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No Such Thing

Fear just isn't scary anymore

2001

Review: March 21, 2006

Director: Hal Hartley

Starring: Sarah Polley, Robert John Burke, Helen Mirren, Julie Christie

Not necessary, but could help you accept some of the conceits here.

THE SETUP:

Woman goes in search of her vanished fiancée, and finds a monster living alone on an island.

DISCUSSION:

This is an interesting movie that, I am the first to admit, I don’t think I fully understand. If you’ve seen a Hal Hartley movie before you will be ready for his philosophical ruminations and slow, steady pace. This one’s a little easier to put in a DVD player, since you know it’s about a monster and features a broad media satire, but there’s still quite a bit of the head-scratcher to it, as well as a deep, melancholic questioning of: why live?

There will be various spoiler levels to this review, because I want to be able to talk about the entire movie. You will have to choose how far you want to go. If you want to see it relatively fresh [recommended], you can know that it’s about a young woman, played by the ever-entrancing Sarah Polley, who goes looking for her fiancée, who has disappeared while on assignment in Iceland. She goes looking for him and finds a monster. There is also a large element of broad media satire. So there ya go, come back and we’ll talk after you’ve seen the movie.

SPOILER LEVEL ONE > > >
The movie begins with a long soliloquy by the monster. We then move immediately into a newsroom run by Helen Mirren as a chain-smoking, hardened media scag, of which there are plenty in real life. She tells her staff she wants “the absolute WORST news,” and rejects a litany of ecological and terrorist troubles, including the fact that “it’s snowing in Johannesburg” as “last week’s news, people!” Her staff then informs her that Lower Manhattan has been sold to a Hollywood studio, which piques her interest, but she is warned that the same studio owns the network they are employed by. THAT’S how broad the satire here is, but Helen Mirren is fun to watch pulling it off, and you know, media satires often bring as smile to the face [unless they’re po-faced crap like that Ron Howard bullshit Ed]. In the newsroom, you’ll see Wallace’s Mom from Veronica Mars.

Anyway, Sarah Polley is Beatrice, who is a low-level assistant in the newsroom, and she mentions that one of their camera crews has gone missing off of Iceland, and she has a tape [of the soliloquy the monster was recording at the beginning, which she has listened to], that constitutes new evidence. She asks that she be allowed to go investigate, and eventually this is allowed.

Now something quite surprising happens next, and if you’re still reading and want to watch the movie, I would recommend coming back after you’ve seen it.

SPOILER LEVEL TWO > > >
Beatrice’s plane goes down, and she miraculously survives. Thus far I haven’t mentioned Beatrice’s completely blank, emotionally flat affect [cause I forgot], but yeah, it’s there, and becomes part of the first glimmers of one’s feeling of: “WHAT is this movie about?” The sight of her fished out of the sea, hanging completely limp, like a doll, is one of the more indelible images of this film.

She is brought to Julie Christie, a doctor who has an experimental surgery to cure her, but it is going to be incredibly painful. They will use local anaesthetic, moving from the area where she still has feeling into the area where she doesn’t, meaning that by the time they’re in the areas that are numb the areas that aren’t will be coming out of the anaesthetic, so the further they go the more extreme, extreme pain she will be in. She is strapped into this wireframe thing that surrounds her entire body, and another moving, indelible image from the movie is a line of tears issuing from one eye as she remains completely motion- and emotionless.

It’s a success, though, and after a brief recovery interlude she is ready to leave the hospital. As she does, there is a crowd gathered outside who reach out to touch her as though she were a religious deity [indelible image #2]. She then has a conversation in which she asks Julie Christie if she believes in monsters, which she kind of does. Beatrice reflects on her survival, and says she was just really lucky, to which Julie Christie replies: “Or blessed.”

Beatrice then goes off to the remote part of Iceland where her fiancée was last seen. This part is long, drawn-out, and somewhat tedious, as it repeats the same scenes a few times to little effect. You have all this prologue-of-Dracula stuff about how the Icelandic villagers live in constant terror, and how “even the horses will only go so far.” I can get into that stuff—once. But when we start hearing it for a second time it starts to get wearying. Anyway, the villagers get Beatrice drunk and carry her out [in a scene that is a little creepy, and reinforces Beatrice’s complete passivity], and leave her on the island where the monster lives.

She wakes up and meets the monster. She finds out that he did indeed eat her fiancée, that he’s a real grumpus, and that he’s immortal. No matter what he tries to do, he can’t die. The monster shoots himself point-blank in the head, but all it does is give him a nasty headache. So what he wants more than anything is to die, and he wants Beatrice to help. She agrees, so long as he agrees to come with her, off the island and into civilization.

There’s a lot of predictable stuff about everyone being amazed at Beatrice walking around with this monster. Her plan is to use him for a news story, because the news network will have the resources to find the mysterious Doctor Arteau, the only one anyone knows of who can destroy matter—and thus destroy the monster.

SPOILERS LEVEL THREE > > >
Beatrice hands the monster over to the network and totally takes to the celebrity lifestyle, hanging out in clubs, chatting with the glitteratti, wearing fashionable clothes, and sleeping with some random hottie, and you’re like: “WHAT the FUCK?!??” Is she going to totally dump the monster—after ALL this about her strength of will and passivity and possible deity, she’s going to totally sell him out to live the party lifestyle?

Well hold on to your heads, because the next morning she realizes that she can’t just leave the monster like that and goes to find him. However, Helen Mirren has realized that this monster is gold to her, and she can NOT allow some scientist to turn him into anti-matter [“I want him kept alive as long as he’s fashionable”]. Meanwhile we are to believe that various nations are coveting him as a weapon. But the monster has escaped, and is being beaten up and pissed on in an alley by various riff-raff.

Beatrice rescues him and they spirit him and Dr. Arteau back to the Icelandic island [WHY did they have to go there?]. Before this we have the monster lamenting what has happened to humanity, and telling us that he watched human evolution from the zygote stage. Then Dr. Arteau speculates that the monster is the manifestation of mankind’s fears [which would make him cousin to Forbidden Planet’s Id monster], and that humanity NEEDS something to fear in order to give life texture and make it what it is.

Meanwhile the monster is in a contraption that is an obvious corollary to the one Beatrice had her operation in toward the beginning. Note that he is presented in the opposite direction, so across the film they are face to face. And the last shot suggests [to me at least] that the monster is obliterated and consumed into a vision of Beatrice-as-deity.

So, what is going on? My main questions are; what is the whole media satire aspect dong here? It doesn’t seem to relate to anything. Secondly, what behind Beatrice’s sudden embrace of the glamorous life, and her just-as-sudden rejection of it? These were the questions that plagued my mind this morning, but now [7pm] I think I have a little more clarity.

I got a bit of a clue toward the end when Dr. Arteau talks about the monster as the collective fears of humanity, and that his process will destroy those fears, leaving humanity rudderless, because we need our fears and terrors to give texture to our lives and psychologies. At the beginning of the movie we hear that the world is in a horrible state of political chaos, with terrorist attacks now mundane, and on the verge of ecological collapse. And the media figures, who I think also stand for the portion of society that follows the media, have lost their fears, as well as their sense of wonder or newness or true emotion. This is exemplified by the scene in which the guys on the street are abusing and pissing on the monster—he’s lost all capacity to scare, he’s just a putz they can vent their hatred on. This is in contrast to the Icelandic villagers, who are oblivious to the media, and who retain their sense of fear, and also seem, on the whole, closer-knit than the news people.

Now not only that, but we have reached a point at which we can annihilate our fears and put them out of reality. Now [this part may be a stretch], this is contrasted with the newsmakers, who can, in a sense, CREATE reality. And what they choose to create with is “the worst news,” i.e. creating more fear, and hence more fear-fatigue.

Now there’s something going on with Beatrice being presented as somewhat of a deity [or at least “blessed”] and the monster, an immortal, giving him God-like powers as well. Is he a devil or demon? Either way, it seems that Beatrice’s experience of the deep pain of life [through her plane crash and operation, but let’s also not forget that she lost her fiancée], gives her an appreciation of the monster’s wish to end his life. It would be one thing if we were told that the monster is what he is as a punishment, because then the movie could be about Beatrice’s understanding his pain, and by making him change in a few fundamental ways [primarily no longer killing people], she is able to grant him his wish, which is to die.

So why does Beatrice dump the monster upon arrival in New York, only to pick him up the next day? We have to remember that at the start of the movie, Beatrice works in this horrid newsroom, as does her fiancée. So, though it may not come across in the movie, where we meet her just as she’s about to set off and have her plane crash. So although it’s not IN the movie [and hence, strictly speaking, doesn’t really count], we could infer that the ritzy life she embraces upon returning to New York is the life she was seeking before we met her. Which would make her enjoying it for approximately 24 hours before waking up in the GOOD column, as at least it didn’t take her that long to come to her senses. It’s a grasp, so take it as you may.

So there are my thoughts. I told you I didn’t have the answers. But I have been surprised by the vehemence of people’s polarization over this film. Critics I really like and respect HATE IT. Many see a reworking of Beauty and the Beast, but I don’t think that’s it. I was kind of shocked by Roger Ebert’s review, where he says she meets the monster “after the delay of a plane crash.” AFTER THE DELAY OF A PLANE CRASH??? So that whole part where she’s the sole survivor and she is mended through this incredible act of endurance and is presented as a blessed deity—that constitutes a “delay?” Uh, to say the least.

So there ya are. This is definitely an interesting, possibly infuriating movie, but even the parts that don’t work are more fascinating than most fully-formed but less ambitious movies. I say definitely worth seeing, no matter what.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

That’s what I said. You may hate it, but it’s still worth seeing.