Lowering the (Amena)bar

And hence my streak of including director names in the titles of my posts this week continues.

Alejandro Amenabar has presided over some of my favorite movies of the last 20 years, but what's been most impressive is the variety of the Spanish director's output. Working in reverse order, his 2009 film Agora was a thinking person's sword-and-sandal epic that tackled no less than all the complexities of science and religion. It was my fourth favorite film of 2010 (the year it was released in the U.S.), and it's a film I've already seen three times. The Sea Inside, a drama about paralysis, knocked my socks off in 2004 (I didn't see it that year, but that's the year it came out). I didn't like 2001's The Others, a ghost story period piece, all that much when I first saw it, but access to a DVD copy of it compelled me to revisit it, and I kind of loved it the second time -- as discussed in this post. Probably my least favorite film of his is his 1997 debut, Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), but it's still quite a good film, and it holds an especially dear place to me as it inspired Cameron Crowe to remake it as Vanilla Sky, one of my favorite films. (Checking wikipedia, I see that Amenabar had a film in 1996 called Thesis, but I'd never heard of that, so I will stubbornly and inexplicably continue to refer to Open Your Eyes as his debut.)

Well, I guess everyone is eventually due for a little regression.

Or a lot.

For Amenabar, that comes in the form of Regression, which I guess you could call a psychological thriller about satanic cults. So it's yet another distinct area of focus for the director, probably closest genre-wise to The Others -- but really, not very close. Alas, it's also a distinct level of quality, in that it is distinctly bad.

The fact that it was available for 99-cent rental on iTunes such a short time after its nominal theatrical release should have been a dead giveaway. But Amenabar has never steered me wrong, so I decided to invest that buck even though I knew nothing about the movie other than the director and its stars (Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson, each promising in their own right).

But when a director loses it, he really loses it. Though some would argue the decline has been more steady. It's been more than six years since Agora, a film that was terrifically directed by never got much traction with audiences and remains under the radar to this day. Those who didn't like it did have some issues with the direction, as I recall. It's been twice that long since The Sea Inside, which won best foreign language film at the Oscars (and which I was quite certain yielded an Oscar nomination for Javier Bardem until I looked it up and found it not to be so). So I guess for most people, Amenabar hasn't done much since 2004, struggling to get movies made and losing small bits of his ability along the way.

His ability to direct actors seems to have vanished almost entirely. Hawke and Watson have both been good plenty of times, but they are stiff and turgid here. Genre material is somewhat familiar for Hawke, but I tend to think of Watson as a person who makes good choices. Maybe they both saw Agora and liked it as much as I did. But if so, they couldn't bring a lot to help Amenabar's dull and hammy script.

I won't tell you a lot about the story, because I'm not trying to sell you on it (obviously) or even really give it a proper review. It basically involves a girl (Watson) who has been abused by her father and possibly also a cult of satanic worshippers practicing ritual sacrifice. Hawke is the detective who seeks justice and likes to grab people by their lapels. The movie has what I think is supposed to be a surprise turn in the third act, but it's a surprise turn for the boring, and leads to an incredibly unsatisfying payoff that I think the movie thinks is supposed to be profound.

What I'm really here to do today is to mourn the profound dropoff in quality from Amenabar. But instead of just piling on this movie, I'd rather take a look at the factors outside his control that may have led to it. Looking at what seems to have happened (without delving into the particulars that are probably available on the web), Amenabar spent a long time trying to get a very ambitious, expensive pet project -- Agora -- off the ground. When that film was not a hit outside of Spain (where it was one of the highest grossing films of all time and swept the Goyas), it left Amenabar in no position to take another risk. So he was left (I imagine) scraping together funding for something with no ambition or aesthetic distinction of any kind, a weak idea weakened further by the fact that Amenabar's lack of enthusiasm for it oozes from every pore. It's not shot well, it's not acted well, it's not edited well, and it doesn't even look particularly polished. In short, it's an anonymous thriller that any hack could make, and it got essentially the equivalent of a straight-to-video release.

What can you do to help restore Amenabar to his former glory? To raise the (Amena)bar?

For starters, go watch Agora. It's streaming on Netflix now and it stars Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella and (perhaps best of all nowadays) Oscar Isaac. It's a feminist epic that looks fantastic and has nothing less than the debate between science and religion at its core. Maybe its attacks on both Christians and, to a slightly lesser extent, Jews made it a hard sell in a country like the U.S. But these should be selling points for someone who feels skeptical about organized religion, and the grand set design, camerawork and sword-and-sandal trappings should be a selling point for everybody else. I think I might watch it again (for the fourth time) myself in the next few days ... even if only to get the taste of Regression out of my mouth.

And Netflix pays attention to its numbers. If enough of you watch it, perhaps Netflix will get Amenabar's career going again by offering him some kind of deal, a deal where he can get back to doing what he wants.

A deal where he can be great again.

A second chill

This is the fourth in my Second Chances series, which runs every Tuesday. See my Second Chances label on the side for other films I've reconsidered after a second viewing.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The chill is an involuntary physiological reaction we experience while watching a movie, when either the images or the music are particularly eerie or foreboding. It essentially relies on our fear of not knowing what's going to happen, and our imagination that whatever happens will be far worse than we imagine.

It's like the physiological response of laughter, in the sense that it relies on surprise to achieve its greatest power. And, like laughter, it would stand to reason that it's not as effective on the second viewing as it would be on the first, since the element of surprise is no longer present.

Why, then, were those chills sprinting down my spine during my entire second viewing of Alejandro Amenabar's The Others?

It's a good question. I should have remembered that the scary bits in The Others are more what's suggested than what's shown, with one or two notable exceptions. Yet I watched that movie this past Sunday in a state of uncertainty about what disturbing images were about to befall me.

As you've probably guessed by its inclusion in my Second Chances series, The Others didn't really work for me the first time I saw it. At the time it came out in 2001, The Sixth Sense was already two years in the past, and M. Night Shyamalan's influence was evident in every horror/thriller you saw. The (spoilers NOW) idea of people you think are alive actually being dead was not only a Shyamalan-like twist, but it was the same exact concept as in The Sixth Sense, even if the setting was vastly different.

But it wasn't just the big reveal at the end of The Others that bothered me, as I sensed myself not liking it as much as I should before that. I think I was also bothered by the fact that the world of the film felt very small, contained, even claustrophobic, as the action was limited just to the house. Add in the fact that not very much happens in the movie, and you've got a little, claustrophobic movie running around in circles in its own tiny space.

Or so I thought at the time.

During Sunday night's second viewing, my opinion of the film was vastly upgraded. Even if I hadn't known on an intellectual level that I was liking it more, I had to trust my physiological reaction, the aforementioned chills. And even if that was due in part to the shriek of violins in the soundtrack, I can't deny that it had an effect on me, and that I found what I was watching to be quite eerie indeed.

So what changed?

I think I appreciate better now some of Amenabar's intentions. The claustrophobia and the narrative inertia, which I considered to be weaknesses of the film, are both, in fact, strengths. If you are a ghost living in purgatory, you would feel a sense of sameness in everything you do, a sense of repetition due to the fact that you can't make new experiences. And from what we understand of ghosts, they are geographically limited in their travels, which is why Nicole Kidman's character gets lost in a dense fog the one time she tries to leave the house.

I also felt an additional eerieness watching Christopher Eccleston's character returning from World War II. He's dead as well, of course, but the difference is that he knows it. This is why his depression is so great. But he recognizes that his family does not know they're dead, and he can't bring himself to tell them. And the fact that they are dead, that she smothered their children, certainly gives him an even greater emotional burden to carry with him to the next plane of existence.

I argued earlier that the chills you experience while watching a movie should be most effective on first viewing. But a movie like The Others (following in the footsteps of The Sixth Sense) has a special value during a second viewing, because it allows you to see the clues and appreciate how they are used to bring about the twist ending. On my second viewing of The Others, I felt like it was plain as day that Kidman and her children were already dead, but I didn't feel like that detracted from the movie. On the contrary. It allowed me to lose myself in the head space of their dreary world, to see the film as Amenabar's personal vision of purgatory, a beautifully appointed purgatory full of gothic imagery, longing and dread.

Amenabar is quite successful at sustaining tension and fear in this film, making us afraid even of a child's drawing of an old woman, with the number 14 written next to it for the number of times she'd seen that particular "ghost." (I'm actually getting chills just writing these words.) The Others is a brilliant example of that minimalism. However, Amenabar did need to give us something corporeal to fear, even if only to please the studio, and that particular scene is quite effective as well. It's the scene where Kidman sees her daughter drawing on her hands and knees on the floor, only it's not her daughter -- it's the face of an old woman in the child's body. If The Others was hurt at the time for following The Sixth Sense, in my personal estimation, then at least it was ahead of the many films that have depicted scary children who speak in tongues in the decade since then.

Lastly I want to praise the three servants in the mansion, who we discover have been dead for over 50 years. The way they glide across the screen, coming toward a helpless Kidman and family, dark shapes with blank faces, is exquisitely scary. Amenabar got that just right, making us fear them without having to go for some kind of inorganic payoff, where they morph into screaming monsters. Their slack faces alone are scary enough.

Second Chance Verdict, The Others: A chilling nightmare and a unique vision.