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Dark Water
It’s okay, honey, Mommy’s just having some issues right now
2005
Review: February 27, 2006
Director: Walter Salles
Starring: Jennifer Connolly, Ariel Gade, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Dougray Scott
I would encourage that.
THE SETUP:
Woman with abandonment issues meets ghost with abandonment issues.
DISCUSSION:
I had avoided this when it was out, sick of all the J-horror tropes being thrown in our face, and plus it just looked like another retread of The Ring, where we spend half our time staring at dripping faucets or faces that may or may not be appearing, creepy high-pitched noises, etc. Plus I read a synopsis of the entire movie on The Movie Spoiler, and it got poor reviews, so I just let it pass by. Then not long ago it got a RAVE review on Film Freak Central, so suddenly I was hot to see it. It was better than I expected it would be, but ultimately it shows that the sorts of things that please and interest a film critic [craft, careful writing, subtext] are not necessarily the same things that equal a decent movie you would want to sit through.
It starts off well. Jennifer Connolly had an alcoholic mother, and the movie opens with a memory of her mother forgetting to pick her up from school. Turns out Jennifer is newly divorced and in a custody battle for her daughter, which of course is going to play on all those pesky abandonment issues. And she has to find more affordable housing, which finds her looking at a place on Roosevelt Island, which, for non-New Yorkers, is this tiny strip of land between Manhatten and Queens. The apartment turns out to be a nightmare in several ways, primarily this nasty leak in the bedroom, coming down from the apartment just above.
Now I haven’t seen the Japanese movie that this is based on, so I can’t speak to how faithful this movie is to that one, but I thought it was a stroke of genius to set it in New York, as right now Manhattan is becoming way to expensive for the normal folk, and many people who are not Paris Hilton are having to move out to the boroughs in order to find an affordable place to live. Like, for instance, myself. One of the reasons I was interested in seeing this movie is that since it came out I moved into a larger, cheaper apartment [from a studio for $1,500 to a HUGE 2-bedroom for $1,250] in a “developing” area of New York, where what is “acceptable” in terms of fixtures, building damage, and general shoddiness is much lower than it was down on 34th street. My apartment turned out fine, but I could definitely relate to the scenes in this movie where Jennifer comes home and the leak is much worse than she expected, and then she goes into the bathroom to take a pill and the water sputters and then hair comes out.
Anyway, she is shown this cruddy apartment by John C. Reilly, delivering a wonderfully comic scene as a real estate broker saying anything he can to spin the obvious negatives of the apartment into positives. Jennifer’s daughter, who was dead against the apartment before, now is suddenly for it [could she have made contact with a ghost?], and they move in. Leaks and creepiness follow.
Now I was totally down with the movie for the first half, enjoying how well the subtext was crafted and how they successfully transplanted the story to New York, how the divorce and custody issues played well into the abandonment theme, etc. I don’t think it’s too big a spoiler to tell you that the ghost turns out to be a little girl who also had abandonment issues [to put it lightly], and a neat touch is that the actress who plays young Jennifer is the same one who plays the ghost… meaning that, in a way, Jennifer is literally being haunted by, and has to make peace with, her younger self. It’s all good. Unfortunately it doesn’t really go anywhere.
There’s dreams, there’s drips, there’s faces, there’s voices. Yada, yada, yada. This is definitely one case where the setup is a LOT more interesting than the resolution, as you’re very involved in where this is all going… and then you see that it doesn’t really have much of anywhere to go. There’s not much for a leak to do except drip, get a little bigger, and drip some more, and that’s what happens here. And a similar structure to The Ring, where you think everything is over but it’s not, just serves to render both climaxes inert.
There are good things, like Jennifer Connolly’s wonderful performance, as well as the great performance of Ariel Gade as her daughter, making it too bad that the story by now is just too pedestrian to dredge up much interest. It’s nice that it had a tight subtext and backstory, but in terms of creating something you’d actually want to watch, that’s just not enough on its own.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
You could do worse, but if you’ve seen The Ring I think you could safely skip this one.
