Some movies you line up for on opening day (recently, for example: the sequel to a great film like Pirates of the
In the first two categories above – the movies you MUST, or try to see – you can be pretty confident that you’ll enjoy them in some way, hopefully a pretty big way. Thus if a movie is fantastic, it’s what you half-expected, and if it’s just ok…it’s a disappointment. But in the later two categories above, your hopes and expectations are set a whole lot lower, thus if a movie is just ok…that’s to be expected, and if it’s quite good, that’s a great surprise, and if it’s a dud, well that’s NO surprise at all.
“The Wicker Man” fell into the later category above. I wanted to see “The Break Up” with my sweet friend Thanh tonight, but it was not screening anywhere in English! Other options were zero. So we ran with this one. I had zero expectations for “The Wicker Man”. And I wasn’t disappointed. Because those zero expectations were met.
“The Wicker Man” is a decidedly average film. I’ve got a vague notion that it’s a remake of a ‘60’s English film – which I’m sure I’ve never seen, but which I vaguely remember from reading various sources was a fairly spooky, fairly well regarded Hammer-type horror movie, staring Christopher Lee.
This one isn’t spooky, isn’t scary, and in fact isn’t very exciting. There’s a vaguely entertaining mystery, and a fairly entertaining setting, but that’s about it.
This one stars Nicolas Cage as a
Cage is has been great before in action fair (“Face Off”, “Con Air”), comedy (“Raising Arizona”) and drama (“Matchstick Men”), yet here his performance is totally misjudged…a cop with ANY level of skill wouldn’t be acting like he does on this island – ranting and raving against the suspects instead of slowly trying to win them over to solve the mystery. The most baffling thing about Cage’s character though isn’t the intensity of freaked-out emotion he often shows, isn’t the number of flashbacks and hallucinations he suffers, and isn’t even that fact that one night he dives into a strange subterranean pool with only mild evidence that something might be down there. And it isn’t EVEN the fact that – after getting stung by one bee – the allergic man runs not AWAY from the bees but INTO the mass of hives. No, the most baffling thing about this character is that – over the course of several days in the hilly, rugged countryside and farmland of the island, he keeps his collar tightly buttoned and his tie tightly tied. THAT’S actually a bigger mystery than ANYTHING the plot throws our way.
Other perfs in this flick are adequate…I mean, mostly EXTREMELY weird and often vacant and sometimes unsettling – but then again, that may be the point – considering the setting. Cage’s ex-girlfriend – the missing girl’s Mum - is played like a confused drug addict, which was quite annoying until the denouement of the piece, when it made a little more sense. The best acting in the film comes from the veteran, Ellen Burstyn, who – despite her role amounting to little more than an extended cameo - deserves her top billing just below Cage. Burstyn is – for a granny – still beautiful, and very regal and royal in her Earth-Queen-Mother role – giving Cage some exposition and veiled explanation – but standing strong and never apologising for her bizarre little society of nut-jobs. It’s the only central role which really rings true.
But because the entire story hinges on Cage’s character’s motivations and rationales – and because these and his performance are all over the place - it just doesn’t really work.
The most successful thing then about the film isn’t the story or the lead character, but the setting. This remake is filmed and set NOT in a foggy British location like the original, but in the stunningly beautiful Pacific Northwest of the US – and it rings true that such a weird little commune COULD have grown up in this remote wilderness, and existed until the present time in it’s relatively un”spoiled” form. (It’s a similar conceit to the one used in “The Village” – but a lot more successfully there).
The pagan rituals are pretty standard and freaky, but not filmed with any type of spookiness or mood or atmosphere – and I couldn’t believe the missed opportunity of the final scene – fire looks a helluva lot more dramatic and terrifying at nighttime than daytime – as does a psycho pagan lynch mob.
As death nightmares go - burning to death has gotta be in most people's top three list (as played in the "Coke or Pepsi - Choose One" game), personally I think it's maybe the worst way to go. It's horrible - but the way it's filmed here - well I was more distraught when Bambi's mum was shot off-screen than I was watching this death scene. Wasted chance.
The director of “The Wicker Men” is Neil LaButte, who is I think best known for a movie I once saw at HOYTS 8 with Will, called “In the Company of Men”, which was a confronting – and pretty accurate expose about male chauvinism and the way men use women. He was pretty good – from memory – at the societal character study type movie, but here he’s pretty crap at generating or building any decent suspense, mystery, or terror.
He’s obviously still interested though in the male-female imbalance in society, because the flip-side of this norm is prevalent in the weird little community in “The Wicker Man” – a community supposedly spawned by witches escaped from the Salem witch trials – a female-controlled community where the women wear the pants and rule the roost…and the near-mute, near-retarded men are little more than physical labour and breed-mules. It must have baffled the Vietnamese cinema audience I saw it with tonight – to see a society where the women control the men – because the abhorrent reverse of this hierarchy has kept women down here for centuries. This traditional system of patriarchal control and dominance sadly still exists here. And despite the fact that this gender inequity seems to be changing rapidly (in Saigon at least), the Wicker film I saw tonight – where the male hero was not challenged (as he usually would have been on screen) by other males with big guns and muscles – but instead dominated and bamboozled instead by devious and strong WOMEN…strange concept for them.
And strange movie for me. But not always in a good way.
My advice – which I’ll be taking myself too – avoid this version, and try to catch the original on TV one day. It MUST be better than this one.
I just hope the lead in the original loosens his tie.
