Villeneuve is an auteur in his own right,
having received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for Incendies in 2010. But to help him concoct the suspenseful
detective crime movie that Prisoners
is he has the help of cinematographer Roger A. Deakins, who is a veteran producing
amazing work, as can be attested by the 10 nominations he has received from the
Academy in such remarkable cinematography as seen in No Country for Old Men or Skyfall.
But maybe it’s the script by Aaron
Guzikowski (Contraband) that makes
the film seem like a rough cut. The film is about the battle between good and
evil, but with some added reflections about childhood trauma, rash judgments,
and the extremes people can be driven to under certain circumstances, in this
case, the kidnapping of two young girls. The main plot includes a number of other
minor sub plots –the drunken priest, the traumatized pedophile, the son of an
alcoholic warden; the lunatic hippies- so it ends up throwing in everything but
the kitchen sink, and then tries to piece everything together. Simpler might
have been better here, or at least more believable.
The actors in the movie are kind of a mixed
bag. On the one hand you have the wonderful talent of Viola Davis, Terrance
Howard, Melissa Leo and Paul Dano, but they are totally underplayed in the
movie, given minor roles and very contained (while doing a good job anyway).
Then there are the actors known more in commercial films, like Hugh Jackman,
the Wolverine, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who already played the detective in a
serial killer movie in Zodiac. These
two actors are put to the challenge of being the characters that ground the movie,
and actually do a surprisingly good job; more Gyllenhaal than Jackman. So, a
lot of talent kind of put to waste, but a role that certainly will help
Gyllenhaal’s career.
Villeneuve and Deakins create a somber atmosphere
and give the movie the pace and rhythm that build up the suspense well, but the
story has enough holes to make it implausible and the slow moving pace doesn’t
accelerate enough when it should, so at times you start feeling impatient and
frustrated, rather than captivated. It almost seems that Villeneuve gets lost
in the faulty script and in trying to take himself too seriously. In trying to
direct a film of Mystic River and Silence of the Lambs caliber --and Prisoners does seem to have some
elements of both-- Villeneuve, to use a pun, seems to have fallen prisoner to
his own pretentiousness.
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| Prisoners and Mystic River |
