***½/****
starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker
screenplay by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright
directed by Breck Eisner
by Walter Chaw A military plane transporting a biological agent designed to
destabilize civilian populations is headed for incineration when it
crash-lands in tiny Ogden Marsh, IA, causing a few of the local yokels
to start acting on all the urges that the veneer of civilization holds
in check. A father kills his wife and son, a school principal
dispatches a few of his students, a coroner begins stitching up the
living, and Sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, good as sheriffs) is left
to consider that for as naughty as these actions are, they're not so
out of character for the people he protects. (It takes a while for him
to deadpan that they might be in a little bit of trouble.) The Crazies
plays with the thought that there's not only not much of a line
separating acceptable behaviour from homicidal, there's also not much
of a line between the infected townspeople and the military choppered
in to contain them. In a good film's best moment, Dutton and his deputy
capture a young soldier (Joe Reegan) and allow him a few minutes to be
afraid and to enact a moment of grace that, if you think about it
later, facilitates the complete destruction of another, larger urban
population. A lot like the mordant epilogue of the also-fantastic 28 Weeks Later
(another film that deals with the problem of occupation armies and the
suppression of insurgencies), the ultimate source of trouble here is
the heroic, quintessentially American desire to survive no matter the
cost to the greater good.
Whip-smart and laced with a sly sense of
humour, Breck Eisner's excellent update of George Romero's same-named
film gratifies most in its refusal to condescend to its audience. It's
a better Romero movie than Romero made, as it happens; there's not a
moment in this remake that's over-written, that strikes a false note or
teeters over, as the original does, habitually, into
desperation-betraying shrillness. It doesn't have speeches to make
about the misdeeds of the military or the impotence of the government
(both seem extraordinarily efficient, truth be told), and it trusts its
cast to live out the relationships their characters have with one
another, just as it trusts us to be canny anthropologists of their
behaviour. That's why there's all this nervous laughter when trusty
deputy Clank (a movie-stealing Joe Anderson) starts getting the
crazy-eyes at exactly the moment his aim improves. Typically tight,
well-conceived, and ultimately a microcosm of why
The Crazies works,
a scene in which our heroes find themselves in a clunker being
processed through an automated car-wash is punctuated by the dual
punchline of a surprise fatality and the sudden, almost whimsical
return of a military gunship. The picture's funny, claustrophobic,
cleanly-edited, and not without pathos.
Look to another great scene where we witness the best hand-trauma since Blood Simple,
paid off as a little bit of the old ultra-violence is visited upon a
baddie who maybe didn't entirely deserve the fate afforded her. As she
dies, we can't help but remember her speech early on excoriating Dutton
for making unfair, ruinous assumptions about her dead husband and
marvel at the film's remarkable comfort with ambiguity. There are no
villains in The Crazies, only a vacuum where a comfortable idea
of order used to be and an invitation to consider the ramifications of
a quiet moment late in the picture with the sheriff pledging his
undying devotion to pregnant wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) in a deserted
truck stop. Death and despair perpetuate because we insist upon
life--and meanwhile, dark ruminations aside, The Crazies delivers the goods with clockwork precision. In its efficiency, pervasive sense of melancholic doom, and Mark Isham's Tangerine Dream-like score, I was reminded of Steve De Jarnatt's underestimated apocalyptic love story Miracle Mile.
Even the discovery of the source of the contamination, a throwaway
moment in a lesser film as Dutton's skiff glides to a stop atop the
outline of a giant, submerged military transport vehicle, is executed
with cool elegance.
The menace in The Crazies is woven in
this way into its visual fabric, bubbling up from below and crashing
down from above in numerous shots of Iowan skies so grey and infinite
that they gain the texture of an ocean pressing in on this American
Gothic. Alexandre Aja's favourite DP Maxime Alexandre's cinematography
suggests a cosmic vice closing slow from first frame to last, a visual
demonstration that the best kind of nihilism is spiced with Sartre's
black existential irony. The Crazies is a prime example of a
picture that has a lot to say about who we are at a specific moment in
our cultural development. It talks of London Bridges falling down in
the very middle of how we define ourselves as a nation, and it's very
possibly the first hint of what the best films this year will be about.
It's a lot better than it had to be. Originally published: March 5, 2010.
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