America, meet your sexiest new star.
Where to begin. “The Box” doesn’t really make any sense, the acting is inconsistent (with the notable exception of Frank Langella), the score is abominable and Richard Kelly doesn’t seem to understand how unintentionally funny some of the images he puts on the screen are. That being said, there’s a certain charm to such a ridiculous movie taking itself so seriously. And underneath the silliness, it does seem like Kelly has important things to say. He’s just not sure how to say them with his chosen medium.
“The Box” stars Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and most of Frank Langella and is very loosely based on a short story titled “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson. Matheson was an experienced writer of print and screen who wrote many of the old episodes of The Twilight Zone, and the original plot reflects the same kind of sensibilities (it was also turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone during the brief 1980s revival). The basic story is that a couple in financial straits receives a box with a button on it. The mysterious man who gives them the box tells them that if they press the button, they will receive a million dollars, but someone they don’t know will die. Predictably, they press it. The mysterious man gives them the money and departs telling them that he’s off to give the box to somebody else – and he’s sure it will be someone that they don’t know! It’s a formulaic and fun short story in the tradition of O. Henry and it features a great twist, but it is not something that could be turned into a 2 hour movie. Realizing this, Kelly gets the original plot out of the way in the first half hour and uses the rest of his film to ponder deeper box-related questions: how the box works, why the guy with the box keeps going around giving it to people, who the guy is, and so on. Guess what Kelly’s answers are! Seriously, just guess. Even after watching the film I’m not sure, but they involve lightning, the NSA, the Viking program, weird looking water and aliens or god or something. Kelly’s answers are often as surprising as they are nonsensical.
Beyond the original box story, I’m still not sure I quite get what was going on this film. The film, too, does not even seem to be sure of what is going on, or even really care. In light of this apparent approach to film making, it would be easy to dismiss Kelly as a lousy second pressing of David Lynch; after all, they both deploy a set of idiosyncratic tropes in the framework of an abstruse story in service of some “greater message” that challenges the audience. But Kelly differs from Lynch in that he appears to actually want to do something more than just challenge the audience. The incoherence in the story comes off less as a Lynchian cinematic pretension and more as a simple failure to effectively communicate his ideas. With The Box, I believe Kelly tries to suggest something about free will, determinism and the nature of redemption. He just needs a better editor to bring that out of the jumble that he presents the audience with. More importantly, he also needs to find a better person or group to score the film than the members of Arcade Fire, an otherwise very talented band that composes a truly awful score.
The serious tone that Kelly cultivates throughout the film is constantly undermined by its bombastic and melodramatic score. Taken alone, the score sounds alternately like the soundtrack to a soap opera or a lost Tchaikovsky composition; as a part of this film, it intrudes on and ruins nearly every scene. The only meaningful purpose I could figure for having such a hamfisted score is that Kelly intended it to function sort of like a laugh track. Without hearing sad and mournful strings wailing away in the background, the average moviegoer would probably be confused by the sight of Cameron Diaz’s deformed foot (”Is this supposed to be arty? Creepy? Oh, there’s the sad music, I’m supposed to feel sorry for her!”). Worried, perhaps, that his metaphysical mumbo jumbo and scatterbrained plot would leave audiences confused and unsure how to interpret various scenes, Kelly beats the viewer over the head with the musical equivalent of a sledgehammer just to make sure that we “get” it.
I walked out of the theater unsure of whether I liked this movie or not. Perhaps that’s not even the right way of looking at it. The plot was certainly muddled and at times outright preposterous, but ultimately more satisfying than watching some David Lynch monstrosity where you slog through 2 hours of “provocative” imagery to find out that the secret behind the film is that some guy bought a bag of chips at a gas station in Beverly Hills – and that that “symbolizes something.” The Box, though it does occasionally entertain, is worthwhile moreso because of the issues that it prompts the audience to contemplate. There is indeed something meaningful in the core of this film, though it might not be quite as profound as maybe Kelly thinks it is. I’m just not sure whether the privilege of considering that something is worth the 9 dollars admission. It is a decent effort, and irrespective of its many flaws, it holds the audience’s attention. When an extremely ambitious film fails, it at least fails while trying something new and original. And that’s more than can be said of most movies from large Hollywood studios.