STEPHEN KING'S THE MIST
Monsters Of Our Own Creation, With Major Cleanups In Aisles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...
PopcornReel.com Movie Review: "Stephen
King's The Mist"
By Omar P.L. Moore/November 22, 2007
Horror-thriller novelist Stephen King and
long-time screenwriter turned feature film director Frank Darabont have a good
thing going. Excusing "The Green Mile" they have "The Shawshank
Redemption", one of the best films ever made, and now "The Mist", which opened
yesterday across the U.S. and Canada. Mr. King wrote all of these titles
as books before Mr. Darabont adapted them for the big screen, and this latest
King work is the best psychological horror film of the year, and in the top
thirty or forty best films of 2007. Centered in a Food House supermarket,
the film's staging ground, the story begins slowly and innocuously and like the
mist that descends suddenly upon a quiet Maine town (Maine is in the upper-most
north-eastern corner of the United States for the uninitiated) grabs the viewer
and swirls around both in the mind and the body, gripping audiences with its
power, suspense and large blocks of tense situations , with jolts for good
measure. A highly entertaining and thought-provoking two-plus-hours, for
sure.
David Drayton (Thomas Jane of "Boogie Nights" and "The Punisher") is a canvas
artist who paints movie poster art, and soon after a violent storm wrecks his
house and others, including an adversarial neighbor Norton (Andre Braugher), the
two break bread and head into town, where mysterious things commence. The
most important location in the film is the Food House, which is something of a
metaphor, as a lot of things in Mr. Darabont's impressive, intelligently
directed film are. David hears something in the back of the store.
He sees it. So do we. He tells someone about it. They don't
believe it. Seeing is believing, and unless you fall into the "do you
believe your lying eyes?" category -- a refrain tossed around during the 1992
trial of four LAPD officers who were caught on tape whooping the living
daylights out of Rodney King in March 1991 -- you will be compelled to believe
that Maine has been under attack. For good measure, the Food House is
fortified by bags of manure, as a protection against the mist that becomes
thicker by the minute. The director's screenplay is filled with some good
one-liners and is acted credibly by all the film's participants. Stunning
visual effects add, not subtract from the film's story.
Adults can tell the greatest fairy tale
stories, and kids, as innocent as they are, can imagine so powerfully and so
assuredly. But is this just imagination, reality, experimentation?, war
games? (On September 11, 2001, war game drills were being simulated in the
event of emergency as a very real disaster was unfolding across American skies.)
There are characters who deliberately aren't fully fleshed out, but own the
earmarks of "The Mist". They hurriedly zoom by, they whisper in the dark.
Natural disasters or man made ones feed fear and an us-against-them mistrust
(reminiscent of a "Twilight Zone" famous episode), and in such situations the
worst enemy as U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said was "fear
itself". More precisely he said that there was nothing to fear except
fear, and the inhabitants of the Food House supermarket are trapped inside fear
itself and are thus naturally a fearful bunch, with no communications with the
outside world except that foolish and risky foray into the bleak, cloudy white
unknown.
Play misty for me: "The Mist" stars Thomas Jane
as David Drayton, holding Mason Gamble, who plays his son, and left is Laurie
Holden (who is a spitting image and dead ringer for Kate Vernon, who appeared in
"Malcolm X".) (Photo: Ronn Schmidt/The Weinstein Company)
Of course, just like being confined in a suspended elevator whose doors are
jammed shut, some of the people caught inside will go stir crazy. One of
them is Mrs. Carmody, a middle-aged heretic who is convinced that "the end of
days are here". Marcia Gay Harden is the film's most obvious flawed center
as her Carmody plays a large part in both embracing and emboldening danger with
rhetoric not unlike that heard from present and prior members of the current
U.S. presidential administration. She, as David says, is a Jim Jones for
the post-9/11/01 era -- a Kool-Aid swilling rabble rouser, with an odious
tongue, even as she is convinced she is doing God's work. (Mr. Jones sent
914 people to their own suicidal deaths in Jonestown, Guyana on November 18,
1978, 29 years and four days ago.) The American lynch mobs of the 1920's,
'30's, '40's and beyond would have loved Mrs. Carmody.
The camera points of view are also key to unraveling the mystery of "The Mist".
Sometimes there are tight close-ups, other times immediate jump cuts or slight
push shots which are tightly edited, and all of these types of shots aren't just
for show. There are things in this horror film which you expect to happen
but don't, and Mr. Darabont avoids the conventional, an eschewal accounting for
even more tension and suspense in a gripping film which shows humans at their
most inept, irrational, helpless, adrenaline-pumped and frightened. The
one conventional thing that "The Mist" does adhere to is the inevitable axiom
that mandates that any black character is not likely to survive an entire horror
film, yet this axiom is not without an unconventional framework -- the black
character in this case, as well as some of the white characters, unwittingly
take chances they intuitively know that they have no earthly business taking, as
do characters who later do precisely the same -- but for very different reasons.
The most notable thing is that all of these people are ordinarily intelligent
and wise, but at any given moment and situation when an unforeseen (or unseen)
occurrence . . .
Large swaths of this film are especially effective because of the absence of
music throughout (except for three very small music cues and one or two
pronounced pieces of music), and at least five camera set-ups used in numerous
scenes at any given time, presumably to represent the mist itself. But who
or what is the mist? And why here in Maine? And why now? Just
when you think you have the film figured out, it jabs you deep in the solar
plexus, and in a very plausible way. That's if you haven't read Mr. King's
novel. The "answers" are revealed by film's end, and even then one is not
entirely sure of what they have just seen or whether what is shown at the end
really explains the preceding events in this very good film. "Lord Of The
Flies", "And Then There Were None", "Murder On The Orient Express" and other
films are all influences on Mr. Darabont here, and of humans one character
mentions quite acidly, "are the worst kind of invention since politics and
religion." That character ends up living on borrowed time (and like us,
he's not alone.) Interestingly enough, "The Mist" was shot on location in
Shreveport, Louisiana, just footsteps from where Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005,
which makes this film more topical and ingenious. The real horror of "The
Mist" is not in the graphic violence it displays but in the psychological
repercussions from rash actions taken that scar the soul much more deeply.
"Stephen King's The Mist" is rated R by the
Motion Picture Association of America for violence, terror, gore and language.
The film's duration is two hours and seven minutes. The film also stars
Toby Jones, William Sadler, Jeffrey DeMunn and Frances Sternhagen.
Copyright The Popcorn Reel. PopcornReel.com. 2007. All Rights Reserved.