Get the Hell Out

Get Out is a movie built from other parts of movies, a pastiche/celebration of horror and other genre tropes.  Yet it doesn't feel at all derivative or superficial.  The writer-director Jordon Peele (of Key and Peele fame) has the goods.  He's a stylist with something very important to say, and that blending of subject matter with technical prowess is exhilarating to witness; in fact it's the overarching reason why movies themselves are so important, so influential.  Peele cannibalizes Rosemary's Baby, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs (just to name a few) with abandon and glee, skillfully slicing and dicing moments and dialog into a meta meditation on horror movies and race and otherness and whiteness and privilege, until by the end of Get Out you are hooked and sunk into a world totally manifested by Peele's intelligence, wit, and anger.

But he doesn't just riff on horror movies.  That would be too easy.  Interspersed within the glittery, gory, Grand-Guignol fetishes are bits and pieces of Woody Allen movies and even a sort of Merchant-Ivory attachment to comedies of manner.  He's out to skewer, but also to humanize what it means to be shut out of the ruling class in a way that's not so much about hate as it is adoration, a belittlement based on fear and envy.

The story is pretty simple, like all great horror movies.  Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya, even better than he was in Black Mirror) has a white girlfriend (Alison Williams, just plain perfect), Rose Armitage.  Chris and Rose are going to visit Rose's family for the first time, and guess what?  She hasn't told them he's black.  Once they arrive (after a run-in with a deer and a policeman), the gaze of the movie sets its sights on the opulence and appurtenances of Rose's mother and father (both doctors) and her douche-bag of a brother.  Here we have the reversal of tropes: freakishness in the guise of white-people in posh circumstances, with Chris the horror-movie innocent negotiating the strangeness and ickiness.  The "ickiness" is most on display when other Armitage family and friends visit for a dinner party wherein they put on the happy-happy smiles of white people welcoming a black person into their midst.  The arrogance of the scenes here topple into the grotesque; each of the rich white folks at the party finds ways to compliment Chris on his athletic prowess, his muscular beauty, his genetic strengths.  It's not about pushing him away; it's about somehow owning his identity without wanting to know him.

That's the crux of the horror here, that dinner party by the lake.  It has the fever and fright of everyday embarrassment and condescension merged with the promise that the paranoiac atmosphere will soon boil over into sordid hypnotic realities:  abduction, enslavement, basement brain surgery.

Get Out's plot is funky enough to be both genre frenetic and yet perfectly, coolly satirical.  Peele never loses sight of genre-movie pleasures, while also  using them to help us feel and understand what it means to be shut out of the world, completely ostracized, while also being smiled at and cajoled and patted on the back.  Rose's dad, after all, would have voted for Obama's third term if he could have.

Within this maelstrom of manners and terrors, our avatar is beautifully performed by Kaluuya.  He's the center-point here, and as we follow him through his paces we start to understand the totality of all the little humiliations he has to go through.  The smiles that kind of make you feel sick.  The ongoing onslaught of conversation that has nothing to do with who you are and yet everything about who they think you are, or at least they think you should be.  Kaluuya's brilliant, intelligent eyes shine out of all that bullshit, as he tries to remain rational, as he tries to remain alive.

I never really liked Key and Peele's sketch-show on Comedy Central too much.  It always seemed to be trying way too hard to make points that have already been made, and the more they went at it, the more tiresome it got.  But Get Out is the complete opposite of that kind of exhaustion; it has a freshness to it, a sense of righteousness devoid of self-righteousness, exercising a brand of humor that's both ghastly and completely optimistic, unique.  After you see this movie, you feel smarter somehow, edified.  Most movies don't have the guts or brains to edify anyone.  Get Out has guts and brains galore.  It skewers (literally at times) a brand of poshness and stupidity heretofore often left out of horror-movie villainy:  pleasant, professional white people in palatial lake-houses, stirring their cups of tea, smiling like they have everything and know everything, and are just waiting to let you have it.
 
      
      

White Trash Baroque

Paul Dano plays a man with developmental disabilities in Prisoners, a thriller that came out this fall, and at first look the performance seems like prototypical caricature.  Silent, blank-faced and pathetic, Dano's Alex Jones skulks through his scenes as a predator who does not seem to understand his own debauched status, or sins.  He just is what he is:  pure nameless feeble-minded evil.  But the movie, and Dano, do not allow us a lot of comfort in our judgment of Alex as that sort of freak.  In fact, by the end of the movie, no one is exactly who they and we think they are, and yet nothing really has changed. 

Ostensibly, the movie is about two little girls being abducted on Thanksgiving in a suburban working-class neighborhood in Pennsylvania.  There's a rainy, grim fairy-tale focus from the start, and the director, Denis Villeneuve, has a beautiful fetish for grit and pallor.  The center of his focus is a beaten-up RV that seems to absorb the two girls.  Next up is the frantic chase to find them, headed by Jake Gyllenhaal as a police detective who is enjoying a solitary Thanksgiving feast at a local Chinese restaurant when he gets the call.  The drab world Prisoners depicts has a sort of an inner-growl to it, as Villeneuve fills the screen with busted walls, rotten wood, and lots and lots of rain.  Hugh Jackson, as one of the dads, carries the movie as his emotions transform from horror and grief into torture and sadism.  It turns out the main suspect is Dano's Alex, that no-good weirdo from down the street who once he is arrested doesn't even have enough sense to answer polygraph questions to the point they can measure the depths of his deception.  According to the detective, Alex has the "IQ of a 10 year old."  This lack of intelligence and morals only increases Jackman's father's anger and eventually he kidnaps Alex and tortures him in an abandoned apartment. 

The paralleling of intelligence with morals is a toxic leftover of course of old-school early 20th Century eugenics and phrenology, and the movie depends on that paradigm in order to place Alex in the context of plot and atmosphere, but somehow Dano's diligent dedication to the part renders Alex's identity as something more than just genetics gone "horribly and predictably wrong" (that's a quote from Henry H. Goddard's 1912 eugenics masterpiece, The Kallikak Family: a Study in the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness).  Alex through the course of the movie's wrenching, white-trash-baroque plot becomes a sort of anti-hero that isn't heroic but has somehow survived a secret holocaust horribly scathed and yet supernaturally real. 

Dano does not escape the stereotype as much as he bores through it.  His face is both Joan-of-Arc-spiritual and stilted, silent-movie delirious.  He seems to drift through the interstices of thought and place, a ghost that isn't involved in his own story and yet has to live through it, without any resources or access to relief.  Somehow Dano makes that helplessness and hopelessness into a sort of mantra that we can hook into, without turning Alex Jones into a demon or an angel or a "normal guy" underneath it all. 

Alex Jones is what he is, somehow, and I don't really know what that is outside of being human.  Dano gives us a human being that has none of the constraints and controls of the usual movie performance.  He's making performance-art inside the chilly, horror-movie contexts of Prisoners.  And it's a total compliment to Villeneuve that the movie's moral compass is more of a spider-web than a navigational tool.  The whole piece seems to take its marching orders from Dano's blank, beautiful, unnerving face.

The Horror, the Horror

Some movies aren't movies as much as atmospheres that take over your consciousness for a while, and then linger, like cigarette smoke in curtains, leaving a taint that doesn't ever go away. 

Snowtown, a true-crime movie directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Shaun Grant, is one of those.  Based on the exploits of a serial killer named John Bunting that took place in a ramshackle Southern Australia suburb in the early 1990s, Snowtown has the depth and contemplativeness of a Terrance Malick movie with the hideous overlay of great horror:  it's a solemn mix/homage to Silence of the Lambs and Days of Heaven that could have been titled Nights of Hell.  What sets it apart from both those movies, however, is its dedication to not getting everything right.  The movie blurs and does not explain, which is totally to its benefit.  Kurzel and Grant want to give you experience, not exposition or explanation, so the movie feels dreamed up and hyper-real simultaneously.  It's a tone, not a show.  Moments collapse into other moments, banalities and horrors uniting effortlessly. 

The center of the horror, its architect and chief engineer, is John Bunting, played by Daniel Henshall.  Henshall's performance anchors Snowtown so deeply that you often forget he is acting or even in a movie.  Bunting is one of those big-mouthed working-class guys having breakfast at McDonald's with his other out-of-work buds, his big mouth and bravado making him the gang-leader, the chief executive officer of all losers and haters.  He has that charisma you can't really describe except to say it creeps most people out.  Most people, except for the lost, and Bunting stumbles onto a group of lost boys at the beginning of the film.  The boys have all been abused and neglected in a variety of ways, but their neighbor across the street, a pedophile, has taken lewd photos of them, so Bunting is able to use their hatred and vulnerability to get them to be his legion.  They harass the "pedo" until he leaves.  (The photo above is right before one of their "pranks."  Bunting buys them ice creams cones, and then directs them to use the ice cream as paint on the neighbor's windows.  They write "faggot" in soft-serve all over them.)

The boys have a gullible, sad, used-up mom, and their household is chaotic, dirty, but somehow so static and dull it turns into a den of lions without anyone noticing.  Serial killing just starts to happen, as if it is supposed to.  Boom.  Bunting uses the gullibility of James, the middle kid, to his benefit, eventually mentoring him into helping him kill his own brother, in one of the most bracingly gruesome scenes I've ever witnessed in movies.  It's like the bath-tub/chainsaw scene in Scarface, slowed down and transformed into a music-less horrible vignette that has both a gory power and an atmosphere of mundanity, cold-blooded and matter-of-fact yet feverish.  Kurzel shoots the whole scene without a lot of cuts, so you feel forced into being there, just like James is, until your gaze becomes coopted, and you feel an inability to escape, or even to look away.   

This is truly a horror movie at that moment, and in many other moments.  By "truly," I mean the carnage is not manufactured to amuse you; it is meant to horrify.  This is a movie that has such stellar technique to it you can't separate yourself from the surroundings; you are inside the trance.   A blood-hot, animal morality surges through Snowtown's bleak veins.  Kurzel isn't making a movie to teach you anything either.  He's making a movie that hypnotizes you into knowing (not understanding) what being there is like.