative mumbling and perplexing character relationships that are at once sharply simple and complex, given to halting development. The plot moves forward in long, languorous periods of stillness and sporadic rise-to-modest-riches montage interrupted only by gory splashes of violence. The film is effectively one of introductions and set-ups that sometimes wind their long, slow way to some sort of resolution. It’s sporadically effective, in short bursts of righteous anger, in which bloodied louts reappear in startling moments of retribution, and scenes in which flawed antiheroes and worse villains clash in a warped cops-and-criminals routine. At best, it’s a film that’s like a backwoods Boardwalk Empire.

But for all the picturesque dusty roads, lush forest landscapes, period detail, and vividly inarticulate performances, the film remains static and unfocused. It’s hard to watch a film introduce such formidable talents as Mia Wasikowska and Gary Oldman in separate striking scenes – the former in an impeccably sound-designed church service, and the latter in a tommy-gun assault down the middle of Main Street – and then thoroughly squander their characters. They fade into the background. Wasikowska lives out an undernourished romantic subplot while Oldman just flat out disappears after two scenes or so. But that’s just indicative of the film’s unfocused approach to storytelling that doggedly refuses to allow clarity into the characterizations. Take Chastain, for instance, who simply floats through the margins and, despite experience some horrific (off-screen) abuse, exists only so that Tom Hardy can have someone other than his brothers to grunt at.

To some extent, I was willing to follow the aimless nature of the film simply because Hillcoat is such a strong director. There is considerable craftsmanship here, striking images, impressive sequences, stunning shots. What’s lacking, ultimately, is a reason to care. By the time the film dead ends in a climactic confrontation, I found myself realizing that I still knew very little about these characters, even as I bristled at the uncomfortable, ill-fitting ugliness that warps the whole thing into a pat clash between good and evil, with the scrappy small town criminals fighting back against a slimy federal influence. It’s a strange note to end on, but no stranger than the wistful epilogue that follows. This is a film that’s well made on every technical level, but deeply confused about what it’s about. It’s a film about rough, violent entrepreneurs and slick, violent lawmen and yet remains uncommitted as to what it wants to say about that, if anything at all.

The Chase: PREMIUM RUSH

As a screenwriter, David Koepp is among the most successful Hollywood has. He’s had a hand in writing an Indiana Jones, two Jurassic Parks, a Spider-man, a Men in Black, a Mission: Impossible, and several original screenplays for some of the most distinctive directors of the past twenty years including Brian De Palma, Robert Zemeckis, and David Fincher. That’s an impressive resume of popcorn filmmaking, but where he’s somewhat-secretly come into his own is as a writer-director. He’s become a genre journeyman filmmaker par excellence. With a clean, consistently professional style and a confident ease with actors, he’s created films like the creepy Stephen King adaptation Secret Window and the charming, gently moving, comic paranormal romance Ghost Town. His newest film is Premium Rush, co-written with his occasional writing partner John Kamps. It’s a light, sunny, zippy chase movie that starts in motion and never lets up, pedaling full speed ahead all the time.

Set in the world of bike messengers in New York City, the film opens with a speed demon named Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) riding as fast as he can down city streets, weaving in and out of traffic, narrowly avoid collisions. In voice over, he extols the virtues of his dangerous customized bike: no breaks, one gear, the pedals always in motion. That’s an apt description of the film as well, for right off the bat his boss (Aasif Mandvi) sends him to pick up an envelope that must be delivered in 90 minutes’ time. Premium Rush. Intercepting this envelope is of supreme importance to a sweaty, nervous, desperate detective (Michael Shannon) who fixes Wilee with a wild-eyed stare and asks if he could take it off his hands. Perplexed by this odd request, a request that’s against company policy anyways, Wilee takes off. The detective takes off after him. The chase is on.

Filmed in smooth, sliding shots crisply edited together, the film is lightening fast, quick and uncomplicated, with a structure that’s a thing of beauty. After some time running forwards, it spins its gears backwards to speedily fill in the story of the envelope –the young woman (Jamie Chung) who needed it sent and why this bad guy needs to get his hands on it – interlocking with the scenes just witnessed with breathless ease before smashing forwards again. Koepp keeps things fast and funny, folding in a rival bike messenger (Sean Kennedy), Wilee’s somewhat exasperated girlfriend (Dania Ramirez), and a tenacious bike cop (Christopher Place) as the envelope crisscrosses Manhattan in a messenger bag, the deadline drawing nearer.

This is a film of great stunt work and charisma from all involved. Joseph Gordon-Levitt keeps the heart of the movie pumping, pedaling constantly through many of his scenes, eager to keep the creep away from the apparently precious contents of the envelope. It’s a great, expressive physical performance that’s convincing in its athletic detail. He’s playing a young guy with an intense job of fast reflexes and reckless skill who gets pulled into action movie shenanigans just because he’s good at what he does. He’s immediately likable and, as the full extent of the plot comes into focus, it’s easy to hope that he gets everything set right and that he remains unharmed. Part of the reason is Gordon-Levitt’s inherent charm, but some of this is the Michael Shannon factor. He’s one of our greatest actors (see Take Shelter if you haven’t yet) and here he’s a fine slimeball in the best hiss-worthy tradition. Instead of playing his crooked cop as a scene-chomping villain or a misunderstood guy in over his head, he’s just a mean brute sloppily covering up his mistakes. That’s even scarier.

The danger in the movie is palpable, with bikes weaving this way and that, swerving around obstacles, in and around cars both moving, barreling through intersections and switching lanes, and parked, with doors unpredictably opening and closing. The end credits have an iPhone-shot behind-the-scenes look at a real on-set bike accident, Gordon-Levitt grinning as he shows off his bloody arm like Jackie Chan once did in credits of his films. Indeed, the choreography of the bikes has something of the grinning skill and speed of a well-executed fight scene, filmed and edited for clarity and speed. It’s especially thrilling to see an action movie so committed to a great gimmick. Refreshingly, there’s only one gunshot in the entire 91-minute running time. The pace is breathless, the thrills relentless. The film turns New York into a citywide obstacle course with all the nervous, propulsive energy that comes with bikes careening about and coming within a hair of crashing at every turn.

It’s a movie of simple human geography – Koepp cuts to a grid of the city streets from time to time – and feats of endurance as convincingly portrayed by stunt drivers and effects artists in a seamless illusion. As a summer packed with the typical bloated blockbusters –several quite good – is winding down, it’s nice to have a late-August break, an after-dinner mint to stave off cinematic indigestion. This is a film that’s mercifully simple and skillful, original yet comfortable, straightforward and speedy. It takes what could be standard genre stuff and livens it up with creativity and adrenaline. It’s a chase picture so go-go-go even the final shot before the cut to the credits is in motion and contains a fun visual trick. Motion picture indeed.

Grumpier Old Men: THE EXPENDABLES 2

Instead of complaining that they just don’t make movies like they used to, Sylvester Stallone has gone ahead and made some like he used to. First came The Expendables, a surprise summer hit a couple years back that brought Stallone and a group of 80’s action stars back onto the big screen right next to a few relatively younger action icons for good measure. That was better than I thought it’d be, often earnestly straightforward, but it turns out that movie was just a feature-length warm up to get these old guys back in fighting shape. Now here’s The Expendables 2, every bit the aggressive, isolationist, simplistic, bloody, blockheaded action movie that its predecessor was, a determined movie that muscles its way through energetic action sequence after energetic action sequence. This time around, it lacks the surprise factor, but it’s tighter, funnier, and more self-aware. The explosions are bigger, the combat is louder, the choreography is more inventive, and the fun manages to outweigh the dumb.

In the fictional world of The Expendables, third-world countries are either saved or enslaved by aging mercenaries. This time a MacGuffin went down with a plane in the backwoods of Russia so Bruce Willis sends Stallone and his crew of Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, and Liam Hemsworth (the youngest of the bunch by twenty years), to retrieve it. Willis even convinces them to take along a woman (Nan Yu), the only character preventing the movie from becoming an all-male action revue. (She spends a lot of her screen time trying not to roll her eyes at these goofballs around her). The group better hurry and find that device so the evil villain Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) doesn’t find it first. So the script by Richard Wenk and Stallone himself is simplicity itself, a point-and-shoot search-and-find kind of movie that’s been done many times over.

What makes this version work is the way it goes all out with action that just goes on and on, finding greasy, bloody, brute-force slapstick in fun choreography and returns to the well of the quipping action one-liner so often it’s endearing. When the movie opens, the bad guys have captured a Chinese billionaire and the gang, grinning ear to ear, rolls over the horizon to the rescue in armored jeeps with messages like “Knock Knock” and “Bad Attitude” painted on the side. That detail made me smile, imagining these guys picking out stencils and laughing to themselves as they decorated their war machines. But anyways, not five minutes go by before Jet Li (in what is basically a cameo) runs out of ammo and beats down his attackers with a frying pan. This is a movie that’s just grabbing at anything near by and throwing it into the mix, but it manages to pull up short of spoofing itself. Somehow the whole thing never quite grows as crazy as it threatens to.

Simon West takes over for Stallone as director on this film, leaving the star more time to focus on enunciation. This sequel, unlike the rough-around-the-edges original, is a slick, professional film with shiny spectacle covered over in surface grit. West’s good with big, empty, R-rated blockbusters. He is, after all, the director of Con Air. He knows how to juggle multiple distinctive talents, giving them each fun little moments to do what they do best. That’s helpful since it’s hard to keep track of who the characters are. They’re guys with names like Lee, Gunner, Church, Troll, and Trench, but that hardly matters. They’re just generic tough guys gruffly bonding over combat exercises. What’s memorable about the characters are the personas behind them. By the end of the picture, Arnold Schwarzenegger has put in an appearance, Chuck Norris has walked through just long enough to tell a lame Chuck Norris joke, and dozens upon dozens of faceless Bad Guys are dead. There’s so much self-referential winking – “I’ll be back!” Willis yells, to which Schwarzenegger responds “Yippee-ki-yay.” – and machine gun rat-a-tat-tatting that it at times grows monotonous.

Still, I must say I enjoyed it. The action is well done, even suspenseful at times. When, for instance, one of Statham’s fistfights drifts closer and closer to a whirring helicopter blade, I was kind of worried for him. But the best part of it all is that there’s a sense that everyone involved was completely happy to be working on this big, dumb action movie. The picture is covered in oldies on the soundtrack, when it’s not filled with gunfire or explosions or mumbling, creating a party atmosphere. They’re having fun with this material, thin as it is, and that shines through. The best example is Jean-Claude Van Damme, who is hamming it up, having a great time as the villain, strutting around in a black trenchcoat, speaking heavily-accented, vaguely threatening nonsense, and glowering threateningly behind a pair of sunglasses that he delicately folds up and places on a table before his final fight scene in the movie. If you had told me even yesterday that this would be one of the most likable performances of the year, I might have doubted you. Oh, sure, there are lots of better performances this year, but few so plainly, appealingly, enjoyable. I knew I should theoretically want to see his character defeated, but more than a small part of me wanted to see him live to fight another day. 

All the while, the movie rockets forward with an unstoppable shoot-‘em-up energy. It’s the kind of movie where someone can kick a knife into a man’s chest and it’s not only goofy and intense in the same moment, it’s actually important to the story. (Well, sort of.) The whole thing’s so simple and eager to be an audience-pleaser that it mostly is. When it’s not bogged down in some of the dullest exposition you’re likely to hear, the movie is fast, explosive, and good enough. When it’s in motion, there’s fun to be had. The movie starts well and ends well with energetic set pieces and by the time it's finishing starting, it's time to start finishing.

He Sees Dead People: PARANORMAN

The creative people at Laika, the stop-motion animation company that first brought us Henry “Nightmare Before Christmas” Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, are back with a first-rate family-friendly horror movie called ParaNorman. It’s the story of Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), an 11-year-old boy who can see ghosts and though it’s scary, it’s not too scary. The film may have more in common stylistically with Poltergeist and Halloween than Scooby Doo, but its heart is all R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps books and Gil Kenan’s underappreciated Monster House, yet another horror movie for kids. ParaNorman is the safe, fun kind of creepy scary that wraps up the danger and suspense in heaping helpings of humor, slapstick, and life lessons.  I’ll bet brave and precocious kids will happily, if maybe a bit uneasily, gobble it up, mostly because I know I would’ve done so when I was 11-years-old, as I did now.

Written and co-directed by debut filmmaker Chris Butler (his co-director is animation veteran Sam Fell, who previously helmed Aardman’s Flushed Away and Universal’s Tale of Despereaux) the film opens with Norman having a good chat with his grandmother (Elaine Stritch) who just happens to be dead. In fact, most of his social interaction happens with these floating ghosts who inhabit this small, sleepy Massachusetts town. Of course, no one believes him. The poor kid is surrounded by people who just don’t understand: his parents (Leslie Mann and Jeff Garlin), his older cheerleader sister (Anna Kendrick), and the school bully (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). He’s a loner who only has a semi-clueless chubby kid (Tucker Albrizzi) to talk to, even though they’ve only just met.

The town’s getting ready to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the town’s claim to fame: the Puritans’ hanging of a girl they declared a witch who, before she died, is said to have cursed the judge and jury to walk the earth as zombies. But, that hasn’t happened in all this time, so the town has grabbed onto the historical anecdote and made it their main reason for existence. On the eve of this anniversary, as the school kids prepare to put on a reenactment – complete with their children’s choir rendition of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” – the town’s resident crazy guy (John Goodman) runs up to Norman and urges him to use his powers of communicating with the dead to stop the witch’s ghost (Jodelle Ferland) from returning to exact revenge by activating her curse.

Wouldn’t you know it? That’s exactly what happens and now it’s up to Norman to avoid the zombies shuffling through town, find a way to break the witch’s curse and stop it all from tearing the town apart. It might be too late. The zombies – shambling corpses with green skin hanging loosely off of fragile bones – are already causing quite a bit of chaos. Unfortunately, when the night grew dark and stormy and the curse came whirling into action, Norman was stuck with his sister, the bully, the chubby kid, and that kid’s older brother (Casey Affleck). They aren’t exactly much help. At one point Norman grumbles that if he’d known what breaking the curse entailed, he’d have “gotten stuck with a different group of people who hate me.”

What keeps the potential intensity of it all manageable is the way Butler, Fell and their crew of technicians keep the nice handcrafted feeling – the textures of the sets and figures are so intricate, vivid and tactile – animating the macabre dollhouse aesthetic while heading off into two pleasantly surprising parallel avenues of attack. Firstly, the film is proudly funny, with all manner of coy references, chipper dialogue, and sight gags jumping right along, puncturing scenes before they get overwhelmingly scary and sliding instead into pleasantly creepy, gorgeously animated, territory. The zombies themselves, initially only great jump-scares and slow-moving threats, are used for both their menace and their inherent goofy physical properties, losing limbs that continue to crawl around and staring agape at the strange modern world around them. They’re as confused as they are dangerous. After all, they’re from 1712.

Secondly, the film finds some unexpected depth in its story of a kid bullied because he’s different, eventually drawing some nice parallels with the town’s violent history. I’d never have guessed that ParaNorman would become, even casually and in an unemphatic, and all the more powerful for it, way, a film about how a town’s history informs its present, about how bullying is a sad fact of human nature, about how retrograde fears and mob mentalities never really go away, they just return in newer, modern iterations. By the end, the striking visuals and creepy fun plot add up to some good lessons and sweet, moving emotional resolution.

From the movie’s opening scratchy, faux-retro studio logos that fade into a cheesy zombie movie that is revealed to be what Norman and his ghost grandma are watching on TV, I knew I was in for something special. This is a movie made with great care and attention to detail, bursting in every frame with imagination and creativity. It’s clear that the filmmakers love this genre and love their characters. And that’s contagious. This is a terrific entertainment that hurtles forward with atmosphere and energy, a fun ride to a satisfying destination.

Do Unto Others: COMPLIANCE

You may recall hearing about this story in the news at the time. In 2004 a prank caller rang up a fast food restaurant and, claiming to be a cop, had the manager bring an employee, a young woman, into the office and hold her there. The caller led the manager through all kinds of degrading actions, including a strip search of this innocent employee, before the deception crumbled. That’s true. Those are the basic facts. Writer-director Craig Zobel’s Compliance is a tough, harrowing film that expertly recounts these events in terrifyingly convincing ordinary detail. The film starts with big white letters filling the screen informing the audience of the story’s veracity. Even so, it’s hard to believe, not because the events within are so implausible, but because you don’t want to believe.

This is undoubtedly one of the most harrowing films of the year, a constant uncomfortable escalation of tension and dread that plays like a tightening vise. What makes it so intense is how Zobel easily draws us into the realism of the situation. The production design feels so specifically worn-down and ordinary. The greasy yellow uniforms of the employees, the weathered signage littering the kitchen and halls, and the slimy tiles of the backroom ooze with the feeling of commonplace, everyday accoutrements of a minimum-wage customer service job. As the work day begins, the manager (Ann Dowd), a middle-aged woman who struggles to connect with her younger employees, is stressed out by nothing more than looming corporate anger because of an unknown shift worker’s mishandling of the freezer. It’s an ordinary day in an ordinary place.

At the height of the evening rush the phone call comes. The voice on the other end (Pat Healy) introduces himself as Officer Daniels and says that he has a woman in his office complaining that an employee at the restaurant stole money from her purse. The suspect is blonde, he says. “Becky?” replies the manager. “That’s right,” the voice says. It’s a scene of rapidly accumulating unease. The manager’s clearly making a mistake, falling right into his trap that plays out across the screen in much the same way Dorothy is bamboozled by the phony wizard in the sepia tone Kansas of The Wizard of Oz. But the consequences here are far more dangerous.

It’s easy to see how easily the manager falls for it. She’s harried, busy, preoccupied. Once she misses the initial warning signs, once she’s unknowingly taking part in the caller’s deception, it’s harder to back out even as the situation escalates. Becky (Dreama Walker) is brought into the manager’s office and the search begins. First, her purse and phone are taken away and scrutinized at the caller’s request. Then, she turns out her pockets. Then she disrobes. At each escalation, there are hesitations and negotiations between the women and the supposed policeman on the other end of the line. What makes the film so edge-of-the-seat suspenseful is not necessarily that the ending is in doubt – although “how bad will it get?” is certainly an urgent pins-and-needles question – but because the behavior every step of the way is at once believable and inscrutable.

This is a film that has no time for a wide shot. After the film’s opening establishing shots, Zobel and cinematographer Adam Stone hold the camera close. The central horror unfolds in tight medium shots and close-ups, trapping the audience in a position to study the emotions on the actors’ faces. Dowd and Walker have moments where their heads fill the frame and we see doubt, pain, and pleading confusion twitch in their muscles. Zobel observes each and every squirm in ways that faintly recall nothing less than the powerful close-ups of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. This approach to the material wouldn’t work if the performances weren’t so great and precise. Dowd’s painful, and painfully understandable, initial lapse of judgment is bad enough, but the continual creepy descent into powerlessness that Walker goes through, a wringer of humiliations and degradations, is almost physically difficult to watch.

Together, these two actresses navigate these scenes with sharp emotional reflexes. Dowd’s performance grows creepy at times as we watch the growing extent to which she’ll ignore doubt about the situation to penetrate the buzz of regular restaurant duties in her busy mind. But what’s truly terrifying and sorrowful is how completely she allows herself to believe the voice on the phone, even feeling a sense of pride when he congratulates her on all her help. Walker’s performance is just as stunning, a fearlessly emotionally naked performance. Her bright-eyed employee feels so immediately real in her first scenes that by the time she’s held captive by her own boss, it’s no wonder it becomes unbearable to watch. All the while, there’s the buzz of Healy’s voice over the phone. It’s a slippery performance, a work of convincing matter-of-fact sadism, that is spiky and deeply upsetting. Zobel forces the audience to sit uncomfortably with these characters held hostage, played with a sick puppeteer’s skill by nothing more than a thoroughly normal-sounding voice on the other end of the phone. It’s this immediacy that makes the film so powerful an exploration. This is a film that regards the behavior of its characters with precision, refusing to explicitly explain and rarely looking away.

It is an instant legend that many in the audience for the Sundance premiere of Compliance walked out and that a question and answer session afterwards was contentious. I saw the film just a couple of weeks ago in a festival setting and the screening shed nearly a fourth of the audience by the time it was over. This is a film that gets up under the skin with deeply upsetting subject matter, but I don’t think that’s what upsets some so. The visceral discomfort comes not from exploitation of the true story or of the actresses involved, but from the film’s deeply felt empathy with the characters and the situation. That’s not to say Zobel lets any character escape the full implications of their actions, but that he allows the characters to be who they are without cheap demonization. It’s all too easy to sit in a comfortable seat in the dark and scoff at the screen. What’s far more difficult is to watch a terrible situation enacted on the screen and come to think about it seriously in an attempt to arrive at some kind of understanding.

Why did the caller do what he did? We may never know and the film provides no answers. Similarly, there are no easy answers to the behavior of the manager and those she ropes in to help her carry out the caller’s orders, just as it’s not easy to watch an energetic young woman slowly lose power over herself and her situation. But what Zobel provides is a chance to view sensational material from a sober, clinical viewpoint. It’s not easy, but it’s a strong effort, a simple provocation and a work of powerful filmmaking.

Magical Thinking: THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN

It’s not always promising when a movie starts with the central characters sitting down and saying that their story might be hard to believe. That’s what happens in the opening scene of The Odd Life of Timothy Green, when the Greens, a just-south-of-middle-aged couple (Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton), sit down across a conference table from an incredibly patient adoption official (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and begin to tell their tale. We go back about a year to find them reacting understandably sorrowfully to the news that they will be unable to conceive a child. That night, they channel this type of mourning into an activity. They write down dream attributes for their child, place the list in a box, and bury it in the garden behind their picturesque small-town-Americana home. That night, between a magical thunderclap and the rain falling upwards, something emerges from their garden. Not only that, it gets in their house. Needless to say, they’re a little confused when confronted with a muddy little boy (CJ Adams) who calls himself Timothy and has a handful of healthy, green leaves growing out of his ankles.

Back in the framing device, the adoption official doesn’t quite believe them, but since there’s still most of the running time to go, she allows them to continue telling their story. Happy to have the chance, the Greens tell all about their time with this son, a precocious 10-year-old boy who just appeared. Writer-director Peter Hedges specializes in films about families and, though this one’s not as good as his Pieces of April and Dan in Real Life, it’s ultimately a very quiet, very low-key little movie about how a child can change a family dynamic, sometimes for the better. The Greens casually accept Timothy into their lives, introducing him to their family as a “sudden, miraculous” son. The family members, for their part, react to the child in much the same way that they’ve responded to his parents. Garner’s high-strung perfectionist sister (Rosemarie DeWitt) is skeptical, but their loving, elderly Aunt and Uncle (Lois Smith and M. Emmet Walsh) take to him write away. Meanwhile, Edgerton’s distant dad (David Morse) is standoffish and hard to connect with. In these ways, the film is a little allegory about how dealing with children can be a way for people to relive or reject the ways they’ve been treated in the past.

Hedges’s film has all the simple force of a thin storybook of magical thinking. It works on its own off-handedly bizarre terms, but the extent to which it works on you will completely depend on how far you’re willing to suspend your disbelief. I found myself holding the film at arm’s length for a good long while. It’s so intent on pushing emotional buttons. Here’s where the boy goes to visit a sweet old man in the hospital. Here’s where the boy interacts with the stuffy businesswoman (Dianne Wiest), the interesting, slightly older girl (Odeya Rush), the frustrated soccer coach (Common), or the local pencil factory foreman (Ron Livingston). Each scene has a clear thematic or plot point. Each moment of uplift or mysterious, mystical mumbo jumbo is scored to an insistent piano-heavy score that over-underlines the intended emotion. And that kid, he goes around behaving vaguely childlike and slightly alien, bright and quick-witted on the one hand and a total blank slate on the other, while his parents try their hardest to be parents to him. Even though they make mistakes, they really aren’t mistakes because it’ll still be okay in the end. It’s a twinkly-eyed wishful-thinking version of parenting.

By the end, I was surprised that I was more or less okay with all of that. It’s not exactly The Boy with Green Hair or anything, but it’s still pretty hokey. Still, the movie is so straight-faced and earnest about its mildly perplexing fantasy conceit, so insistent in its magical-child-provokes-the-best-out-of-people plotlines even when they dead-end or remain half-formed. By the movie’s final moments, which I won’t spoil here, I was sort of happy with it and glad I saw it. It’s not a total waste of time. This is a harmless, gimmicky movie that has a pretty terrific cast of character actors lending weight to what is a sweet, if difficult to warm up to, mild fantasy. I get that it’s a tough sell. I’m not exactly sold on the whole thing myself and if you’re one to scoff at the very idea of earnestness I’d advise you to stay far away. Is it corny? Are you kidding? It’s off the cob. But for families looking for a fairly gentle matinee with some well-intended lessons about accepting people, standing by your family, telling the truth, and other such things, it might be just the late-summer movie of choice.