In which we have fun watching twitchy Jake Gyllenhaal twitch.
Writer: Aaron Guzikowski
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Melissa Leo, Maria Bello, David Dastmalchian
Runtime: 153 mins.
2013
Before seeing the movie, there was nothing in particular that enticed me about Prisoners. The promotional posters were dour, the trailers forgettable. The title didn't inspire. Jackman and Gyllenhaal can be strong actors, but have an equal propensity for coasting. Even the premise itself, a dark gritty child abduction thriller, feels been-there-done-that.
It took a very direct and specific recommendation for me to seek the movie out, and I'm glad because most of my preconceptions were askew. As far as thrillers go Prisoners manages to be thrilling for most of its bloated 153 minutes, which is high praise for a genre subject to more cliches than most.
The narrative follows two parallel and oft-intertwining threads, that of bereft father Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) searching for his kidnapped daughter, and that of disillusioned Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) also searching for Keller's kidnapped daughter. Their neighbors' (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) child is also abducted, though that family's involvement with the story is disappointingly slight. Also disappointingly slight is the role of Keller's wife, Grace Dover (Maria Bello), who spends most of the movie hysterical in bed popping pills.
Anyway, Detective Loki finds an immediate suspect in Alex Jones (Paul Dano), who was driving around a suspicious RV earlier sighted in the Dovers' neighborhood. Unfortunately, he turns out to be an apparent simpleton who seems incapable of answering straightforward questions, let alone executing the abduction of two adolescent girls. Detective Loki is forced to explore other possible suspects, which causes Keller Dover to take the matter of Alex Jones into his own hands...
The first thing that bears mentioning is that Aaron Guzikowski is an able screenwriter who has a weakness for atrocious character names. If you're going to name a character after the trickster god, who has achieved more cultural penetration now than ever before thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you better have a damned good thematic reason for it. Instead, Detective Loki is little more than an impassioned agent of the law. He never does anything remotely tricky or misleading. He's smart but he isn't cunning per se. His main trait seems to be doggedness. Yet he is saddled with the misguided connotations of that name. And the less said about "Keller Dover" the better.
That aside, Prisoners has its fair share of twists and turns, some of which are engaging and some of which are alienating. The tangible air of mystery and the constant red herrings (that are maybe more than they seem) are the bread and butter of this movie, and they stir up this really great tension that lingers through most of it. Alex Jones in particular is a great source of confounding ambiguity, with Paul Dano delivering a typically sniveling and creepy performance. Jackman and Gyllenhaal are also in fine form, their performances displaying little subtlety, but both pursued with a full-on intensity that is really all you need in a thriller. They help propel the deliciously twisty plot and keep it from dragging.
Until the hefty third act, that is, whereupon mystery slowly transmutes to tedium, and the reveals get kind of goofy. It's not that the third act is bad, per se, it's more that the rest of the movie set such a high bar for eschewing typical thriller silliness. There's one particular late jump scare involving snakes in lockboxes that feels like a cheap shot after the mature restraint Prisoners had shown for so long.
None of that is anywhere close to a deal breaker, though, because the very best aspect of Prisoners is its cinematography. This is courtesy of Roger Deakins, perhaps the most legendary of currently working cinematographers. His oh so distinguished resume includes The Shawshank Redemption, A Beautiful Mind, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Skyfall, and nearly every movie the Coen Bros. have ever made. His work here elevates the material tenfold. I kid you not, Deakins manages to evoke intense dread in the opening scenes, before anything bad has even happened, by lingering on shots of some trees. He makes the trees look so damned sinister! He somehow manages to make frequent shots of people getting out of cars, or talking to people in cars, interesting and exciting. There's a nighttime race against time in a police car that is the most beautiful such scene I have ever beheld, with the washed out police reds and blues mixing with the yellows of the other headlights, all reflecting off the rainslick asphalt. And of course, there's the famous torture scene, which Deakins and director Villeneuve present with brutal clarity. Apparently the scene was so gruesome that when Prisoners was originally submitted to the MPAA it earned a rare NC-17 rating--they had to cut down a few scenes to bring it down to the much more bankable R.
If only the themes weren't so slipshod. The title Prisoners becomes evocative, because it's too slippery to apply to any one thing in the movie. You get to think of the ways that people become prisoners of their own obligations, forcing them into destructive courses of action that they feel they must pursue. But this ultimately falls a bit flat at the end when character motivations become needlessly muddied. There is also a heavy-handed motif of reliance on or reference to religion, which never really goes anywhere. People just talk about God every so often and it doesn't seem to inform their actions all that much. A wasted opportunity.
Combine that with dialogue that is never any more than above average, and we have a movie that looks and feels far more high-minded than it is at its core. Even so, it makes for a far more compelling experience than what I anticipated.
3 / 5 BLOBS
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