no such thing
Aug. 1st, 2009 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intertribalNo Such Thing (2001) is not a cohesive movie. The first third of the movie - about a tabloid journalist (played by Sarah Polley, which is always a plus) who goes to Iceland to find out if a monster killed her fiance and the rest of the film crew - is very strong. Very moody, very dark, almost keeping itself at a bit of a distance from its subjects to allow for the landscape and minor characters to add to the movie's feel. Iceland, of course, is a commanding presence. There's even a plane crash involved, wonderfully handled. Parts of it feel like the first movie I saw Sarah Polley in, Atom Egoyan's soul-shaking The Sweet Hereafter. An early scene between the locals and the monster is all dry wit and a rocky ocean, like a gritty Nordic fable, like Egil Saga. Hell, even like Ragnarok. This is how the movie should have stayed.
Then we meet the monster, who has woodenish horns and breathes fire and lives on a rock in the ocean. He is a people-killer, but all we see are the skeletons on his rock-island - he doesn't actually kill anybody during the movie. The monster is a gruff, sensitive type, a hard drinker who greets the journalist with "what the fuck are you lookin' at?" He wants to die because he's been around since the beginning of time and is tired of watching human civilization, and only one doctor knows how to kill him, so he and the journalist head off to try and find this doctor. By this point the movie's already taken a bit of a dip into pop-camp territory, but there's some really nice scenes where the monster and the journalist are trekking through Icelandic villages, awkwardly sitting with the locals. Once they get back to New York, however (the journalist's bosses have usurped the project), the movie becomes totally pop-camp. Some of this - the absurdity of the monster as a pseudo-celebrity, still smashing televisions and spewing sarcasm - is really funny, though very emotionally shallow in comparison to the beginning. The characters - who I originally felt were very real - are reduced to punch lines. Then the doctor comes into the picture, and he's a disappointing non-entity. Then the military steps in to run experiments on the monster, and the journalist has to rescue the monster from the evil scientists and the movie teeters into a very tired cliche. Apparently this is the filmmaker's (Hal Hartley) attempt to make Beauty and the Beast (and that is about how long this cliche has been around, it was in the original fairytale). Note that the abused, misunderstood monster cliche only feels like a cliche when carried out insincerely, without emotional resonance - that's when it becomes a throwaway gimmick, an obligatory "moral to the story", similar to the way every Disney movie ends up with the characters learning that friends should stick together and we should all follow our dreams. The outsider-insider-who-is-the-real-monster set-up is an important issue for any community. This kind of treatment belittles it.
It's a shame, because I think if Hal Handley had stuck to his original setting/cinematography, he probably could have made a movie with a similar message about monsters and people that felt like it meant something. They get back to Iceland in the end, but it's too late. Save a few moments of slow-going, understated honesty between the journalist and the monster on the journey home, it's drivel, and a big let-down given the way the movie started.
Then we meet the monster, who has woodenish horns and breathes fire and lives on a rock in the ocean. He is a people-killer, but all we see are the skeletons on his rock-island - he doesn't actually kill anybody during the movie. The monster is a gruff, sensitive type, a hard drinker who greets the journalist with "what the fuck are you lookin' at?" He wants to die because he's been around since the beginning of time and is tired of watching human civilization, and only one doctor knows how to kill him, so he and the journalist head off to try and find this doctor. By this point the movie's already taken a bit of a dip into pop-camp territory, but there's some really nice scenes where the monster and the journalist are trekking through Icelandic villages, awkwardly sitting with the locals. Once they get back to New York, however (the journalist's bosses have usurped the project), the movie becomes totally pop-camp. Some of this - the absurdity of the monster as a pseudo-celebrity, still smashing televisions and spewing sarcasm - is really funny, though very emotionally shallow in comparison to the beginning. The characters - who I originally felt were very real - are reduced to punch lines. Then the doctor comes into the picture, and he's a disappointing non-entity. Then the military steps in to run experiments on the monster, and the journalist has to rescue the monster from the evil scientists and the movie teeters into a very tired cliche. Apparently this is the filmmaker's (Hal Hartley) attempt to make Beauty and the Beast (and that is about how long this cliche has been around, it was in the original fairytale). Note that the abused, misunderstood monster cliche only feels like a cliche when carried out insincerely, without emotional resonance - that's when it becomes a throwaway gimmick, an obligatory "moral to the story", similar to the way every Disney movie ends up with the characters learning that friends should stick together and we should all follow our dreams. The outsider-insider-who-is-the-real-monster set-up is an important issue for any community. This kind of treatment belittles it.
It's a shame, because I think if Hal Handley had stuck to his original setting/cinematography, he probably could have made a movie with a similar message about monsters and people that felt like it meant something. They get back to Iceland in the end, but it's too late. Save a few moments of slow-going, understated honesty between the journalist and the monster on the journey home, it's drivel, and a big let-down given the way the movie started.
