“Drag Me to Hell” and “Orphan” (Or, How to Bedevil the Modern Woman)

I saw both of these movies alone, late at night, in near-empty theaters, perfect conditions for the contained hysteria that accompanies good horror movies. The movies did their part, too. Both of them center on a likable, intelligent female protagonist whose world is invaded by forces of Evil, and in both movies the Evil is convincing and vivid. Yet while I found “Orphan” effective and stimulating (if exploitative), “Drag Me to Hell” shook me up in a far deeper way. “Orphan” is far more aesthetically realistic and serious, but the wacky carnival of gross-out effects and CGI apparitions in “Drag Me to Hell” adds up to something genuinely ghoulish, a test of modern complacency in which our intelligence and good intentions- and even our love- are found wanting.

Vera Farmiga, an up-and-coming actress probably best known for her supporting role in “The Departed,” is very impressive as “Orphan’s” protagonist, Kate Coleman. Kate is a strong and righteous iteration of the put-upon woman at the center of many a horror movie; unlike, say, Mia Farrow’s terrified mother in “Rosemary’s Baby,” Kate is defined by her positive strengths, rather than the mounting oppression she suffers. She is a caring mother to both her kids and especially her deaf daughter. Her career has been derailed by alcoholism, but she’s gotten sober and is poised to re-enter the fray. When the little girl Kate and her husband adopt begins to undermine her in vicious ways, she doesn’t just cry about it–she is backed up by past struggles represented to us with great textural conviction. Farmiga has a long face and intense eyes, and she often leans forward in a peculiarly involving way; you feel her pain, her desire, and even her hate.

By contrast, Alison Lohman is essentially a blank slate at the center of “Drag Me to Hell.” We sympathize with her not because she is psychologically complex or deeply motivated, but because she seems regular. Lohman’s Christine Brown is an office worker, anxious about impressing her boss and getting the next big promotion, but otherwise basically content; she’s got a good boyfriend, and she’s left an embarrassing rural background (and weight problem) far behind. Lohman’s big-eyed blandness ruined a different movie by artsy auteur Atom Egoyan (“Where the Truth Lies”) but her blandness is appealing here, perhaps because this movie’s auteur (Sam Raimi of “Evil Dead” and “Spiderman”) is closer to comic book than arthouse.

“Orphan” is pulp, but it’s Bergman compared to Raimi’s film. “Orphan” begins with Kate’s nightmare about a recent miscarriage, a scene full of convincing pain and blood. Even as its horrors attain baroque perversity, that realness clings to everything. It’s a movie about a demonic orphan child, but what’s at stake is the life of a family; it matters to us. By contrast, “Drag Me to Hell” begins with a CGI-heavy prologue about a boy who, for stealing jewelry from gypsies, is literally dragged to, um, Hell, by a demon. Through the floor. The opening credits roll over “ancient scrolls” depicting black magic, devils, and witches, which as good as announces that the film is rooted in ridiculous, campy mumbo-jumbo.

But it’s not. That’s the glory of Raimi’s strategy here; the mumbo-jumbo is a pretext, gradually elevated into grotesque abstraction: the horror movie as a cartoonish form of mourning. Early on, Christine is told by her boss at the bank that she has to make “tough decisions” to get the promotion, but the dark, dark irony informing the whole film is that Christine seems fundamentally unequipped to make a tough decision, or to understand what that means (practically, morally, emotionally). While the demonic visitations that begin tormenting her are triggered by a moral error, they aren’t “her fault,” exactly. Her mistake is perfectly understandable, more a compromise than a betrayal, Yet we feel with increasing certainty that Christine’s response is simply not enough. The forces attacking Christine are expressed most viscerally in decay and rot–disturbingly curious flies, worms spilling out from orifices, an old woman vomiting mucus, a climactic fight in a muddy graveyard in the rain. Poor, mild-mannered Christine is up against pure death. Her reaction is insufficient, self-absorbed, pathetic; what’s terrifying is that it feels perfectly normal every step of the way.

“Orphan”’s cold, creepy realism (relatively speaking) is quite effective and helps make a few dangerously fantastical final-act revelations pretty shocking. Farmiga’s wonderfully virile motherhood is complemented by Peter Sarsgaard, nicely self-obsessed as her well-meaning husband, and by Isabelle Fuhrmann, who presents a fairly likable and emotionally affecting Demon-Girl.

Yet the point of these things is generally to distract from what the movie is at heart: a shock-story about a Demon-Girl adopted by a defenseless family. There is something tawdry and lurid at the very core of “Orphan,” and we are left with it bluntly in the end. That’s okay. We’ve been absorbed, creeped-out; we got what we came for.
Oddly enough, though, “Drag Me to Hell,” in its unabashed horror-movie excess, delivers something above and beyond the basic spooky thrills. We are left not with the wild apparitions and gross-outs that have splattered across the screen; we are left with something behind them, something unseen that retains, amid the antics, a special, unmistakable reverence. We are left with a thought, a real and serious one: Hell.
Scary.

“The Girl from Monaco” and “Inglourious Basterds” (Exploring Genre vs. Masturbating to It)

Quentin Tarantino is definitely talented, maybe unique. His latest, “Inglourious Basterds,” blew me away in several ways. One thing he portrays marvelously: evil. In this pseudo-historical World War II extravaganza, various Nazis show up as bad guys, all repulsive in fascinatingly different ways. The performance of Christoph Waltz in particular, as a bright and cheery colonel nicknamed “The Jew-Hunter,” is a study in evil banality. Also included are a half-charming, half-odious young war hero (Daniel Brühl) and a maniacally giggling Goebbels (Sylvester Groth). Tarantino clearly knows how to get vivid caricatures from his actors; these are some of the funniest and creepiest villains you could imagine.

Yet my reaction at the end of “Inglourious Basterds” was not fear or shock at the evil depicted, nor hope in the possibility of good being stronger; the feeling was just hopelessness. The movie purports to be a wish-fulfillment version of history where the Jewish people get some kind of collective revenge for Nazi atrocities. The first scene here, where Waltz’s Nazi colonel pays a seemingly cordial but increasingly ominous visit to a man harboring a Jewish family, is stunning; it employs Tarantino’s unusual, playful way of building suspense to make you feel the self-satisfied sadism at the core of the Nazi mission under your skin. The end of the scene is ugly, outrageously so. Right on cue, we meet the Basterds, Tarantino’s proposed solution to the Nazi Question. The Basterds, led by the ruthlessly folksy Southerner Lt. Aldo Rayne (Brad Pitt, pretty funny), are a team of Jewish-American soldiers who infiltrate Nazi Germany in disguise, with, Rayne repeatedly explains, a specific mission: “Killin’ Natzies.” And how–one Basterd’s specialty is bashing them to death with a baseball bat, which Rayne (our hero) finds highly entertaining. Rayne also demands that the victims be scalped. Why? Because it’s “cool.”

Rayne is not much of a protagonist and certainly not much of a moral center. This has something to do with Pitt’s limitations as an actor and something to do with Tarantino’s apparent lack of interest in human beings for their own sake. Per Tarantino’s pop-culture preoccupations, the subject of his war movie quickly becomes War Movies. The Basterds become involved in Operation Kino, an attempt to corner major Nazi officials during the screening of a film about a Nazi war hero. We catch some glimpses of the film, which appears to be mostly people shooting each other, with reaction shots of delighted Nazis in the audience. This is interesting since what Tarantino does with violence isn’t entirely different, except, of course, for being divorced from radical nationalist ideology. Tarantino delights in creating situations where violence seems justified and desirable, and in making the consummation of that desire as thrilling as possible. Except for the first scene, every scene, even the ones where good guys get killed, are punctuated with a kind of ecstasy, an explosion of kinetic effects. I guess the main difference is that Tarantino’s pleasurable violence is Ironic, or Meta. Or maybe it’s Art.

Anne Fontaine’s underrated comedy-noir, “The Girl from Monaco,” also tackles big moral questions by playing around with genre tropes. The title sounds a bit like a joke, a vaguely noirish title that suggests exotic locations and a femme fatale without really saying anything. The film begins as a comedy-mystery, with roly-poly lawyer Bertrand (Fabrice Luchini) coming to Monaco to take on a troubled murder case. He is cute (and awkward) with his tall, dark, stoic bodyguard, Christoph (Roschdy Zem); they are a funny couple, a wide-eyed, amiable nebbish and a craggy, secretive man of duty. We learn that while Bertrand’s love life is sporadic and unfulfilling, Christoph is a cool, effortless seducer. When a ditsy weather-girl named Audrey (Louise Bourgoin), who has a romantic history with Christoph, takes a suspiciously enthusiastic interest in easily-led Bertrand, we are set for the typical slick complications of a sex comedy, with some juicy thriller elements in the mix.

This girl from Monaco is a strange one, though. On the one hand, she seems like a total airhead, full of dumb ideas and girlish squeals. On the other, she seems like a femme fatale, leading Bertrand into some dangerous place; she gives him what he obviously lusts for too eagerly, and her romantic/sexual life seems full of darkness and perversity. Rather than jumping into the usual romantic games and who’s-on-who’s-side suspense, the film just wonders with Bertrand: Who is this girl? What does she want? We never find out because that would be impossible. She is a real human being, the nexus of values, ideals, and desires that are theoretically incompatible, the seat of violation and purity; she is a mystery that first fascinates, then puzzles, and finally exhausts Bertrand. Bertrand is passive; this is endearing at first, a model of comfy, middle-aged innocence. But Bertrand’s passivity proves to be something scary and immense, a black hole that eats away at moral responsibility and compassion that greedily sucks everything toward his own center. Bertrand wants things selfishly, and they happen; he realizes this the hard way, and the possibility of redemption opens up.

“Inglourious Basterds” begins as a film about the atrocities of World War II–an unusually bold and stylish one, but meant seriously. The rest of the film slowly but surely corrupts any such sincere intentions with flashy anachronisms and meta-devices; Tarantino makes it more and more apparent that he wants to wallow in evil, not consider or even criticize it. “The Girl from Monaco” starts as fluff, mostly concerned with a middle-aged man’s sexual insecurity, but it morphs into a fearfully lucid look at lust and self-absorption, in life and on film. The ending of “Basterds” feels hopeless because Tarantino has (somehow) failed to make a hilarious action extravaganza out of the Holocaust; “Monaco” takes a good, steady look at the evil in the human heart and leaves us thinking.