A widow with ESP (Cate Blanchett) lives with her son in a small Southern town, helping people by trying to "read" their futures and living on donations. There are folks who don't like that kind of devlish stuff 'round here. Katie disappears. Blanchett, who is one of those psychics who cannot control their "visions" so that she can only get glimpses of things that have happened or might happen, has a vision of Holmes' body at the bottom of a pond. She reveals her vision to the Sheriff (good performance by Dr. Emil Skoda, I mean J. K. Simmons). Well, he's one of the local empiricists and doesn't believe her but takes her out to a pond resembling the one seen in her vision. Sure enough. They drag Katie's remains out of it. Where was Tom Cruise when she needed him?
I won't go on with the plot. It gets twisted around a bit and the end won't come as a great big surprise if you've seen a couple of other thrillers with metaphysical overtones.
It was written by the co-authors of the far superior, "One False Move." But this is a pretty weak effort. We hear New Age lines from a bunch of small-minded townies. A man and a woman are attracted to one another but when he comes on to her, she backs hesitantly away and says, "I don't think this is a good idea right now." (The guy is falling-down drunk so it's hard to see what the idea was in the first place.) "She's gone," the man tells the woman, "but I have to learn to live with that, just as you have to learn to live with the loss of your husband." (Real MEN don't talk like that.) And, later, "I'm so sorry I wasn't there for you when you needed me." The director, Raimi, is efficient without being in the least original. The music cues us about looming threats. When Blanchett is worried, a shadow crosses her curtain -- but it turns out to be a friend! As the climax approaching, to heighten the tension, there is a windy thunderstorm full of rain and strobe lightning. (Ho hum.) At the end, when all is being revealed, the rain is replaced by fog. One blow from a flashlight conks a full-grown man out for the duration just because the script calls for it.
Blanchett is about to be murderized at the pond but she is saved by a disturbed young man whom she had earlier tried to help. The young man, Giovanni Ribisi, is supposed to be in a psychiatric hospital but, "I escaped," he tells her. He doesn't tell her how he managed to find her and her would-be murderer in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night in the fog. Well, not that it matters, because it turns out that Ribisi has actually been dead for a couple of hours anyway. This takes us beyond the possibility of ESP and into the realm of the frankly supernatural. This raises certain interesting questions but the film doesn't address them. It's satisfied to be another everyday thriller with parallel universe harmonics.
All of that makes it sound like a movie to avoid but it's not. The reason it's not is that mysteries are kind of interesting. Whodunnit, you know? And the movie is saved by Cate Blanchett's sterling performance. She makes the movie.
She isn't exactly beautiful. She's lean and narrow shouldered. Her nose is long and pulpy, and her epicanthic fold is overdeveloped by Western tastes. But faces have characteristics or traits. Angelina Jolie's primary trait is sexuality. Gene Tierney's was staggering beauty. Agnes Moorehead's was sliminess of a particularly feminine sort. Blanchett's primary trait is perceptivity. Not intelligence in any academic sense, but an ability to figure things out, to see through them, to discern patterns and form Gestalts. This trait is put to good use, of course, in a role that calls for psychic abilities, but she showed the same ability to use her skills in "Elizabeth" too, where instead of hesitancy and anxiety the role called for a growing self confidence.
Her accent alone is fascinating. Her Commonwealth speech is quite thoroughly transformed into Southernness here. It's not the hillbilly speech of the upland South, and it's not from the low country either. Its closest analog is probably Texas or Oklahoma. She has even the slightest of marks down right. "I didn't really think anything OF it." And the vowel is prolonged and drawn out in a manner only found in the American South. (The same speech sound is heard in the vowel in "druuuunk.") Sorry. Bit of regional linguistics there.
Oh -- I ought to mention wardrobe too. A fine job. They've given Blanchett exactly the right unpretentious floppy clothes that an ordinary lower-middle-class Southern widow of no sophistication might wear. Example: In one important scene, she wears this fuzzy white V-necked sweater -- angora or cashmere or something. (I don't know anything about women's clothes but I know what I like.) Underneath this sweater, though, there is a rough white T shirt that leaves a cartoon alligator's face peeping over the sweater's V neck. Exactly the proper degree of sloppiness. Yet in another scene, at a party, her hair is draped around her long face is lustrous curls and when she reaches down to remove a tight shoe we can't help noticing how sleek her ankle and her feet are, and neither can Kinnear, the guy she's with.
But without Cate Blanchett's superior performance this would be no more than a routine thriller. With her, it rises rather above the routine and is worth catching.
I won't go on with the plot. It gets twisted around a bit and the end won't come as a great big surprise if you've seen a couple of other thrillers with metaphysical overtones.
It was written by the co-authors of the far superior, "One False Move." But this is a pretty weak effort. We hear New Age lines from a bunch of small-minded townies. A man and a woman are attracted to one another but when he comes on to her, she backs hesitantly away and says, "I don't think this is a good idea right now." (The guy is falling-down drunk so it's hard to see what the idea was in the first place.) "She's gone," the man tells the woman, "but I have to learn to live with that, just as you have to learn to live with the loss of your husband." (Real MEN don't talk like that.) And, later, "I'm so sorry I wasn't there for you when you needed me." The director, Raimi, is efficient without being in the least original. The music cues us about looming threats. When Blanchett is worried, a shadow crosses her curtain -- but it turns out to be a friend! As the climax approaching, to heighten the tension, there is a windy thunderstorm full of rain and strobe lightning. (Ho hum.) At the end, when all is being revealed, the rain is replaced by fog. One blow from a flashlight conks a full-grown man out for the duration just because the script calls for it.
Blanchett is about to be murderized at the pond but she is saved by a disturbed young man whom she had earlier tried to help. The young man, Giovanni Ribisi, is supposed to be in a psychiatric hospital but, "I escaped," he tells her. He doesn't tell her how he managed to find her and her would-be murderer in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night in the fog. Well, not that it matters, because it turns out that Ribisi has actually been dead for a couple of hours anyway. This takes us beyond the possibility of ESP and into the realm of the frankly supernatural. This raises certain interesting questions but the film doesn't address them. It's satisfied to be another everyday thriller with parallel universe harmonics.
All of that makes it sound like a movie to avoid but it's not. The reason it's not is that mysteries are kind of interesting. Whodunnit, you know? And the movie is saved by Cate Blanchett's sterling performance. She makes the movie.
She isn't exactly beautiful. She's lean and narrow shouldered. Her nose is long and pulpy, and her epicanthic fold is overdeveloped by Western tastes. But faces have characteristics or traits. Angelina Jolie's primary trait is sexuality. Gene Tierney's was staggering beauty. Agnes Moorehead's was sliminess of a particularly feminine sort. Blanchett's primary trait is perceptivity. Not intelligence in any academic sense, but an ability to figure things out, to see through them, to discern patterns and form Gestalts. This trait is put to good use, of course, in a role that calls for psychic abilities, but she showed the same ability to use her skills in "Elizabeth" too, where instead of hesitancy and anxiety the role called for a growing self confidence.
Her accent alone is fascinating. Her Commonwealth speech is quite thoroughly transformed into Southernness here. It's not the hillbilly speech of the upland South, and it's not from the low country either. Its closest analog is probably Texas or Oklahoma. She has even the slightest of marks down right. "I didn't really think anything OF it." And the vowel is prolonged and drawn out in a manner only found in the American South. (The same speech sound is heard in the vowel in "druuuunk.") Sorry. Bit of regional linguistics there.
Oh -- I ought to mention wardrobe too. A fine job. They've given Blanchett exactly the right unpretentious floppy clothes that an ordinary lower-middle-class Southern widow of no sophistication might wear. Example: In one important scene, she wears this fuzzy white V-necked sweater -- angora or cashmere or something. (I don't know anything about women's clothes but I know what I like.) Underneath this sweater, though, there is a rough white T shirt that leaves a cartoon alligator's face peeping over the sweater's V neck. Exactly the proper degree of sloppiness. Yet in another scene, at a party, her hair is draped around her long face is lustrous curls and when she reaches down to remove a tight shoe we can't help noticing how sleek her ankle and her feet are, and neither can Kinnear, the guy she's with.
But without Cate Blanchett's superior performance this would be no more than a routine thriller. With her, it rises rather above the routine and is worth catching.