Young buck auteur Richard Kelly has, since "Donnie Darko," pined to be the Hitchcock of metaphysical sci-fi thrillers (a subgenre over which he holds dominion), which has led to a cult following in some circles, and migraine headaches in others. While not a terrible filmmaker by any stretch, Kelly--in a vein similar to Terry Gilliam--rarely knows when to apply the brakes to his craft. "The Box," an ambitious effort backed by a major studio, fascinates and alienates in near-equal proportion. The director's stream-of-consciousness approach to imagery is seldom less than dazzling--there's nary a shot in "The Box" that isn't gorgeous, fake CG and all; on a purely superficial level, this is arguably the director's most visually arresting effort to date. As based on the short story 'Button, Button' by Richard Matheson, "The Box" is an egregious case of a director mismatched to his material (and Kelly is responsible for the adaptation, as well). While I have not read the story, I have enough familiarity with Matheson's work to know he deals in peeling the layers of sanity and safety away from seemingly banal topics, until fear and uncertainty are the only emotions that remain; matched with Kelly's bombastic narrative complications (NASA, conspiracy theories, trans-dimensional swimming pools...eh), this tale of a husband (James Marsden) and wife (a game--yet wasted--Cameron Diaz) who inherit the titular device that causes a murder only scrapes the surface of being a reflection on morality and sacrifice. A filmmaker like David Lynch (who, despite his excesses, knows a thing or two about subtlety and ambiguity) could have made a sparse, claustrophobic thriller around this theme, but Kelly brings things to a crashing halt in the last 30 minutes, with ridiculous dialog (Marsden's speech about the afterlife; Diaz's confession to Frank Langella's disfigured messenger) that confuses pathos with pretension, developments ripped from a bad '50s B-movie (that bell-ringing Santa), and a desperate attempt (yeah, just like "Donnie Darko") to clarify all the enigmas set forth prior. When is this guy going to just trust the material to carry itself without holding the audience's hand through answers he can't even adequately explain? A little ambiguity goes a long way, and could have transformed "The Box" into a great thriller instead of a frustratingly wasteful night at the movies.
Review of The Box
