Retro Reel by Sreepathy, Volume 23

Retro Reel is a column about movies, but not about the latest box-office releases. There will be aspects of review, but the column is intended more as a recommendation of good movies of different genres, with the sense of a retrospective – hence, the ‘Retro’ in the name. In a day and age when movies are projected digitally, the word “reel” may seem retrograde and outdated. Yet, no other word captures the imagery of a movie as “Reel”…Sreepathy is an unabashed movie buff who loves a well-told onscreen story. He has a list of about 450 must-watch movies, and Retro Reel is an attempt to share with friends of a similar bent of mind, some of the best movie-watching experiences he has had. He lives in Naperville with his wife and two sons.

F a l l e n

What if evil were like the common cold – chilling and contagious?

I am not a big fan of the ‘Supernatural’ genre in movies. Mainly because, when the key to the central plot of a story is a supernatural event, it closes the door to any nuance of thought. You can only either accept or reject what is subjective – you cannot question it; neither can you reason with it. And while there is an easy comfort to be had in the one-or-zero binary choice of accepting or rejecting ideas, it’s not half as interesting as dealing with the layered complexity of reasoning. Worse are movies that call themselves “supernatural thrillers”. Many of them make the asinine mistake of unraveling an otherwise rational mystery through a supernatural explanation. You can either gnash your teeth or naively agree, but you cannot have any other reaction where “The-ghost-did-it!” is the key to solving a riddle. That’s exactly what happened with the more recent Aamir Khan starrer, Talaash. After a superbly well-structured, moody, atmospheric build-up, the movie rather abruptly ends with an irrational “ghostly” resolution. In doing so, it deflates itself and insults the very intelligence it intrigues for a major portion of its running time. Taunting the audience’s intelligence can only spell doom for a writer or director.

But there are exceptions. M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is a fine example where the supernatural dimension isn’t a big part of the central conflict in the story, but it still manages to thrill. It does so by introducing the twilight element – not to resolve, but to provide an unexpected twist in the tale. If you watch it carefully, even without that element the storyline is interesting – and complete! Or, take this edition’s recommendation, Fallen (1998), written by Nicholas Kazan and directed by Gregory Hoblit. Surprise is the intrinsic appeal of the supernatural, and yet, unlike other movies of its genre, Fallen doesn’t even try to surprise you. Right in the opening scenes of the narrative, its metaphysical nature becomes manifest. And without the surprise-value, the writer and director have to work harder to keep you intelligently involved in the yarn they’re spinning – and that’s what Kazan and Hoblit do. The question isn’t whether the story is believable or realistic, but how cogent and engaging its ideas are. It is like being given a puzzling lock and its key too, yet being fascinated by its design.

Fallen starts off with Detective John Hobbes – the best and the most honest man on the police-force – catching and bringing to book a dreaded serial killer, Edgar Reese, who is then executed for his crimes…Even then, the crimes don’t end. Hobbes and his team are boggled by a fresh rash of killings that continue to bear the signature of Reese’s methods. Like a virus, this evil not only spreads at will, unchecked, but also keeps reappearing at multiple places. Moreover, the killer leaves cryptic clues that tease and taunt Hobbes. Also, the crimes begin to get closer, and increasingly personal, to Hobbes. Being the thorough detective, he follows the trail of terror meticulously, even at the risk of grave danger to himself.

Very soon, a mystery-within-a-mystery unfolds when Hobbes discovers that thirty years ago another detective died under baffling circumstances after going through a concatenation of events that is eerily similar to whatever he’s going through now. Hobbes seeks out and gets in touch with that detective’s surviving daughter, Gretta Milano, who is now a professor of theology specializing in the study of demons and angels. Meanwhile, the crimes have gotten so personal that Hobbes is neatly implicated in one of them as a suspect. Now he is left with the only choice of attempting to put an end to this evil by taking it head-on, all by himself…

Gregory Hoblit’s direction does a great job of giving the movie its dark creepy feel, using cinematography adroitly to achieve that. There are a couple of scenes that truly manage to send severe chills down your spine, thanks to the way the camera pans over them. The movie is very well-acted but the best performance doesn’t come from the usually brilliant Denzel Washington playing the detective. The pitfall with high caliber is that you tend to demand more – at many places instead of internalizing the dread of the haunted, Washington displays the daring of the heroic. Embeth Davidtz, with her frail and vulnerable looks, is cast very well as Gretta Milano but the script doesn’t allow her otherwise interesting character to develop fully. But the best acting kudos, in my opinion, goes to John Goodman, who plays Jonesy, the detective’s loyal partner. And the other great piece of acting comes from Elias Koteas’ short role in the first ten minutes of the movie where he shakes you up with his chilling histrionics playing Edgar Reese, the serial-killer.

Fallen could have been a great movie – it starts some interesting conversations about fear, evil, God, and life but fails to carry them beyond the superficial level. Yet, if you’re looking for intelligent entertainment, it’s still a very good draw that satisfies you in its own way. Also, even though its circumstances invite them, the script does well to avoid a couple of trite temptations. One, it keeps its visuals free of any blood-and-gore; it opts to wrack your grey cells rather than wrench your guts. Two, it resists the introduction of a romantic dalliance between Hobbes and Gretta Milano. Yielding to those temptations would’ve distracted and diluted the narrative’s focus.

Though largely told from the perspective of Detective Hobbes, Fallen’s storytelling puts the audience in the balcony-seat through the interesting use of a plot-device known as “dramatic irony” in literature/drama. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows and understands the context much more than the characters themselves in the drama. Which almost prompts you to yell, “Watch out!”, when one of them is in a dangerous situation. Rather than feel the tension through suspense externally imposed on it by the writer/director, the audience breathes the tension through the characters’ uncertainty or ignorance. How that effect is achieved in this movie I won’t tell you; go watch and experience it firsthand. Alongside all this, the narrative also lays out the framework for how the demon functions – its methods, its processes, its strengths, and yes, its weaknesses too. Evil, it seems, is not infallible or invincible. And despite letting the audience on so much, the plot still serves up a twist in the endgame that you do not anticipate – at least I didn’t.

As I said before, Fallen is ultimately not about believability, but about an ability to tell an unlikely story smartly.

PS: Rated R (language), ‘Fallen’ is available in the Naperville Public Library and on Netflix.