I didn't remember what any of the buzz had been about 2013's Carrie, Kimberly Peirce's remake of Brian DePalma's 1976 adaptation of the Stephen King novel, at the time it was released. I guess there wouldn't have been a lot of disappointment here either, because the fact that I don't remember anyone saying anything good about it means that it probably wasn't good.
Instead of either disappointed or being not disappointed based only on low expectations, I spent the majority of the time watching this on Thursday night wondering if it would be worth giving five stars.
"That's crazy," you say.
You're probably right, and I didn't end up going five stars, in part because some parts of the movie's climax lost me a little bit.
But I argue that giving a movie a five-star rating doesn't always mean "It's as good as Citizen Kane." Sometimes it just means "It is the very best version of itself it could possibly be." And Carrie is that.
As is often the case with a movie you really like, it's difficult to figure out where to start praising it. But let's just start at the top with the actress chosen for the title role.
I've gone on a bit of a rollercoaster with Chloe Grace Moretz. Her introduction to us with the duo of Kick-Ass and Let Me In -- though, to be clear, she already had 25 credits before that year of 2010 -- carried with it (no pun intended) the immense promise of a preternaturally gifted young actress. Both of those roles, by the way, paved the way for her to appear in the sort of mature subject matter of Carrie, playing the sort of freak she plays here. But somewhere in the mid-teens (and I guess her mid-teens), I lost some steam on the actress, and have started to think of myself as not really liking her. That feeling has been with me for the better part of ten years. It's not that she can't act anymore, but I think it's some combination of unworthiness of the roles she's gotten and something undefinable about her that bothers me. (I have a pet theory that she's added too much collagen to her lips, but I don't actually know if that's really it, or if she's even done that.)
Well, I think I'm back on board now. She's perfectly cast as Carrie. And it's interesting to watch this movie in the wake of just having seen She's All That for the first time while I was in Europe. This is a similar sort of makeover story, where a handsome popular guy enters into a relationship of sorts with an "ugly" girl as a result of a wager of sorts, though in both cases with essentially benevolent intentions. The thing everybody knows about She's All That is that the removal of Rachel Leigh Cook's glasses is a flimsy reason to transform her from an "ugly" girl to a beautiful potential prom queen, since the actress herself is quite pretty. Moretz is also quite pretty, but her initial incarnation as the previously home-schooled and otherwise sheltered Carrie White is far more believable as a "before" photo for someone with the potential to be transformed. Her eyes have an alien look of fear and withdrawal, one that makes us believe she's really a wallflower with a crazy religious mother who has prevented her from assimilating with her classmates in any meaningful way. This is accentuated in a scene near the beginning where all the girls are playing volleyball in a swimming pool, and though they're all wearing swim caps, Carrie's makes her look especially alien.
I kept watching Moretz for signs of her failing in any given moment, because I'd spent the last decade feeling dubious about her talents. I never detected even a moment of artificiality, and I found very specific choices to be profound. I don't know why this stood out to me, but there's a moment she's standing up to her mother -- more on her in a minute -- where she just finishes by saying, in a matter-of-fact and non-threatening way, "And I just don't want to talk about it anymore." You believe that Carrie White is a real teenager with real complexity to how she processes stimuli, not a demon -- or witch, in the parlance of her mother -- just waiting to come out and fuck shit up. But when that time comes, she's equal to that task as well, having already played both a miniature vampire and a ten-year-old assassin/would-be superhero.
As good as Moretz is at replicating the terminal shyness of Sissy Spacek from the original, Julianne Moore may be even better at capturing Piper Laurie's insanity and psychopathy. What really drew me in to Carrie was the opening scene of Margaret White giving birth. We can't at first tell that this is what's happening, so it just appears that this woman is writhing around in bed, releasing shrieks of agony that correspond to the exact torment of her soul. As she always does, Moore really commits here. At the exact moment this performance reaches its crescendo, Moore dials it down to near utter stillness -- so still, in fact, that for a moment we think she might have died, except that we know she's in the whole movie. For maybe ten seconds she has this fixed, dead stare at the ceiling. Then she looks down between her legs to see a child emerged. When she goes to get a particularly menacing pair of scissors from her bedside table, we don't know if it's to cut the umbilical cord or to extinguish the new life -- and in fact it was the latter, though she stops herself just in time. She believes this baby is the product of sin, and therefore, to return it to God is the best action possible. She doesn't, or else we wouldn't have a movie.
Anyway, her performance carries on like this (again, no pun intended). It's big in certain points but that's not mostly what makes it great. The character is most terrifying when she assumes this dead-eyed look, especially because it is often accompanied by things like robotically banging her head against a wall.
I should pause here to acknowledge the use of that word "terrifying." Because some amount of the impact of horror is due to not knowing what will happen, we would expect not to be as scared by movies that are remakes of other movies we've already seen. That's one reason I wasn't expecting to be very scared in this month of horror remakes. The reason I stated I wouldn't be scared is that I'd heard many of the movies I'm planning to see were bad. But the more compelling reason is that by already knowing what will happen, it limits the number of avenues my mind can have for imagining what will happen next, and being scared by those potential outcomes.
During Carrie, though, I felt that tingle of fear on multiple occasions. I only saw the original for the first time in 2017 (after reading the book back in the 1980s), but the eight years since then have been enough for me not to remember everything about what happens, so I'm glad to say I felt myself scared by the details within an overall story arc that I remembered.
I feel like my praise of Carrie is starting to carry on (there I go again) longer than I intended, so I'll try to speed things up a bit here.
Aside from these two great performances, you also get great work from Judy Greer as the gym teacher, a complicated character who is clearly in Carrie's corner but also resorts to unorthodox behavior like slapping the girl during her hysterics in the shower tampon scene. That's only one of two actions she takes in this movie that cause her to be reported to the befuddled principal, another well drawn character in only a few scenes, which I felt was a good way Carrie had been updated to our more sensitive modern era. Then I also want to call out the compassionate portrayals of Gabriella Wilde and Ansel Elgort as the repentant bully Sue and her always-on-the-right-side popular boyfriend Tommy.
One of the things I liked about this movie was the complex portrayals of the bullies. Not only is there Sue going a lot farther than a character in her position would to atone for the scene where they pelt Carrie with tampons, sacrificing her own prom attendance, but even the main bully, Chris (Portia Doubleday), is a lot more like an accidental bully than someone who tortures Carrie for sport. Her failing is not that she's sadistic by nature but that she has too little consideration for the feelings of others, and this escalates into greater sadism when she starts to suffer the consequences of her actions and therefore begins to truly blame and hate Carrie. Overall I just got a good sense of nuance from how these characters are drawn.
For that we may be able to thank writers Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, but I think it's time to start talking about the director now. You may recognize Kimberly Peirce as the director of the acclaimed film Boys Don't Cry in 1999. You know, the Brandon Teena story, which won Hilary Swank her first Oscar. I don't remember that film having any specific technical merits, but at every stage of Carrie I was thinking about a thoughtful camera placement or other choice that just heightened the experience of the story. It's a shame that this movie was not a hit, because although Peirce has worked in television consistently since Carrie, she has yet to make another feature. Granted, Carrie was only her third feature after 2008's Stop-Loss, so it took her nine years to make another even after Boys Don't Cry was a hit. Maybe that means the current 12-year layoff is not a permanent one either.
Lastly I wanted to make mention of both the soundtrack and the score. Marco Beltrami really brings a sinister note to the score, and I Shazamed exactly four songs while watching the movie -- which is pretty crazy for a film that's 12 years old.
I think I've made my point that Carrie is well worth seeing, if you've never seen it. In fact, it's done something that I don't expect another film this month will do: It's gotten a higher star rating from me on Letterboxd than the original version of the film.
If my next horror remake this month can come within even a star on the lower end of the original movie, I'll count myself lucky.
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