PRISONERS took no prisoners, and paid the price

Back in September 2013, a challenging drama called Prisoners.  It was fairly well-reviewed and had reasonable commercial success, but by the time of the award season it had been swamped by such inferior material as American Hustle.  The only Academy nomination it received (and thoroughly deserved) was for Roger Deakins's cinematography, and although Aaron Guzikowski's sceenplay, written on spec, won a number of several script competitions, including The Black List and The Blue Cat, it got very little attention when prizes were dispensed for actual films.

What happened?

Before going any further, I need to say that you should see this film.  It is too visually and morally complex to adequately describe or summarize in a blog post like this, and it will repay your time.  Put it in your queue or get it from your library or borrow it from a friend, clear out an evening and watch this, preferably not alone.  And if you haven't seen director Denis Villeneuve's previous film, Incendies, go back and see that as well.  My guess is that like me, you will try and see all of Mr. Villeneuve's films in future.

Back to my question.  First, Prisoners is a godawful title.  Yes, it makes sense in a philosophical metaphorical way AFTER you've seen the film and had some time to think about it.  But most people don't want to see a movie about prisoners, unless they're American GIs breaking out of WWII prisoner camps.  Moreover, it is a confusing description in a literal level.  I am not going to exhibit hubris sufficient to propose alternate titles, but I know this one is absolutely terrible and had to have contributed to the general audience indifference.

Second, the film was marketed as a thriller.  In fact, it begins by employing thriller tropes, but by 45 minutes in, it is clear we are in deeper waters than the typical Liam Neeson movie.  (Admittedly there is a thriller-style twist ending, and the only hint I will give you is to pay close attention to the casting.)

Overall, Prisoners feels more like a neo-noir than a thriller, especially in its look, as in this clip.


More significantly, Prisoners shares the noir ethos that no one is in sole possession of the moral high ground, nor is any villain made of pure villainy; stylized as it is, noir recognizes that life is more mixed than melodrama would have it.

There are certainly allegorical or at least metaphorical aspects of the story, in that Jackman's character, a good guy who captures a boy-man suspected of kidnapping his daughter and brutally tortures him, is reminiscent of the United States succumbing to fear and cowardice and engaging in torture to combat terrorism.  But the allegory doesn't hold for long, because the film has more subtle and complex moral fish to fry.  (And that is a terrible use of idiom there.)

Next, as far as awards and nominations go, Prisoners does not end on a triumphal note (though the ending is not as ambiguous as a lot of obtuse people want to think), and the good guys and bad guys are all muddled up morally.  Moreover, the stellar cast is truly used as an ensemble, which makes handing out award nominations much harder.  (The National Board of Review actually nominated the cast AS an ensemble.)  If there is someone to be singled out, it has to be Jake Gyllenhall, with the best work of his I have seen yet.  Here's a little bit.



Prisoners is not a film that calls for a sequel, but I would like to see Gyllenhall play this character again.

If you're still on the fence about the rewards of seeing this film, I urge you in the strongest terms to click this link and look at this superb and detailed analysis, written by cinematographer Matthew Scott, of the look of the film and the depth of its craft.  As an example, here is the still I put at the top of this post, as de-constructed by Mr. Scott.

Roots of evil

You'll shoot your sister's eye out,  kid.

Finally, someone has made a good film inspired by Columbine, although We Need To Talk About Kevin (2012) is not about Columbine, nor, for that matter is Beautiful Boy (2010). Still, neither film would have been made but for that atrocity.  And the existence of both films illuminates the difference between solid professional craftsmanship and genuine art.

The central question of any such "Bad Seed" movie is whether evil proceeds from the parent, even at a distant, or whether it springs forth spontaneously in a given generation, leaving the parents and other ancestors scratching their heads, attributing evil to random, mutation, the malevolence of a fallen angel or perhaps God's own perversity.

Beautiful Boy, as I would probably do myself, throws its hands in the air and humbly confesses that it has no answers on the subject.  Instead, it is the portrait of a marriage under severe stress.  At the beginning of the film, the stress fractures are already evident, buttoned-up husband Michael Sheen has already asked wife Maria Bello for a divorce and the news that the couple's son has perpetrated a Virginia Tech-type attack seems likely to be fatal to the relationship.  Perversely, they are brought together by the stresses, especially the shunning and vituperation arriving at their doorstep as though they were collaborators in their son's terrible act.

The film's highlight is an acting dual tour de force when the couple has retreated to the anonymous safety of a motel to avoid the scrutiny and hatred of the mob and they pass through a cathartic variety of contributions, including moments of intimacy just short of those in Blue Valentine, and to similarly devastating effect.

But fine work as it is, the film is ultimately a doughnut, circling around its subject, but leaving a hole where there should be drama, or at very least reflection by the characters.   No attempt is made to show any connection between what the parents may have said or done at any time and their son's shooting spree.  It is perhaps meant to be ironic and telling that the final phone conversation with the son, shown in flashback, is mundane, if a bit distant, but in any event contains no foreshadowing of horror to come.  But it raises the question of why the filmmakers designed a story with a central impetus they are unwilling to examine anyway.  To say, "nobody knows where evil comes from" is a cop-out.  If that is so, why make a film about it?

The makers of We Have To Talk About Kevin had no such shyness, and the world was presumably forewarned, as the film is based on a widely-praised novel.  Irony is still on display, as the one thing nobody ever does is talk about Kevin, who really should have been talked about.  He is a Bad Seed, different from previous bad seeds in movie only for the plausibility of his evil, given both the story's less melodramatic scale and tone (compared to, say The Bad Seed, The Omen and similar titles) and by the horrific events of the last dozen years or so, which suggest a persistent subterranean collective psychosis among the nation's young.

Kevin is not afraid to stare into the abyss, at least in the person of his mother, played by the fearless, if not reckless, Tilda Swinton, whose character never wanted a child and resents the obligations of motherhood from the start.  The child's apparent psychopathology emerges as both a judgment on and a product of her indifferent child-rearing.  Honestly, when have the movies given us a bad mother who wasn't a Southern Gothic clown, or a straight-ahead Bad Witch?

The truth is that Kevin's evil stems directly from his desire to irritate and punish his mother, and whether that is cause or effect of her bad mothering is not clear.  And so, when he is incarcerated and robbed of power, she can love him, in one of the eeriest denouements in all of Bad Seed Cinema.

Other writers have pointed out Kevin's most striking cinematic accomplishment, the recasting of the novel's epistolary narrative structure (presumably by writer-director Lynne Ramsay) into a mosaic of flash-forward-and-backs into what is obviously a very carefully designed warp and woof of spiritual horror.  Color, especially red, is used to make connections between distant times and places.  (These places include a very confusing opening montage--I learned by reading online that what is being depicted is a tomato festival that is a cross between the running of the bull sin Pamplona and the Indian festival of Holi, when color is thrown at any and all persons.  It does show Kevin's future mother as a free spirit, but in my case, I had to seek outside help to decipher that sequence, which is not a good thing.)  The resulting cacophony of visual information is perhaps a better, deeper insight into Kevin's mother's mind than the novel's letters may have been -- the memory of images, after all, are pre-conscious, lacking the deliberation of a composed letter.

And Swinton seems to be redefining film acting over and over again.  It seems no accident that she resembles Buster Keaton, who inhabited film more than he appeared in it.  the same might be said for Swinton, who seems to work without self-awareness or self-consciousness, indifferent as to whether or not her character is sympathetic.  Like Keaton, the blanker she is, the better she is.  Wise is the filmmaker who eschews the condescending clarity of melodrama and leaves space for her audience.  OK, Ms. Ramsay, you go on the list.  I'm down for wherever you want to take me.

Still, the greatest Bad Seed film may still, however, be World's Greatest Dad, which truly comes to grips with the awfulness and spiritual void of parenting a truly terrible person and which, black comedy though it be, explores the lengths to which such a parent will go to seek solace for the consequences of their own unintended and perhaps even nonexistent crimes as parents.