Stoker

Someone must have been pissing in the DNA samples, because something has gone horribly wrong with this Shadow of a Doubt clone. If Stoker is supposed to evoke the Hitchcock classic, then it does so only as a Frankenstein-style re-creation, built out of spart parts left over from South Korean horror films and The Paperboy. Regardless, there are now two sociopathic Uncle Charlies stalking the corridors of cinematic history, and we must contend with Park Chan-Wook’s contribution to this proud tradition of avuncular terror. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Hitchcock and Park—making his North American feature debut here—but the contrast is illuminating. Shadow of a Doubt pours acids on the idylls of middle America; Stoker looks at the scarred remains and suggests everything is precisely as fucked up as it seems. Park et al. have arrived to point out that damaged loners and isolated eccentrics are kind of nutty, which is as dramatically satisfying as declaring a spade is a spade. The gulf between the two films is written in the faces of the men who play Uncle Charlie. When Joseph Cotten’s gentleman-killer smiles, he looks like he’s going to offer you a drink. When Matthew Goode smiles, he looks like he’s going to brain you with a rock.

Despite a few elegant visual touches here or there, Stoker only occasionally rises to the heights of coherence, while its stately pace and artful splatter veers ever closer to camp with each twist of the plot. For such grisly sex-and-murder mayhem, the film is surprisingly bloodless. The fault lies partly with Park’s smothering style and partly with the performances. Goode, as mentioned, is little more than a smirk in a sweater, while Mia Wasikowska (as India, Charlie’s equally deranged niece) is reduced to petulant sulking for much of the film. As for Nicole Kidman: future scholars will write of this film when discussing her camp-vamp phase, so I will defer to their expertise. However, what could any performer do with this ripe nonsense? Self-realization in the film is intimately twined with sex and violence, which amounts to masturbating in the shower after your uncle has killed your would-be rapist—with your father’s belt, I should note (wouldn’t want to lose any of the psychosexual nuances, after all). The film pushes so many buttons at once it smashes the remote. Even when the film gets it right, it gets it wrong. Yes, children do often reflect the madness of their families, but that doesn’t typically apply to distant relations you don’t even know exist. Or is strangling people with a leather belt some sort of hereditary condition now?

Eyes Wide Shut

Only a truly serious wiseass like Stanley Kubrick would dare to pose the question at the heart of Eyes Wide Shut: if everyone thinks Tom Cruise is so hot, why can’t anyone fuck him? To judge by the film, the problem lies with Cruise himself. Regardless of which way he swings (and the film certainly covers its bases), the guy just won’t get down and dirty with the little people. In a beguiling nocturnal New York, the film tosses all manner of temptations at poor Tom, from lithe Lolitas to oversexed mourners and hotel clerks. He’s the loneliest guy at the top-secret, pseudo-occult evil orgy. Everyone wants to take the cruise, in other words, but the ship just won’t leave the dock.

On the surface, this is really just the simple story of a doubting husband (Cruise) putting himself in temptation’s way to prove his fidelity to his wife (Nicole Kidman, at her best). But the surface may be the least interesting part of this dreamy, weird movie, which remains a provocative and fascinating depiction of the intersection of sex and celebrity. Kubrick’s inherent solemnity obscures the general goofiness of the plot, and deadpan doesn’t begin to do justice to the weird tone that results. He’s not telling a joke seriously—he’s joking and serious, all at once, as if cognitive dissonance were the most honest way to tell this tale. And perhaps it is, considering we’ve got two major movie stars here who are both sexy yet essentially sexless. Admit it—lusting after this pair would be like falling in love with two mannequins, which are just as unnaturally well-formed and equally unobtainable.

The crucial moment comes during the aforementioned freaky-deaky orgy, where Cruise is commanded to strip before a masked crowd. For a film that so casually objectifies the nude female form, this feels like a fair bit of turnabout, an opportunity to make the voyeur squirm a bit and feel his own helplessness. But Cruise is saved from this threat, which begs the question of who exactly is being protected from nudity here—him or us? No one wants to see the sex object, female or male, made real (brought down to size, in a manner of speaking). In the context of the film, the moment is so terrifying it can only be compared to something like the opening of the box in Kiss Me Deadly, which was enough to separate flesh from bone and raze buildings. Is Tom Cruise’s penis another one of those cinematic truths just too terrible to bear?