“Stoker”
Directed by Chan Wook-Park
Starring Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman, Jacki Weaver
Drama/Mystery/Thriller
99 mins
R

Korean director Chan Wook Park‘s Stoker is a product of great precision. Each shot is brilliantly articulated and poised with such deliberation that it’s impossible to ignore the artistry and preparedness in each and every frame.

Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) plays India, a loner type whose father has just died, the Eve to Matthew Goode‘s biblical garden-dwelling snake. The stars align as India finds herself in a perfectly helpless state when her previously unknown uncle arrives and the game of cat and mouse beings. Although India initially pushes him away, she finds herself slowly seduced by the mystery that is her uncle Charlie.

Charlie, with his vampirically sparkling eyes and cloaked intentions, is an enigma off the bat. We as an audience know that something is amiss from the first time we glimpse him, standing over the funeral on a hazy distant hill, and yet when we met him there is an immediate air of allure seeping from the chiseled jawed, stony persona that makes up Charlie.

As Korean director Park’s, who directed the cult hit Oldboy, first foray into the American film industry, he manages to maintain the same level of fierce detail and intelligent zeal that defines his predominantly visual storytelling. Park’s fervor for intricate story-boarding, for which he is famous, is clearly evident onscreen as each shot perfectly transitions into the next with the effortlessness of a professional ballet troupe. Even with a thick language barrier between Park and his cast, he seems to have directed them in exactly the way that he intended down to the subtlest movement and the slightest sway of the camera. With Stoker, Park is a puppet master with a tenacious handle on the reins.

Even as the title cards play, a sense of Hitchcockian mystique that brands the film is established but it’s not until everything is said and done that everything comes full circle and clicks into place. Moments that once seemed little more than fruitless experiments with visual artistry later become cornerstones to the masterful smattering of foreshadow. It’s within this careful positioning of all the pieces tha a rarely accomplished feel of competition to the film emerges as does a lasting sense of wonder. Where ever these characters go from here, I would most certainly like to see that journey and yet it is not only the seen but the unseen that makes the film such a taut little piece of suspense.

In terms of the performances in the piece, Wasikowska’s brooding India is just as shrouded in gothic mystery as her uncle Charlie. As the constant chiming of clocks and syncopated clack of metronomes click in the background, we can only make guesswork as to what exactly makes India tick. As the film opens on her 18th birthday, this is the tale of her transition into adulthood, a exploration of a troubled teen and who she chooses to become.Having been a gung-ho daddy’s girl all her life, India’s relationship with her mother, played by Nicole Kidman, has always been lackluster to her mother’s dismay.

Kidman is the real tragic character here, playing a lonely, pitiable woman who really seemed to try to foster a relationship with her dismissive daughter but could never break down the icy boundaries between them. While I was at first under the impression that mother Evelyn would be painted as a villain, I found myself siding with this pleading, tragic character. Sure, maybe she should have tried a little harder in the past to be a better mother but there is an insurmountable misunderstanding between her and India that just cannot be summited.
 

Matthew Goode as Uncle Charlie is more than good and while it doesn’t take a long time to figure out that he’s a bona fide creeper, it’s the unpacking of what makes him such an eerie presence that gives Goode an opportunity to shine. There is so much festering behind his impossibly blue-hued eyes that the scenes were he just stares at India or Evelyn or just out into space are totally hypnotic. While I don’t want to give too much away here, it often seems that Goode channels that final moment that we see Norman Bates in the perfectly slow pan out in Psycho.

After all is said and done, Stoker adds up to a wonderfully paced creep-fest that knows exactly where to mine for the best elements of suspense. It’s morbid revelry in the underbelly of family secrets offers up some tasty moments of macabre and underscores the film with a lurid fascination with the root of all evil. What lingers on after the credits roll is this creeping sense that malevolence may just be hereditary.

 

As an artistic endeavor, Spring Breakers has the depth of a comb-over and the appeal of a Girls Gone Wild DVD rendered in slow motion. That is to say, it could be worse. Unfortunately for filmmaker Harmony Korine, no-one cued him in to the fact that his audience, even a predominantly male audience, can only ogle at bobbling breasts and sun-scorched beaches for so long before they start to remember that they’re in a movie theater to see an actual film. An actual film being something this experimental montage doesn’t ever add up to.

Korine quickly lathers on a wallpaper of foreshadow as we meet four college chicks whose purposed bone-deep friendship seems impossible or at least highly unlikely. As Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Brit (Ashley Benson) doddle pictures of dongs in their dimly lit lecture, Cottie (Rachel Korine who is actually the wife of director Harmony) slugs down bong rips and the shamelessly named Faith (Disney‘s Selena Gomez) half-heartedly attends a youth church group. Faith’s church friends pound home the fact that the other girls are bad news but the message only partially comes across to the thick-headed do-gooder.

In order to finance their trip to an unnamed but stereotypical Spring Break locale, Candy and Brit talk Cottie into stealing her professor’s car so that they can rob a restaurant. Bing, bang, boom, they grab the cash, scoop up Faith and make off to Florida. Instead of trying to flesh out the mental states of these wild childs or attempt to rationalize the unexplained addition of Faith, a character who clearly wouldn’t be morally on board with these highly illegal endeavors, Korine glosses over the affair with a montage of boobies. And while the hypnotic barrage of slow motion bouncing breasts and brain-blistering dubstep tunes almost tricked us into forgetting that we are supposed to be watching a narrative with plot and character develop, he doesn’t quite get away with it this time. Nice try but no dice.

Interspliced between sun-baked shots of partially nude and, of course, fully nude people (mind you: these are humans that don’t look like people I’d ever want to hang out with) fist bumping, water bouncing, doing all imaginable kinds of hooking up and executing copious bong rips and lines of blow, is some sembleance of the girls “discovering themselves” or at least that’s what they say to their mommies when they call home to gloat…I mean report in. Again, we don’t see them doing any kind of soul searching out here, just a lot of good old fashion partying like a rock star. We may be told that there is something more going on with these girls but there’s no evidence of that onscreen.

Finally, a flicker of thesbianic hope enters the equation when the girls wind up in jail for partying way too hard and are serendipitously bailed out by a gold-plate toothed James Franco, who simply goes by the name Alien. Flunky-rapper by day and drug-kingpin by night, Franco immediately illuminates the screen with his G-diction and farcical little characer bits, offering a much needed lump of levity  and opening up the narrative to new possibilities. Unfortunately, Korine squanders the opportunities afforded him by Franco and simply allows the film to flounder in a new wading pool of mediocrity.

It’s not hard to miss the cautionary warning mixed up in their affair about the dangers of drugs, sex and power but it’s carried out with the subtly of a pink elephant. It gets to the point where the pitiable well of scripted narrative runs dry so the few clunky through lines peppered through Spring Breakers are repeated again and again, broadcasting an impractically tone-deafness on the part of Korine to the ridiculous redundancies scattered throughout the film that babble on and on like a broken record.

While it might not be fair to point the finger exclusively at Korine, it’s just hard to swallow that this film was actually edited by an actual editor. At it’s core, there stands a powerful message about the captivating sway of the unorthodox, the hypnotic descent and the fierce disillusionment of reality but it’s totally let down by a sweltering decrescendo in momentum and just plain dumb film-making. Things get wild and things get racy when you’re under the spell of a neon-streaked Spring Break rave but when you’re not jammed full of ecstasy, it’s fairly easy to see the abundantly uninteresting attendees and the seams come melting apart.

In Spring Breakers defense, it’s not all bad. I didn’t hate the nudity, in fact, I rather liked it but that seductive allure is hardly an excuse for the badly bandaged final product this movie turned out to be. Also on the plus side, we can add in Franco and a memorably avante garde shoot out but that’s about it. If some well written scribe had sat down and churned out about 20-30 more pages to tack into the script or made the executive decision to turn this helplessly wandering narrative into a short film, I’m sure it would have been a lot more successful. Instead, Korine overextends himself again and again, winding up with an undeniably titillating film characterized by shallow character development, endless montages and the worst editing this side of Bollywood.