Thursday, October 10, 2013

Prisoners (2013)


Prisoners is a thriller of the variety that wants you to contemplate how you would react if put in place of the film’s characters. It does not rely on flashy, fast-paced editing to keep things moving, actually avoiding such gimmicks to make sure that the audience is forced to take in every dread-filled moment it delivers. Denis Villeneuve is a Canadian director, whose Incendies a couple years ago was met with international acclaim. With Prisoners, he has crossed over to English-language expectations, is working with a large, grade-A cast and is still holding on to his deliberately slow-moving style. This is a bold move on his part, because tradition tells us that, even though slow and steady may win the race as far as critical consensus is concerned, movies must be quick, jumpy and clear-cut to be successful. In theory, today’s ADD filmgoers should not have the patience to endure all two and a half hours of Prisoners, which is why I’m so pleasantly surprised by its enormous success. It would be nice to know whether people are flocking to it because of what it is or because of what they thought it would be.

The story of the film concerns two families, each comprised of a father, mother, older child and younger child. One night, during a gathering between the two families, both of the younger children completely disappear. The police are brought in and one of the fathers gets into repeated trouble for getting in the way of the investigation. He has become completely convinced for various reasons that a simple-minded man-child has kidnapped his daughter and that the police are deliberately ignoring this fact. Therefore, as the days go on and neither child makes a reappearance, the father takes matters into his own hands.

The screenplay here was written by Aaron Guzikowski and, though I don’t really want to throw anybody under the bus, any failures on the part of the film can be attributed to its writing. This is a difficult film to swallow, not because it isn’t well-made or even because it’s too harsh on the viewer, but because it’s perhaps a little too blunt for its own good. The story is the sort of thing more straight-forward horror movies are made of, in that the viewer can feel the terror of a missing child mixed with the possibility of murder or, worse still, molestation.

It also follows similar guidelines usually used by mystery movies: following the detective around, gathering clues and suspicions, and letting the viewer try to figure out the hidden antagonist before the big, final revelation. My problem with Prisoners is that, despite these elements, the story never reaches the full potential of either format. It becomes almost immediately distracted by its ideas that everyone is evil and not just the criminals, and proceeds to beat us over the head with this idea for most of the runtime, leaving the mystery to brief interludes of afterthought.

That’s another problem, too. Literally every character in the film turns out to be insane to some degree, to the point that the whole production becomes a simple series of crazy people doing crazy things because they’re crazy. Since there is very little plot as far as things happening for a great narrative purpose goes, watching the movie feels a bit like reading those less interesting news stories where people do bad things and that’s the end of it. We already know people are naturally bad and we sense the film’s conclusion long before it arrives, so since the movie offers little else than these insights, it becomes quickly tiresome.

What there is to enjoy in the film is the admirably steady direction, Roger Deakins’ hypnotic photography and the expectedly flawless performances from all the well-established leads. I was most impressed by Jake Gyllenhaal as the detective who knows how to do his job (He’s solved every one of his past cases.), but who can’t seem to get the understanding and cooperation he needs from either his superiors or the people he’s helping. Watch Gyllenhaal in the role and you see the embodiment of patience, frustration and exhaustion. Most actors would attempt to juggle these emotions, but Gyllenhaal is all of them at once and as such, never falters (Notice the little, infrequent spasms his eyelids have. It made me wonder if the character ever sleeps. It was a convincing touch.).

Another great, though small performance is given by Viola Davis, that rising powerhouse of an actress whose brief appearance provides the best moment in the film, the only moment that actually managed to surprise me. I was the least impressed by star Hugh Jackman who never quite seems real to me in any of his performances. I guess his experience as a stage actor betrays him, because he is always making me wish he’d tone it down a bit. I understand that actors have to go to the places their characters take them, but did Jackman really need to go as far as he did here? All I can say is that he truthfully annoyed me. Also, I suppose I should mention Paul Dano and Melissa Leo, who do what they can with their characters, which were too ridiculous to salvage.

All in all, Prisoners is far from a bad movie, but is altogether too frustrating to be a good one. I don’t have a problem with movies being frustrating, assuming that some sort of satisfaction can be had on either a cinematic or aesthetic level. For me, there was plenty to appreciate in the acting and pacing, but the final product just wasn’t satisfying. I don’t really know if a truly good movie could have been made from the same material. I guess this is as good as it could be.

7/10

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