Don't Read the Latin

Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods was originally slated to hit theaters sometime in 2010, and after I saw the film last Friday night I imagined the wait for them to the their film finally released, a hold up caused by MGM’s money troubles, must have been especially grueling. I can’t help but thinking that Goddard and Whedon suspected they really had something here, even if that something was merely a really good time at the movies, which is in any case certainly nothing to sneeze at.

But if what they have is something beyond merely a good time at the movies, what is it exactly? Another thing I thought while watching The Cabin in the Woods was that it would be really nice if talented guys like Goddard and Whedon could make a horror film that wasn’t about the fact that it was a horror film. Or that fewer contemporary filmmakers believed that one of the essential components of a horror film is that it be a comedy. And so on. But in fairness to Goddard and Whedon – Goddard, who directed, co-wrote the film with Whedon, who also produced – they’re really goddamn clever, and, as a result, The Cabin in the Woods is a really goddamn clever movie, one that eventually broke down all – okay, most – of my defenses. Plus, it’s not like it blindsides you with its irony, if that’s really what we’re dealing with here. Contrary to the belief of some people, The Cabin in the Woods is not full of plot twists and reversals. As horror writer and critic Kim Newman has pointed out, it’s not a film with a twist; it’s a film with a premise. The film begins with Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, the film’s most powerful weapons, engaging in small talk about fertility and cabinets and so forth while ambling around their vaguely science-y, vaguely governmental, vaguely military workplace. What that workplace is, and what it’s for, is what some people are regarding as a twist, but what must more accurately be regarded as the story the film is telling. In any case, this scene leads to maybe the funniest title card I’ve ever seen, the appearance of which should destroy any illusions you might have about what kind of film, tonally speaking, this is.

Yet while “twist” is the wrong word, I’m still loathe to reveal where the story goes. I mean, why ruin the fun? Myself, I was ultimately very glad to go into this thing cold, as much as possible anyway, and I was also pleased that I saw the film on opening night, since the commercials that have aired on TV since include images I wouldn’t have wanted in my head, anticipating when they’d arrive as I sat there watching the film. So if you haven’t seen the film, I don’t know what to tell you, other than marketing sucks, I guess. But where the story begins, after the Whitford/Jenkins prologue, is with five post-graduate students – a stoner (Fran Kranz), a blonde, party-ish type girl (Anna Hutchison), a smart jock (Chris Hemsworth), another smart jock who is I guess less of a jock than the other one (Jesse Williams), and our heroine (Kristen Connolly), the more demure of the two females, who is not actually a virgin but who will eventually find herself behaving, to her surprise, as though she was – heading out on vacation to a cabin, which is in the woods, belonging to Hemsworth’s cousin. On their way there they meet a creepy and rude gas station attendant (Tim de Zarn) who lets fly with some smirking warnings about the cabin – he’s one of those characters who will warn you that you’re heading towards your doom but will not hide the fact that he’s kind of hoping you don’t listen to him – and you, the audience, are quite aware that you’ve seen all this before, and since the scenes with the young folk are given, at this stage, no particular spin or, I don’t know, spark, it’s hard to not hope that the curious Jenkins/Whitford stuff, which has by now begun to sprinkle itself throughout the proceedings, turns out to be something at least a little bit novel.

Well, good news, because it does. I don’t think it’s revealing too much, and anyway I don’t know how I could continue with this review without making note of this, that Whitford and Jenkins’ job is, and the whole governmental-esque facility where they work exists to, plan, control and orchestrate the horror film mayhem that is about to befall our young heroes, and to do so with a very conscious understanding of the tropes and clichés that surround the other, very different kind of movie that is transpiring in that cabin in the woods. So yes, it’s like that, but it’s a good thing that it’s like that. The Whitford/Jenkins material (and it’s not just them, Amy Acker is there, too, and is very good, as is Brian White as a military man whose burgeoning conscience adds a bit of heft to the whole thing) serves to save the cabin material, which if anything can occasionally threaten to become too self consciously by-the-numbers. This is by design, but is also, practically by definition, potentially enervating. It teeters on the edge, at least, and the Whitford/Jenkins stuff is sometimes called on to steer everything away from the precipice, which it very ably does by virtue of having all the best jokes, and also all the intrigue, mystery, and inventiveness the cabin scenes intentionally lack.

About jokes, briefly. The Cabin in the Woods is a funny movie, occasionally very funny, but I'd like to pick a nit or two. There are two kinds of jokes that bug me which The Cabin in the Woods engages in. Not egregiously, but enough to make me want to bring it up. One is the kind where one character will say something that no one would ever say just so another character can deliver the punchline. This kind of strained set-up/knock down is what I shall now refer to as the Social Network Gershwin Joke. The other kind bothers me a little bit more, because it means a good joke gets diminished. What happens in The Cabin in the Woods is Bradley Whitford is given a terrific throwaway line that turns out to not be a throwaway. Goddard and/or Whedon believe, and many other writers agree, that everything must be paid off eventually, so the terrific throwaway is forced to build to something else. And it doesn't even build to anything great. If I told you the line, and gave you some context, you could predict what the payoff will be. Meanwhile, the great throwaway has to now be looked at askance. This is a little bit like the need to explain everything in a horror film, or remove the mysterious dread. It's not quite the same as explaining a joke, curiously enough, but like horror movie explanations it restricts the audience's imagination, which is part of what makes the original, now only onstensibly, throwaway so funny. This is, in fact, my one big gripe about Shaun of the Dead, a film I otherwise adore.

But in the end that's okay, because The Cabin in the Woods has a lot more to offer. This is a stretch, but what they're going for here is not entirely unlike what Poe was after with "Premature Burial." I don't want to make too much of this, because that would be ridiculous, and I suspect I'm only making the connection because Poe has been on my mind due to the pending release of that, I can only assume, piece of horse-, bull-, and dogshit The Raven, but anyway, in that story Poe essentially sketched out the psychology of the horror genre, and laid bare why he wrote the kinds of stories he wrote. It's possibly his masterpiece, and in that sense, the sense of weight and power and all that, it's nothing at all like The Cabin in the Woods. But Goddard and Whedon sort of are trying to encapsulate modern horror and its hold on us within this one crazy little movie. In doing so, they sometimes slip under the weight of their ambition -- for instance, some of the references to other horror films are very general, while one or two are off-puttingly specific, such as one to Bryan Bertino's The Strangers that is so precisely about that movie that for a little while The Cabin in the Woods starts to feel like a spoof -- but their film shouldn't be written off as a goof. It's deeply thought-out, if not especially deep itself. And besides, if nothing else, it's a really good story, well told, one that only gets more interesting and satisfying as it goes along. The answer to the question of what this is all in aid of is one of my favorite things about The Cabin in the Woods. How often can anyone say that?

The Collection Project: When it All Makes Sense

I was feeling rather lumpish last night, both physically and mentally, when suddenly, very late at night, I found myself thinking about the Coen brothers. This, in itself, is not noteworthy. If you and I were to play the "What are You Thinking?" game (that's a game, right?), and you guessed I was thinking about the Coen brothers, you'd probably be right, and sometimes I feel like this blog is just one or two posts away from turning into a full-blown Coens fansite. We're not there yet, but look, right now you're reading one of those very posts.
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The specific Coens film I found myself contemplating was Burn After Reading, from 2008. Not enormously well-loved by critics or audiences at the time, which is something the film has in common with The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading has subsequently failed to develop any kind of strong cult following, which is something the film does not have in common with The Big Lebowski. This strange little black comedy seems to have mildly befuddled or slightly disappointed just about everybody, a reaction heightened, no doubt, by the fact that it followed their top-to-bottom triumph of No Country for Old Men. Personally, I view Burn After Reading as every bit a part of their creative renaissance (for lack of a less stupid phrase, and in comparison to Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, two not-bad films that nevertheless cast die-hards like myself into a state of gloomy concern) as that previous film and their eventual follow-up, A Serious Man. In the same way that Fargo's break-out success slightly confused me -- it's a great movie, but what was it about that one that critics and audiences felt was missing from their earlier work? -- the indifferent backing away that greeted Burn After Reading's release continues to leave me puzzled. Do people still really not know what to expect from the Coen brothers? Or I suppose most people could simply not find the film's collection of selfish, deluded, even stupid, characters, mixed with a few bursts of shocking violence, not all that funny, but, again, if you're a fan going in, what's leaving you cold?
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I'm not really asking those questions, by the way (though feel free to answer!); I'm merely registering my befuddlement. And besides, it's quite possible I know the answer, which is that Burn After Reading is one of the most sublimely (to me) pointless film I've ever seen. None of the major characters -- the disgraced CIA analyst (John Malkovich); the pair of moronic gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt); their lonely, love-stricken boss (Richard Jenkins); the cocky, unfaithful, practically meat-headed US Marshal (George Clooney) -- have any clue, at any time, what they're doing, or what anyone else is doing, or why any of this is happening -- and it's well worth mentioning that the core reason any of this is happening is that Malkovich decided to angrily quit his job and write his entirely worthless memoirs. Each character gets lost in his or her own motives and wants (as opposed to needs), each has decided, incorrectly, that he or she is smart, and all but one of them loses out in the end, to the point that three of them die violently. For no good goddamn reason at all.
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In that way, Burn After Reading is of a piece with earlier Coens films like their intentionally less funny (but still sometimes intentionally funny) debut, Blood Simple, whose plot is also dependent on all the main players being utterly clueless about what's going on. In that film, cluelessness also leads to some pretty nasty violence, but not only is Blood Simple less funny, it also, like pretty much all dark crime films, comes pre-burdened (which I don't mean as a knock) with a cosmic message -- something along the lines of "Look what behaving in this way and/or associating with these people gets you." Plus, fate. Similarly, The Big Lebowski is as absurd and meaningless in its plotting as Burn After Reading, but Lebowski has a great deal of heart, which the later film is almost completely lacking. I say "almost", because I don't see how one can be fully immune to the disappointment, sadness, and touching guile of, respectively, the Malkovich (I'm thinking of his early scenes, mainly), Jenkins and Pitt characters, but the fates of those three are not only similar in their completeness, let's say, but in the way the Coens practically gloss over them. The result being that one doesn't walk away from Burn After Reading mourning those lost, so much as thinking "That was pretty messed up."
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Of all the complaints against a film, or any work of art, that particularly grate on me, the one I hear most often is "It had no point." The idea that a film, or a story, needs to have a specific "point" for it to be deemed good, or in any way worthwhile, is about as short-sighted as you can get, and this perhaps accounts for the mass indifference that greeted Burn After Reading, because, as I say, it is entirely pointless. It's a film whose story initially flows out of the offices of the CIA, but it's not a political film. It contains criminal acts, including murder, but has no message, no insight into criminal behavior or psychology, or clear satirical point of view. It's just a bunch of shit that happens, because a bunch of people weren't paying attention. And I think the ultimate summarization of Burn After Reading's towering absurdism is this quote from Joel Coen, describing the film:
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It's sort of about the Central Intelligence Agency, and physical fitness, and what happens when those two worlds collide.
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