short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Take Shelter (2011, USA)

While watching Take Shelter, I couldn’t help but feel that 2011 was the year of the highbrow apocalypse movie – though in truth, perhaps it was only this film and Melancholia that really made it seem so. Here, what begins as a portrait of Curtis, a man spinning into madness (played by none other than Michael Shannon, who could probably teach a master class in crazy at the ripe old age of 36), becomes a film of surprising depth, one that not only captures the uncertainty and unpredictability just under the surface of daily life, but that also asks how we might react to a modern-day prophet.

Much of Take Shelter is devoted to playing the tension of Shannon’s character’s increasing instability against his desire to be an average family man. As he descends into a mania of visions and nightmares about an apocalyptic storm, he is anchored by his love for his wife (a great Jessica Chastain) and young daughter, as well as by his need to push against family history. He is a doting husband, a kind father, a good employee and a loyal friend. What could make a man like this fall apart in such a dramatic way?

One of the smartest things writer-director Jeff Nichols does in questioning the source of Curtis’s visions is to remove god from the equation. With the divine in no way the source of his troubles, an all the more convincing diagnosis of mental illness can be made. But between Nichols’s script and Shannon’s deft work, there remains a thread of lucidity within his growing mania. And as the inevitable climax comes to pass, you find yourself – in the strangest way – hoping that Curtis may not be mad after all, despite the obvious alternative.

On another level, Take Shelter is a metaphor for the tenuous grasp many of us have on what we’re sold as the American dream. The family, while in no way poor, is still not much more than a paycheck away from dire straits, and Curtis’s method to manage his madness complicates this in both subtle and overt ways. Some of this gets a bit heavy-handed, but Nichols has great talent as a director for creating tension onscreen, even in the segments not directly related to Curtis’s visions. It’s a real nail-biter, as Nichols and Shannon make it clear that Curtis may be capable of anything – ruination and salvation alike.

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