Hugh Jackman plays the father of a missing child in Denis Villeneuve’s thriller: THE NEW YORKER - Review The images are gray, rain-streaked, and richly dank, and always in super-sharp focus. “Prisoners,” a sombrely impressive thriller in the style of “Mystic River” and “Zodiac,” was shot by the British cinematographer Roger Deakins, a master of bleakness (he also did “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men”). Dreariness has its own kind of poetry—it certainly colors the mood of this harrowing tale, which is set in a Pennsylvania suburb. It’s a seemingly normal, quiet place, where fervid religion and rage against God exist side by side; it also has a history of missing children. Written by an American, Aaron Guzikowski, and directed by a Canadian, Denis Villeneuve, “Prisoners,” like “Mystic River” and “Zodiac,” is a thriller that digs into the dark cellars of American paranoia and aggression. Two couples, one African-American (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and one white (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello), are celebrating Thanksgiving together when their two young daughters go outside to play, and immediately vanish. Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), the ace local police detective, arrests a feebleminded, apparently hapless young man (Paul Dano) as a suspect but releases him after a couple of days—he doesn’t have enough evidence to hold him. Loki is both systematic and highly intuitive, and Gyllenhaal, looking haggard and eaten up inside, projects decency and obsessiveness in equal measure—that’s why he keeps getting cast as a cop in movies. But one of the fathers, Keller Dover (Jackman), insists that Loki isn’t doing enough, and he rampages through town searching for the girls, part anguished parent, part vigilante, part morally blind avenger. Most detective stories drive toward reassurance. In the beginning, someone is missing, or someone has been murdered; corruption festers under the prosperous surface of life; the time is out of joint. A detective uses his reason, his specialized knowledge of how criminals think, and gradually, after many mistakes, solves the crime, exposes the corruption, and pulls the pieces of our existence back into a satisfying whole. Life makes sense, after all. But “Prisoners,” like “Mystic River,” breaks the genre’s conventions. Villeneuve has what I keep looking for in directors: a charged sense of the way the world actually works. Dover, similar to the Sean Penn character in “Mystic River”—a man who loses his daughter and goes mad—falls into moral anarchy. His job in life, he keeps saying, is to protect his family. He’s morally right and also disastrously wrong. Jackman, with a black Vandyke beard, seems more backwoods than suburban here, and he’s frightening. For once, he has something genuine to sink his claws into—the narrow, ignorant righteousness of American macho at its most extreme. Dover’s intervention gums up Loki’s ordered way of doing things, and the movie turns into, among other things, a rivalry between method and impulse, with Loki, unable to solve the crime and taunted by Dover, falling into a deep rage of his own. “Prisoners,” despite its gathering anxiety, has some of the pleasures of ordinary thrillers. But Villeneuve, who previously directed “Incendies,” does volatile scenes without exaggeration; parts of the movie are exceedingly violent, though the violence isn’t “fun”—it makes you wince. (Horror-film fans will not like this picture; some of it is actually horrifying.) Villeneuve throws us into a complicated skein of abductions going back years without losing the urgency of the present. “Prisoners” is a challenge: you have to decide who’s right and who’s wrong at every turn, and, when it’s over, ambiguity, rather than the satisfactions of harmony, reigns. Life stays out of joint. This movie suggests that it’s never really been any other way. newyorker/arts/critics/cinema/2013/09/23/130923crci_cinema_denby
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 05:11:07 +0000
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