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The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Generic creeps on the road to nowhere
2005
Review: September 16th, 2005
Director: Scott Derrickson
Starring: Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott, Jennifer Carpenter
It would help you enjoy it a lot more.
THE SETUP:
Girl dies during exorcism. Priest goes on trial for killing her.
DISCUSSION:
I have a much less generous feeling toward this film than I did when I walked out of it-and I thought it was pretty lame when I walked out. It's not terrible, just lame. It seems very TV movie. It's certainly directed like one.
Here's the deal: the movie opens by letting us know that this girl Emily Rose has died. Then we shift to the high-powered lawyers [I could never get a grip on WHERE all this was taking place] having drinks in the kind of bar lawyers in movies are always at. Laura Linney is there, and she is promised that she'll make full partner if she takes the exorcism case. At this point she does another thing people in [careless] movies always do-she orders a drink and then leaves the bar before it even arrives. This is probably, truth be told, second to the movie convention of lighting a cigarette and then immediately stubbing it out.
So she visits Tom Wilkinson in jail, and he agrees to testify so long as he is allowed to tell Emily's story. So the trial starts, presided over by an adult Harry Potter if he had undergone sex reassignment, and the possession of Emily is told entirely in flashbacks. She went off to college and immediately started having weird hallucinations-or were they? At this point you start to think "is this movie going to be all about how Emily should have never have pursed a higher education?" Then after a little while longer you start not to care what it's really about.
So we start to have succession of scary scene after scary scene with tepid courtroom drama in between. You will notice that the college Emily attends has paid remarkable attention to ensuring that every space has a consistently orange lighting scheme. She returns home not long after being possessed. Emily eats bugs. She contorts in funny ways. Her pupils dilate. I was surprised that she didn't get sucked up to the ceiling, since that seems to be an exorcism mainstay. But the viewer is aware all of this time that Emily is already dead, so these creeps, while creepy, don't go much of anywhere. And since we didn't get to know Emily at all before she became possessed, we have no sense of what has been lost.
Meanwhile, Tom tells Laura that dark forces are surrounding the trial. So every night at 3am [the hour of the beast, or some such] Laura is menaced by tepid creepiness. At one point she breaks a glass while in bare feet, but doesn't seem to think it necessary to watch where she's walking. Tom also has visions of menacing things. There is one point at which Laura is talking to a reluctant witness in a park, when suddenly the pigeons scatter with a big booming noise. Even the pigeons don't want him to talk! And then you start to think. what the fuck do the evil forces care about the fucking legal proceedings in some dumb case? Don't the evil forces have better things to worry about? Why don't they try to influence the economy or politics or. get a fucking reality show or something? Christ, I know more about influencing people than the fucking evil forces.
So every little creepy thing in the book is thrown at the viewer in an attempt to see what will stick, or at least keep you from thinking about how lame all this is. Another detail that annoyed me is that we are told that Emily knocked out her teeth by biting the walls in a frenzy. Only, every time we see her after that, her teeth are perfectly fine. Poor Jennifer Carpenter has a truly thankless role here, as she has to give a lot in terms of screaming and crying and contorting, but I suspect that very few people will remember who she is after this movie, and I'm not sure this'll lead to more parts in winning romantic comedies.
Blah, blah, blah, court case goes on, flashbacks unfold, creepiness bedevils Laura and Tom. By now the only interest left in the story is how the court case will come out and really, who the fuck cares? Maybe if you're Christian or Catholic and you buy into the whole "faith on trial" angle, but it didn't do anything for me. In the last 20 minutes we have what is supposed to be a strong statement in favor of faith, but the whole movie is so shoddily produced I don't think too many people will be moved.
On that topic, the direction here was so lame that it really became noticeable. It's just very banal TV-style direction. though that may be an insult to TV. There were unending shots that began behind a chair or wall-something that would blot out the entire screen, so we could have a smooth transition from scene to scene, and they get tiresome very quickly. The presence of Laura Linney also couldn't help but continually remind me of The Mothman Prophecies, another very similar movie about something that could be really creepy, and could be a true story, if it were anything but hogwash. The difference is that Mothman had a great ending that tied the whole thing together and gave you that creepy "what if it were true?" frisson, where here the interest ends when the flashbacks stop, and there's still 15 minutes of courtroom drama to go.
The supposedly "true" story this is based on apparently happened in Germany in the 70s. It's just one of those things to get more people into the theater. If you just want to be scared and feel the creeps for two hours, this movie would fit the bill. That is, if seeing the exact same scares and jumps and jolts you've been seeing for the past 10 years doesn't bother you. If you're looking for something in the way of a good movie, however, I'd stay home and watch The Exorcist again.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
There are worse ways to kill two hours and waste $10. There are also better ones.
