Butler's Cinema Scene

Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode

“STOKER” My rating: B- (Opens March 22 at the Glenwood Arts and Tivoli)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Stoker” represents an extraordinary level of film craftsmanship.

Every shot, every color choice, every cut and transition, the soundtrack – even  the opening credits –suggest an almost obsessive determination to get all the details exactly right. On so many levels the movie is breathtaking.

Given this, why isn’t Korean director Park Chan-wook‘s first English-language film more satisfying?

I think it’s because in trying to give us a classic Hitchcock-style suspense film he (and his writer, the actor Wentworth Miller) has in fact given us a somewhat academic deconstruction of a Hitchcock-style suspense film.

Big difference.

 If you’re looking for thesis material “Stoker” is chock full of allusions, references and outright steals.

But for genuine suspense, go elsewhere.  Unlike Hitch, Park (whose best-known film in this country is probably the incest-and-savagery epic “Old Boy”) doesn’t allow us to identify with his characters. They might as well be specimens of exotic insects in glass jars.

Our heroine is high school senior India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), whom we meet at the funeral of her beloved father, who has died in some sort of fiery car crash.

Nicole Kidman

India is angry and miserable. She hates her stiff and borderline dotty mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), who seems to have wandered in from a Tennessee Williams play.  India, you see, was intensely attached to her Daddy  (played in a few brief flashbacks by Dermot Mulroney) with whom she spent countless pleasurable hours hunting game birds.

Even in the best of times India is a perpetual loner. She treats other kids her age with silent indifference. She stands apart if only for her eccentric odd fashion choices — no makeup,  severe longish skirts,  black-and-white saddle shoes. She looks like a throwback to the ‘50s.

Now she faces the double-whammy of dealing  not only with her despised mother but with her newly-arrived Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), whom  she didn’t even know existed. The very smooth (almost to the point of creepiness) Charlie explains that for more than 20 years he’s been living in Europe.

Okay, anyone with even a passing knowledge of Hitchcock recognizes this setup as an homage to “Shadow of a Doubt, “ in which a teenage girl falls for her charming Uncle Charlie only to discover he’s a serial killer.

And in fact, the family’s housekeeper vanishes shortly after Charlie’s arrival. He graciously volunteers to cook until she returns.

(More pop cultural references: The Stokers’ sprawling country manse is filled with stuffed turkeys, pheasants and other fowl bagged by India and her father.  Just like the motel in “Psycho.” Hey, this movie even has a shower scene. Plus, it should  be noted that the name Stoker brings to mind novelist Bram Stoker, the creator of Count Dracula and a godfather of Gothic lit. )

The suspicious India stubbornly rejects Charlie’s attempts at friendship (notwithstanding their sharing a four-handed piano piece, a brilliant scene reeking of sexual tension). The purring Evelyn, though, is rarin’ to go. She and her late husband were at a sexual standoff…this debonair brother-in-law is much more to her liking.

Ere long other people are vanishing (Australian actress Jacki Weaver has a brief role as an aunt who comes to pay her respects). And along the way India realizes that she and Uncle Charlie actually have quite a bit in common.

“Stoker” is filled with vaguely over-the-top, weirdly stylized dialogue which only emphasizes the unreality of Park’s approach. Even India’s fellow teens eschew naturalism for a sort of formalized, Kabuki line delivery.

All this has the effect of distancing us from the characters, unfortunate since the three principals are all quite good. Every now and then they deliver a flash of mordant humor that briefly opens a window of acceptance — humor makes us happy accomplices, after all — but that window is quickly slammed shut.

“Stoker,” then, is an exercise rather than the real deal.

| Robert W. Butler

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