Review: The Box
Frank Langella messes with a married couple in The Box
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By Darren Estwick. |  |
Monday, 30, Nov 2009 09:09
Directed by Richard Kelly, out December 4th in cinemas, starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and Frank Langella, running times 115 mins
By Matthew Champion.
First things first, I like cinema. And not in the 'movies are my world' PC World ad way currently doing the round in cinemas. I like the way cinema makes me feel and how it can leave me thinking. Enter The Box, the third film from former directorial wonderkid Richard Kelly.
Since bursting on to the scene in 2001 aged 26 with Donnie Darko, Kelly has flattered to deceive, first in 2007's Southland Tales (a mess) and now to an even greater extent in The Box.
Put simply, The Box made me feel nothing and left me thinking how much I hated what I had just seen.
While Darko had a breakout performance from Jake Gyllenhaal (arguably not yet lived up to), jarring scenes of startling quality and a unique indie feel, The Box has a largely-wasteful cast (top-billed Cameron Diaz is a crushing disappointment), the perversion of a simple premise, an amateurish approach to screenwriting and a crushing lack of invention.
It's as if Kelly has tried to take all the things that made Donnie Darko great without realising that what worked in a movie mostly starring and for teenagers looks completely out of place in a film presumably aimed at adults. The ridiculous, Saturday morning-esque water effects being one point in question, being in slavish thrall to the period it is set in (in this case 1976) another.
Said simple premise features the titular box handed to a married couple living slightly beyond their means in the shadow of Nasa's Langley facility where Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) works, by a horrifically disfigured yet charming stranger Arlington Steward (Frank Langella).
What Steward proposes to Arthur and Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) is 24 hours to decide whether to press the button contained in the box he has given them. If they press it they receive $1 million in cash, but (always a but) someone they don't know will die.
Things go awry as both Arthur and his wife Norma (Diaz) face setbacks at work, and, unwilling to give up on their lifestyle or the life they had promised their 13-year-old son, push the button. This is where the short story (Button, Button by Richard Matheson) and subsequent Twilight Zone episode that The Box is based upon end, albeit with differing outcomes.
But Kelly's take on the following 90 minutes of screen time take the audience into unchartered and misguided territory, with a host of nosebleed-prone 'employees' freaking the Lewis' out as the truth about Steward's humanity is clumsily revealed. That truth is never fully established by Kelly, but as the story stumbles into themes of purgatory of original sin, and Arthur and Norma get followed round never-ending libraries by Steward's goons, he wisely leaves some questions answered, bowing to the theory that a director's imagination is never as good as his audience's.
In the case of The Box, it almost definitely isn't.