‘The Box’ is Well Acted but Unfulfilling
-----From Director Richard Kelly, who made his name with the cult classic ‘Donnie Darko,’ comes ‘The Box.’ With a strong cast, a cool trailer, and an eerie proposition, this film had plenty of potential. ‘The Box’ starts out fun and intriguing, but unfortunately, once the audience begins to understand what’s going on, there isn’t a significant payoff of any sort at the film’s end.
-----‘The Box’ is about a proposition. A suburban family in the mid-70s has recently fallen upon hard times. That’s when the mysterious Arlington Steward leaves a package on their door, and returns later with an offering. Choice number one, they don’t press the button located at the top of the box, and he comes and picks it up in 24 hours. Choice number two, they push the button, and someone in the world whom they don’t know, will die. They will also be given $1,000,000 in cash.
-----Frank Langella plays Steward with a haunting sincerity. His scenes help carry the plot even as it falls apart, and he has a number of superb sequences with costars James Marsden and Cameron Diaz. Marsden is also good, as everyman husband and father trying to get into the astronaut program, while simultaneously dealing with newfound financial issues. Diaz marks the third and last of the primary characters, and is also strong playing against her typecast as she recently did with the dreadful, ‘My Sister’s Keeper.’ Here however, Diaz is strong, and manages a great chemistry with both Marsden and Langella. If not for the strength of these three stars and their intense interactions, ‘The Box’ wouldn’t be a film worth any viewings.
-----The plot of the box is very reminiscent of long-since past ‘Twilight Zone’ mysteries. The problem here is that the film leads audiences into many revelations early on in the runtime, but never takes any of those suspicions further or otherwise deeper. It’s as if you’ve made out most of the picture by the time the dots are fully connected, offering not so much a surprise as an agreeable understanding of the ending events. Even then, much is left up for speculation, with some elements completely in the dark and others illuminated numerous times throughout the film, which settles into an anticlimactic conclusion that somewhat trivializes the plot of these particular characters, and never really offers any insight into what is to come.
-----In the technical realm the film finds its momentum. As I previously mentioned, the ‘Twilight Zone’ atmosphere keeps the audience engaged, even if it never comes full circle. The musical score is also strong, with a very old-school yet increasingly provocative intensity in its brooding, heavy undertones. The whole movie has a unique look, and the 70s costumes and elements are noticeable without being overdone. Overall, ‘The Box’ is certainly a well-made endeavor, and one that starts strong despite a plot that doesn’t fully satisfy.
-----There are moments in ‘The Box’ where you may feel like you dozed off for a few minutes or perhaps the film just skipped? That is to say, the movie occasionally jumps from one scene to the next in a dream-like manor, with all sense of time and motive occasionally lost. While this is intentional to throw the audience off, the technique every so often results in an irrelevant scene and a convoluted structure. Perhaps the source of this problem is that the film was based on a short story. Given the film’s conclusion, it would make sense to read a short story with such a final product as the one ‘The Box’ delivers; but it doesn’t make sense to watch a two hour film with many sequences doing nothing to sway the eventual outcome. The strong premise no doubt fueled and amply filled the short story, but it can’t sustain a whole film given the ending presented. No doubt the studio screened ‘The Box’ and realized they wouldn’t have a satisfactory product for audiences, with a weak Box Office haul (no pun intended) reflecting the film’s lack of crunch time advertising and likely poor word of mouth. I can think of a simple change that may have watered down the film’s conclusion, but would no doubt been more satisfying for audiences and made the plot seem bit less open-ended and irrelevant. Nonetheless, ‘The Box’ is never boring, and is at times very intriguing. The ending isn’t of the quality that earlier scenes promised it would be, but there is still some great dialogue between the leads, even as the plot approaches some hokier elements and stretches farther than most imaginations will allow given the film’s prior realism. When the credits finally roll, ‘The Box’ leaves you somewhat empty and maybe even confused until you realize, there isn’t something to “get,” it’s all explained as much as it ever will be.
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