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Subj: "The Mothman Prophecies:" The movie about unexplained phenomena that gets it RIGHT Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 at 02:23:13 am EDT (Viewed 395 times) | |||
I was still in grade school when I started hunting for Bigfoot. It helps to grow up in a particularly rural suburb of Washington state, sure, and the frequent family camping trips didn't hurt, but more than that was the allure of that which was unaccounted for, and yet, was still so close to my everyday existence (damn near literally right in my own backyard). Much like marijuana supposedly leads to "harder drugs," so too did my pursuit of Sasquatch turn into an investigation of UFOs, and eventually an interest in damn near all things cryptozoological, extraterrestrial and otherwise paranormal. By the time I was in third grade, I was "self-publishing" WHISPER magazine, a faux-tabloid dedicated to chronicling my own version of The X-Files, damn near a decade ahead of its time. Not even 10 years old, and I was hooked, man; I was a hardcore junkie for this shit, who could quote chapter and verse of both the Condon report and the works of Grover S. Krantz, professor of anthropology at Washington State University and one of the few distinguished academics to unashamedly declare his belief in the existence of Bigfoot. Hell, I MET Grover Krantz, probably around fifth grade. My mom took me to the WSU campus at Pullman, and there he was, in a classroom lab, surrounded by plaster casts of Sasquatch footprints. I didn't pick up on it at the time, but I suspect now that he was probably just humoring an indulgent mother's request at first, until he started explaining what makes the plaster casts such compelling evidence, and I said, "Because of the detail of the dermal ridges," and he blinked and said, "That's right," after which he started talking to me, rather than talking over my head to my mom, about his Bigfoot hunting research. Grover Krantz died in 2002, at the age of 70. I didn't have the mind for the hard science that anthropology would have required, and journalism has suited my personality and talents much better as a career field, but every once in a while, I still regret not being one of Grover Krantz's undergraduate students at WSU, if only because I would have loved to have gone on one of his summer expeditions in search of Bigfoot. Which brings us, in an incredibly roundabout way, to Mothman: The Mothman Prophecies opens with a caption that reads, "Based on actual events." Even speaking as someone who takes these reports seriously, I'd amend that to read, "Based LOOSELY on actual events," for reasons starting with the fact that the actual events in question took place in the late 1960s, whereas The Mothman Prophecies establishes them as occurring in the (relatively) present day. Then again, this is precisely what cuts to the heart of why it's so goddamned difficult to make a movie about real-life unexplained phenomena, because while any movie based on real-life events is going to represent a tug-of-war between factual details and the needs of a narrative, the gulf between the two is bound to be especially wide in the case of something like Mothman. I mean, how the fuck do you even MAKE a movie about something like THIS? If you stick strictly to putting the recorded details of the case onscreen, you're left with this laundry list of sightings that ends as randomly and as inexplicably as it began, which makes for a great documentary but a shitty story. By contrast, if you try to finesse those accounts into something approaching a more linear and sensible series of events, you run the risk of ascribing definitive explanations to occurrences that remain so haunting precisely because no such answers have been found, even after all these years. The Mothman Prophecies sidesteps this storytelling conflict by turning the seemingly unsolvable mystery itself into the point of the exercise, and in a rather gravity-defying feat, it actually works. The result is a thoughtful, affecting movie that manages the neat hat-trick of piquing one's curiosity about the subject matter, at the same time that it warns you to leave well enough alone. It certainly doesn't hurt that the story rests on the shoulders of four very effective actors - Richard Gere, Laura Linney, the since-departed Alan Bates, and the woefully overlooked, always excellent Will Patton - all of whom make a fine art out of the understatement of emotion, and all of whom wind up playing characters who, each in their own way, are suffering from serious PTSD, as a direct result of their exposures to the unfathomable. Much is made of the fact that Gere's John Klein and Bates' Alexander Leek were each created to represent different aspects of John Keel, the real-life investigator who wrote about Mothman, but just as significant are Linney's small-town sheriff and Patton's working-class contactee. As the film's protagonist, Gere is a relentless, very nearly self-destructive seeker, continually grasping and moving ever forward out of an instinctive need to fill the void in his life, while Bates is the looming specter of Gere's possible future, a burned-out scholar who lost everything he valued in his own quest, and wound up permanently weirded out as a result (it's worth noting that Bates' odd head tilts and eerie stares make him seem almost as sinister as the elusive truth that he once sought out). On the other side, Patton portrays the tragedy of a decent but simple man who's caught up in something much bigger than he could ever hope to wrap his head around, which results in his gradual disintegration, as he spins his wheels in impotent fixation ... while Linney actually seems to find the closest thing to a "healthy" approach of any of the characters, through stoic avoidance of any contemplation of the deeper questions raised by what she's witnessed. I should mention, as well, that Mark Pellington's direction and the soundtrack by tomandandy combine to create an appropriately alien audiovisual package that practically qualifies as the movie's fifth major player in its own right. Whenever I want to put my mind in a slightly out-of-sync place, the tomandandy soundtrack to The Mothman Prophecies is one of those scores that I can trust to unnerve me as soon as I press "play." So, yeah, consider this a recommendation, from someone who's put in some research time of his own in this field. | |||
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