The main problem with the picture is that there's no time taken to develop Emily before she turns into a bug-eating, wallpaper-tearing, Aramaic-spouting dervish. A cipher from the start, her transformation isn't a transformation so much as it's simply Emily--and if this drooling ghoul should die in the course of her exorcism, well, that's just one of those things. We know it's going to happen from the first minute, anyway, starting at the end as the film does. (In so doing, it also reassures us that the only casualty of the exorcism will be Emily.) Worse, without anything else resembling character development, we're left trying to suck a lot of meaning out of what we're provided. Like Emily's excitement at getting a scholarship for college, thus freeing her from her briefly-glimpsed life as an extra in a Grant Wood painting. That scene's followed immediately by some flat courtroom testimony from a maid or something and then shots of how Emily is terrified and alone on campus, seeing demons in the faces of her classmates. The suggestion, without anything else to go on, is that she should never have gone after an education. Moreover, she probably shouldn't have taken a boyfriend in non-descript Jason (Joshua Close, the actor in the cast least capable of disguising the travesty of a screenplay)--a decision that suggests not only that Emily isn't as devout as others have made her out to be, but also that the script (by Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman) is crutch-heavy to the point where it couldn't resist a love interest, even if it never develops that relationship beyond a label.

A few scary scenes manage to outweigh the banality (and stupidity: consider the bit where Emily's dad gets kicked in the head by a horse in full froth but is "okay" a second later) of the rest of it for a while, but as Derrickson and Boardman pile courtroom contrivance upon courtroom contrivance (the key witness murdered the day of his testimony, the moral superiority, the rogue counsel, the surprise evidence, the tough-talking judge, yadda yadda yadda), patience inevitably flags. The "true story" upon which the film is based isn't sexy enough, I guess, for a straight treatment, thus we're given a stupendously familiar treatment whose middlebrow intentions are cast into harsher relief by the decision to subtitle the demon's forays into dead tongues--which, if we presume that none of the people around Emily can speak ancient Greek, Aramaic, German, or Latin, is for our benefit and, apparently, so that we never feel any kind of connection with the characters' confusion and fear. Truth be told, if the best the devil can come up with is "You just try to get me out, I dare you!", I'd just as soon imagine that it's saying "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell, Karras." It's a movie about demonic possession that doesn't wish to offend so that it can rationalize its own existence as a means to draw its audience closer to a Catholic god. As far as proselytizing-through-exploitation goes, The Passion of the Christ did it better, and with better cinematography and a lot more convincing gore to boot.

Tom Wilkinson is fabulous as the priest who goes on trial for Emily's negligent homicide; Campbell Scott is one-dimensional, but venomously so, as a heat-seeking prosecutor; and Linney, as the defense attorney, is weak and wet-eyed in the courtroom sequences but excellent in the more intimate exchanges between her counsellor Bruner and Wilkinson's Father Moore. But you have to figure that the way The Exorcism of Emily Rose attracted its sterling cast in the first place is by offering each of its three major players bloated, principled monologues and pressure-cooker stand-offs in bars and jail cells. Meaning that the real tragedy of the piece isn't the death of Anneliese Michel in 1973, but the selling-out of all that talent for the opportunity to puff out their chests and prowl the proscenium, no matter how unfinished their characters or rote the piece's narrative machinations. It makes me inclined not so much to praise the cast for delivering great performances in a terrible film shot from a terrible script as to condemn them for it. Damned if you do, B-List character actor if you don't.

If The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a revival tent that encourages a dangerous collective belief in the supernatural at the expense of a real person killed for the pervasiveness of similar beliefs, then the ice cream-suited revival-tent preacher is writer-director Scott Derrickson, who modestly cops to reading over two-thousand books on demonic possession in preparation for this film on its DVD release. That means, conservatively speaking, that he read a book a day for six years, give or take, while still finding time to work on the screenplay and handle the many things a director needs to handle to get a project going. Is it possible? I guess so. Is it more likely that he's full of shit? Sure--or a sloppy reader. Because the thing of it is that The Exorcism of Emily Rose doesn't demonstrate any uniqueness whatsoever, and that much of the commentary by Derrickson (the idiot behind the pretentious faux-noir Hellraiser: Inferno) and, within an extended featurette, co-scriptor Paul Boardman, has to do with how much they were drawn by the fact that this story combined two shopworn genres into one coated capsule. What they saw was hardly an opportunity for research and innovation, but a way to cash in, Million Dollar Baby-like, on a pair of can't-miss, prefab contraptions. It could've been a film that examines the divide between faith and reason; it's content to be two bad films mashed together by a hack director pretentious enough to name-check both Ingmar Bergman and Dario Argento as primary influences in his yak-track.

Derrickson addresses whether or not Emily is actually possessed by affecting an undergraduate ambiguity about it all that suggests he doesn't really have anything to say. He talks a lot--calling Laura Linney a "gift" to him as a director--and generally pays out just enough rope with which to hang himself several times over. Chief revelation here is that, in addition to reading thousands of books preparatory to the shoot, he watched every courtroom drama ever made. The Verdict, To Kill a Mockingbird, Inherit the Wind, A Few Good Men, Anatomy of a Murder, and on and on are name-checked before Derrickson drops the bombshell that he wasn't that visually ambitious in the courtroom scenes. "Ambition" is a word that Derrickson likes a lot, by the by, and I don't think it always means what he thinks it means. (With his rimless glasses, ponytail, weak chin, and soul patch, Derrickson is every inch the creepy thirtysomething dude who hangs out at the student union.) Lack of visual ambition doesn't seem to jibe with the rantings of production designer David Brisbin: in the third of three featurettes, "Visual Design" (19 mins.), Brisbin matches Derrickson's smarmy intensity with squinty madness of his own, adamant that none of the extraordinarily familiar locations in the film are anything that's ever been seen onscreen before. Most puzzling is the rigid colour schemata of the picture that declares orange as indicative of "great horror," blue as verboten, and green as "peace" without going into any kind of detail as to why. "Orange represents horror" is not analysis, it's arbitrary and, more to the point, it's pretense with no ultimate basis in theory. In the cosmology of Emily Rose, cumquats represent terror with the same kind of weight as orange.

"Genesis of the Story" (20 mins.) confirms that the film is based very, very, very loosely on a true story. Derrickson's recollections about first learning of Anneliese Michel invariably include the fact that he was working on a Jerry Bruckheimer picture, meaning that Derrickson is a shameless name-dropper who knows the kinds of movies he's going to be making from this point forward. What I'm really sick of, by the way, are these jackhole directors who declare their own films to be really funny or really scary. I have to say, though, that from its opening shot of pumpkins rotting on the vine to its central image of a barbed wire fence dripping with blood, The Exorcism of Emily Rose looks great on DVD, whose "Widescreen Unrated Version"* sports a brilliant and moody 2.40:1, 16x9-enhanced video transfer. Black level is excellent, shadow detail is crisp, and the attendant DD 5.1 audio is thunderous, if not particularly imaginative or logical. (Since so much of this flick is just chatting, a mono mix would've sufficed.) As for the unrated footage, it consists of three additional minutes of badly-written yelling in the courtroom that wouldn't have impacted the film's PG-13 rating had the studio bothered to submit to the MPAA.

Linney takes credit for bringing on Campbell Scott, and the whole thing depresses for the amount of tap-dancing done around the liberties taken with the Michel case for the sake of providing an extraordinarily facile entertainment. I hate to pile on, but I feel like I have to mention that Jennifer Carpenter misuses the word "rumination" in her talking-head. It's a small thing, but it's indicative of the problems of the film and its special features: lots of exciting words and ideas, very little comprehension of them demonstrated. The actors predictably receive a tongue bath in "Casting the Movie" (12 mins.), with Carpenter's screaming and writhing and bleeding garnering the curious praise that key points of the picture were adapted to accommodate her virtuoso melodramatic, horror-styled suffering. Derrickson reveals that he had no casting preconceptions because he feels that is "so limiting"--leading me to wonder what the hell he's talking about, given that his experience as a director includes a short, a direct-to-video horror franchise knock-off, and now this. A two-and-a-half minute deleted scene finds the Linney character almost being raped by a too-enthusiastic date (you can watch it with commentary if your stomach is lined with lead), while previews for a sick amount of bad movies (The Da Vinci Code, The Fog (2005), The Gospel, The Grudge, The Pink Panther (2006), The Amityville Horror, The Amityville Horror (2005), Boogeyman, Into the Blue, MirrorMask, Open Season, Sueño, The Cave) round out the presentation.-Walter Chaw

*"Widescreen Theatrical Version" also available.

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
122 minutes
MPAA
Unrated
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.40:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English
DVD-9
Region One
Sony

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Published: January 31, 2006