The Box Review

Richard Kelly is a man with ambition. He's determined to pose questions and make you think. He has themes and ideas that fascinate him and is highly literate, cramming all his influences into his films with decreasing levels of subtlety. It's this talent and intelligence that make The Box as infuriating a cinema experience as it is. It should be provoking and intriguing but ends up being very unsatisfying. After the cult success of Donnie Darko and the abject failure of Southland Tales, Kelly has attempted something more mainstream. Or at least he's pretending he has.

James Marsden and Cameron Diaz play Arthur and Norma Lewis, an ordinary couple mired in financial difficulty. A disfigured and mysterious stranger, Arlington Steward (played with understated relish by Frank Langella), arrives and gives them a wooden box with a button on the top. If they push the button two things will happen. Someone they don't know will die and they will receive one million dollars. The moral dilemma is played out in the first twenty minutes or so, after all what kind of film would we have if they didn't push the button. The rest of the film deals with the consequences of that decision, offering an ever deepening conspiracy and increasingly bizarre happenings with the townsfolk turning into extras from Village Of The Damned with nosebleeds, the babysitter not being everything she seems and Arlington Steward being revealed as the victim of a lightening strike he may or may not have even survived. Amidst all of this, the couple try and understand exactly what it is they have gotten themselves into and how they can extricate themselves from it.

This is one of those films that suffers from unfortunate and misleading marketing. The trailers all played up the central notion of the mysterious box and suggested the film is a thriller. One suspects this is how Kelly originally pitched it and got the money to make it, as that core notion (coming from the short story by Richard Matheson) is a highly marketable one. But where the short story ends, Kelly is only getting started and he uses the premise basically as a springboard to launch into his own flights of fancy. Much of the first half lives up to the marketing and plays like a straight thriller. A really great score by members of Arcade Fire helps generate menace in otherwise mundane scenes and the cinematography and production design, while perfectly capturing the 1970s setting, work hard to create a sense of unease. The problem however is that there is very little actual unease present. Many of these early scenes clunk along due to pedestrian writing and unconvincing performances by Marsden and Diaz. More problematic still is the fact that many of the film's attempts to create mystery and intrigue fall on the wrong side of naff and laughable. There are a couple of terrific moments, a man standing just out of shot looking in the kitchen window, or particularly when Steward announces menacingly that another couple that the Lewis' don't know will soon be made the same offer as they, implying that they could become the victims of the next people's decision to push the button. But by the time you have the old Granny staring at Cameron Diaz at a wedding rehearsal dinner in a manner that's supposed to be creepy but is actually kind of hilarious, you're very far from unnerved. And that's long before you're completely sick of the nosebleeds.

The second half of the film veers into science fiction territory and the moral dilemma the box presents turns out to have much larger consequences. It's clear from the start that something is going on and those complaining that the second half comes out of left field have not been paying attention. Not that I can really blame them. There is only so long, only so many times, you can cut to a strange, seemingly random (except that it clearly means something and so isn't random and therefore, oooh what could it mean?) shot and expect the audience to say "Oooh what could it mean?" It comes down to the age old problem that I simply didn't care about the characters enough to care about their predicament, even as their predicament takes on ever larger significance. This problem renders the ending, which completely hinges on our attachment to the characters, pretty much impotent. Indeed by the time the ending arrives, you can't help but get the sense that what is happening matters way more to Kelly than it does to any of the characters. When so many films don't even bother trying, it's always good to see one attempt to inject meaning and multiple layers into its story. But it's that story that must come first; get the basics right before adding the complications and a lot of the time The Box fails on its most basic levels. Scenes merge into each other, particularly early on, and the editing is often disjointed with many scenes seeming truncated. This seems to result from the structure and story not being completely in place in the script. Yet running alongside this is the feeling that Kelly has made pretty much the film he wanted to make, particularly when it comes to the ideas of philosophy that permeate the film. It's a strange fracture that persists throughout the entire running time. Also, when you get into this kind of territory, there are ultimately only so many explanations for what is happening. And you can't help but feel that this ground has been well and truly covered before.

I'm starting to wonder if Donnie Darko was something of an anomoly, that Kelly may not even realise what made that film connect with people in the first place. The Box ultimately frustrates but, for me, there is never a sense that it could ever have been that much better. Perhaps working from someone else's scripts, Kelly may have greater success as he is forced to interpret a story that isn't his. As it stands, what we have is a film with good moments and points of interest buried in a lot of tedium, one that attempts to test our humanity and personal and collective morality but ends up merely testing our patience.

4.5/10