Mainstream movies can often cause career indigestion — just check out the case file on Julianne Moore. Clearly one of the three or four best actresses on the contemporary cinema scene, Moore’s independent film resume is pure gold: Far From Heaven, Boogie Nights, Short Cuts, A Map of the World, etc. Yet whenever a major studio hands her a script that isn’t flagged as literary Oscar-bait material (meaning The Hours and The End of the Affair), it’s depressing to watch this peerless performer waste her talents in schlock that wouldn’t even be worthy of Sandra Bullock’s time. Honestly, Hannibal? The wretched Psycho remake? And Assassins, in which she had to play sidekick to Sylvester Stallone?
Moore can once again be found slumming in The Forgotten (** out of four), yet another movie with a title that instantly makes critics’ jobs a little easier. As usual, she isn’t the problem: Even in her worst films, she always invests every inch of her thespian moxie into the roles, and this one’s no exception. As Telly Paretta, a woman whose son was killed in an airplane crash, she makes her grief so palpable that you can almost reach out and leave your fingerprints all over it.
But Telly’s sorrow is only the beginning of her troubles. Fourteen months after the accident, she’s suddenly being told by both her husband (Anthony Edwards) and her psychiatrist (Gary Sinise) that she never had a son, that there was no plane crash, and that the boy only existed within her own delusional mind. Refusing to subscribe to this theory, Telly looks for proof, but none apparently exists: All her family photos have disappeared, neighbors insist she’s always been childless, and even the local newspaper’s stories about the crash have mysteriously been replaced on the library microfilm.
Could Telly really be bonkers? Not likely — after all, there must be some valid reason why government agents are suddenly pursuing her, and why a shadowy figure (Linus Roache) keeps popping up at regular intervals. More conclusively, she manages to find an ally in Ash (Dominic West), a neighbor whose daughter was also on that plane — and whose memories of the girl had vanished until Telly came along to jolt them back into existence. United in their efforts to uncover the truth regarding their children’s fates, Telly and Ash follow the trail of clues until it leads them directly into . . . an old episode of The X-Files.
That’s right: What begins as an unsettling psychological thriller eventually morphs into a sci-fi curio that becomes less intriguing as it plays out. Certainly, adding malevolent E.T.s to the mix might be one way to go, but scripter Gerald DiPego (whose past exercises in gloppy metaphysics include Phenomenon and Angel Eyes) never plays fair, allowing the powers of the otherworldly invaders to ebb and flow based squarely on the demands of his storyline. Director Joseph Ruben manages to stage some genuinely creepy moments here and there (the sight of humans being sucked up into the stratosphere, as if by a giant Hoover in the sky, never loses its potency), but they’re squandered in a movie that ultimately drowns itself in an ocean of inconsistency.
Who knew that the 21st century would witness the glorious resurrection of the zombie flick? Last year’s 28 Days Later was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, while this past spring’s Dawn of the Dead proved to be a surprisingly accomplished remake of the George Romero classic. And now we get the cheeky UK import Shaun of the Dead (***).
No mere splatterfest — its gore is rather subdued, as far as these things go — Shaun of the Dead instead turns out to be a horror film, a romantic comedy, and a social satire all rolled into one. Shaun (played by co-scripter Simon Pegg) works a dead-end job, hangs around with his slacker pal Ed (Nick Frost), and spends every night downing pints at the local pub. It’s hardly a shock, then, when his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) abruptly dumps him. Shaun is initially too distraught to pay attention to the zombie epidemic that has suddenly hit town, but once the flesh-eaters break into his house, he realizes that the best course of action is to rescue both Liz and his mom (Penelope Wilton), hole up in the pub, and cheerily get plastered with Ed until things revert back to normal.
If Romero’s Dawn was able to draw a correlation between modern suburbanites and the post-apocalyptic zombies — both of whom spend their time mindlessly wandering through malls — then Shaun equals that feat by presenting its humans as zombies-in-training, aimless people who shuffle through life with no ambitions, no skills and no awareness of the world surrounding them. In one of the film’s wittiest sequences, Shaun makes his morning trek down the block to the local convenience store, not realizing that all those other groggy beings ambling along the sidewalks or crossing the streets are no longer human.
Pegg and director-cowriter Edgar Wright take care to include the expected in-jokes for zombiephiles, yet the comedy quotient makes this more accessible to general audiences than most movies centering on the undead. After all, who won’t be able to relate to the scene in which, needing weapons to fling at the attacking zombies’ heads, Shaun agonizes over which albums in his prized collection can be sacrificed and which ones must be preserved? Sorry, Sade.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2004.
