 |
| Review: 'Carrie' is a ''new'' version of a classic |
After all, we see new versions of
Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams all the time (whether on stage or screen).
What's wrong with doing an updated version of a beloved Hollywood movie? In
theory, nothing, yet in practice, it seldom works out well. There's something
about how movies, with their singularity of mood and density of detail, imprint
themselves on our imaginations that places the prospect of a remake somewhere
between a rock and a hard place. Think about it: If you follow the original too
closely, duplicating signature shots or lines of dialogue or acting flourishes,
then you're stuck in a mode of mindless imitation — and what's the point of
that? People might as well just watch the great version they already know (or,
for new generations, have yet to discover). But if you seriously update the
movie in question, making a lot of eyebrow-raising changes, then you risk
violating the essence of the original — or leaving out too much of what
everyone loved about it in the first place. When you get down to it, a ''new''
version of a classic is a contradiction in terms.
Carrie, the rapturous and
terrifying 1976 Brian De Palma thriller based on Stephen King's first novel, is
a movie that has earned its place as a quirky horror milestone without,
perhaps, ever having quite attained the status of a masterpiece. Yet I personally
think it's a great film. There's nothing that compares to its glittery fusion
of dreaminess and dread — of Cinderella-at-the-prom fantasy and blood-bucket
horror, all mixed up with elements of '70s teensploitation comedy and primally
entangled mother-daughter tragedy. And what acting! Sissy Spacek, as the
squashed-nerd telekinetic high school wallflower Carrie, and Piper Laurie, as
her ragingly repressed Evangelical mom, achieved a tremulous power together.
And De Palma, a prankish virtuoso, perched the whole thing on the knife's edge
between sincerity and satire. Carrie is a timeless movie because it's both one
of the most passionate and most scandalously funny horror films ever made.
So what does one do for a remake
encore? Kimberly Peirce, the gifted director of the new Carrie, has gone down
what seems, on the surface, to be a savvy road. She follows De Palma's version
quite faithfully, evoking everything from his camera angles to his lighting to
his flying-object F/X to his gleeful staging of mean-girl antics. At the same
time, she offers just enough tweaks and updated details to present the material
in a new way.
The fabled shower-room scene, in
which the naïve, sheltered Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) gets her first
period and is shocked into thinking that she's dying, now has an added fillip
of cruelty: Chris, the most hateful of the girls, doesn't just pelt Carrie with
tampons and shout ''Plug it up!'' She records the whole ordeal on her
smartphone and then posts the video. In a neat reversal, Chris and her best
friend, the popular but far more empathetic Sue (who feels so guilty about what
happened that she gets her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom), are both
portrayed against type: Nice-girl Sue is played by Gabriella Wilde, who looks
like a vintage snooty princess, whereas the awful Chris is made into a pensive
bohemian punk by Portia Doubleday. And Carrie's mother (Julianne Moore), a
fundamentalist fanatic who tries to cut Carrie off from the world, is now
herself a cutter who pinpricks her own flesh in secret. Moore makes her fierce,
guilt-tripping, and scary — but not, in the way that Laurie did, almost
religiously possessed.
Despite being 40 years old now,
the Carrie story lives quite comfortably in the 21st century. Here's the
problem, though. The original film had King's ingenious plot, with its fusion
of innocence and cruelty and that subliminal wink of demonic takeover, but it
also had De Palma's voluptuous operatic style, which gave the story the quality
of a daydream-turned-nightmare. When you take away that style and serve up the
plot fairly straight, as Peirce does here, we seem to be watching a Carrie
that's been flattened, robbed of its over-the-top emotional extravagance.
Given the challenge of revamping
Spacek's brilliant shivery-nerd-turned-avenger performance, Chloë Grace Moretz
does a creditable job. In stiff hair and lumpish clothing, she's very much the
geek outsider (though today there's a much greater context for geeks as
heroines), and the emotions seem to bleed through her ghostly, lunar-pale skin.
Yet the way Peirce has updated Carrie White, without making any overt changes
to the character, is to portray her as a little less clueless, a little less
pathetic, a little more defiant. She's now a cute, bright, painfully shy girl
who sees herself (wrongly) as a loser. Before, she was a total walking blob of
misery and dysfunction. That slight tonal shift robs the story of its
masochistic edge.
Of course, Carrie isn't merely a
fable of adolescent agony. It's all about Carrie's revenge, once she's
subjected to the most diabolical practical ''joke'' in movie history. Carrie's
telekinetic powers, driven by the rage she represses, allowed De Palma to
orchestrate a senior-prom apocalypse that was pure filmmaking mastery. Peirce
stages the prom as a prosaic rerun, without a lot of gaudy inspiration. And
it's here that the real problem with redoing a classic reveals itself. Sure, a
lot of famous movies are timeless, yet they're also rooted in their time. In
the original Carrie, Spacek's character seemed to be channeling something
creepy and larger-than-life — maybe it was even the underworld. But now we're a
lot more accustomed to seeing movie characters mold their destiny through
special effects, and since Peirce films the climax in a rather depersonalized,
shoot-the-works way, Carrie comes close to seeming like an especially alienated
member of the X-Men team. She blows stuff up real good, in a way that would
make the devil — or Bruce Willis — proud. Grade: B--
0 comments :
Post a Comment