What Lies Beneath
Director: Robert Zemeckis. Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, Harrison Ford, Diana Scarwid, Amber Valletta, Joe Morton, James Remar, Miranda Otto, Sloane Shelton. Screenplay: Clark Gregg (based on a story by Sarah Kernochan and Clark Gregg).
People sometimes ask me how I justify my reviews of the films I see. Essentially, I respond that I evaluate each movie as closely as possible on its own terms—how well did it accomplish its apparent goals?—and then I evaluate the sincerity, difficulty, newness, and value of those goals. In keeping with this tradition, I want to clarify that What Lies Beneath is not really a movie, but an expensive machine designed to startle you every few minutes. To this end, the movie is fairly successful. However, whether Hollywood needed to shell out dozens of millions of dollars to make another such contraption, and whether you want to hand over eight big ones to see it, are different questions, and their likely answers, at least in the first case, importantly reduce how much credit one can give What Lies Beneath for being frightening, though it is that. If it were a hard or novel thing to startle someone by making a loud noise, or showing them blood, or forcing them to watch women in danger, the film might be more admirable, even more lastingly enjoyable. As it is, the movie passes its own test as a scare-fest, but at least five other movies each month are tackling tougher goals, sometimes surpassing them. Why aren't you watching those?
What Lies Beneath so embraces time-honored Gothic motifs that its diaphanous opening credits montage features both swirling mists and dark, rippling water. Ooooh, you say, instantly either bored or intrigued. I was bored, though giddily, because I knew I'd asked for this stuff, and at that moment, I wanted it. Still, I was delighted that the movie didn't remain this tediously conventional. In fact, the story's exposition is unveiled with a refreshing slowness. I do not mean that nothing happens—we see Michelle Pfeiffer, playing a middle-aged, upper-middle-class mother named Claire, packing her daughter off to college. We also see Harrison Ford, playing a piece of furniture that impersonates Pfeiffer's husband, accompany her to their daughter's campus and drive her back to their house. None of this is boring, because Pfeiffer and Ford are gorgeous (duh), because composer Alan Silvestri hired every string player west of Missouri, and because the film provides even more junk thrills besides the music. After all, the house is set on the water, fog rolls in routinely, and the rooms are full of mirrors and of doors that won't stay shut, so we know the house is Spooky. At the same time, the film refuses to wholly explain itself. Though we see a photograph of a wrecked car, and notice how everyone treats Claire with a strange, tense benevolence, at least a half-hour goes by before we learn that she was recently in a terrible crash that may have been a suicide attempt.
Director Robert Zemeckis has called What Lies Beneath his "Hitchcock" picture, and though that comparison is ultimately preposterous, the picture most called to mind by the film's first hour is not Rear Window, despite desperate, superficial plot similarities, but The Birds. What initially scares us about What Lies Beneath is not the banal, telegraphed evil of the house, but, as in the Tippi Hedren vehicle, the creepy remoteness and serene placidity of the heroine, who seems to exist in a pocket of calm that can't be accidental, or natural, or permanent. Pfeiffer, who is good at being an exquisite object even though she's capable of more, was a canny choice to play the lead, or else she was canny to choose it—one has to reach all the way back to 1995's Dangerous Minds for her last hit. Still, she gamely goes through all the steps of pricking her ears up at strange sounds, tiptoeing around the house of the strange new neighbors, even spying on them with binoculars when she believes the husband of the couple has murdered his wife. (I wasn't kidding about the thefts from Rear Window.) Still, what is best about Pfeiffer's performance, and about the script's treatment of her role, is that she's every bit as mysterious as the things that are happening to her, and the actress is brave enough to make Claire stupid, and self-defeating, so that we almost think she welcomes, or deserves, whatever shivery fate befalls her.
It should be clear from what I've written so far that Zemeckis and his crew of hacks—some talented, some not, all hacks—are permanently ambivalent about whether less is more, or more is more. Their deliberate restraint in characterization is the equal and opposite reaction to their plodding, hackneyed ploys at circumstantial scares: eyeballs that suddenly fill the frame, crashing percussion, Ouija boards, footsteps leading into the house! The film's eeriest, most sudden shock is followed by Michelle Pfeiffer walking into a chemistry lab where someone happens to be discussing a new drug that paralyzes mammals—"Yes, even humans!"—for five minutes or more. . . gee, think that'll come up again? Tonal ambivalence is, of course, hardly new to Zemeckis, who has already built an improbably durable career out of feathered fish: the youth comedy/adult fantasy Back to the Future, the animation/live-action experiment Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the dopey/brilliant Contact, and, of course, Forrest Gump, the definitive 1990s liberal historical fable that hated both liberals and history. What Lies Beneath only sticks out from this crowd because its unevenness has nothing to do with genre: it is decisively and unmistakably a horror film. The division has to do with approach. Does Zemeckis want to make a stupid horror film, or a smart one? A predictable hunk of cheese, or an insinuating web of unease?
Friends who saw the movie before I did all agreed that the movie squats on both sides of all of these fences (a startling conceptual feat, no?). However, they differed widely over when the movie startled vs. stupefied, and their reactions were even more severely polarized as to the plot's climactic convolutions—which might, might, arrive as a surprise, so my lips are sealed. Let me just say that What Lies Beneath works best when it most resembles the filmmakers' own minimalist challenge to themselves. Imagine a room of people demanding, "What is the scariest, weirdest scene we can design involving only a running faucet and a person who cannot move?" and then living up to their own assignment reasonably well. At the same time, these set-pieces succeed largely because they are so obviously set-pieces; it is clear that Zemeckis has not made a movie, but a series of idle fiddlings with his fancy new toys. Within that structure, momentum and fright arrive in permanent reverse proportion. The first half of What Lies Beneath is mostly platitudes and cheap tricks, but they combine into something strangely fixating; the second half is a line-up of striking, off-kilter scenes, but they are utterly self-contained, increasingly repetitive, and finally absurd. If you thought Jodie Foster's dead father in Contact pulled off the oddest resurrection in recent history, rest assured that Zemeckis has more rabbits to pull out of that particular, albeit bizarre, hat. Furthermore, if you think Bad People who die from blows to the head are Really Dead The First Time, you're in way over your head—or, come to think of it, you're the ideal audience for this folderol.
Like Gwyneth Paltrow, as she pled to Entertainment Weekly's snoopier romantic dish-diggers, "I would never sit here and lie to you," and thus I admit, my hands flew to my face more than a few times during What Lies Beneath. I also fought the urge to yell things at the characters, and usually this was a good thing. At the same time, I also realized as each new plot twist unfolded that most of what preceded it had suddenly been rendered irrelevant, or implausible. Obviously, you know better than I do what your priorities are in deciding whether to see a film like this. Just know ahead of time, with total certainty, that you do know exactly what a "film like this" is. What Lies Beneath might surprise you from scene to scene, but the sum total won't surprise you at all. Savor those local thrills and temporary enigmas, because only two larger mysteries survive this very involving but mostly inevitable spectacle: what was that all about, and why did the filmmakers bother? Grade: C+