Caught in his Own Maze

It is a dangerous place for the innocent, this world of ours. This is the underlying statement that Prisoners delivers. The movie is a tense crime thriller by Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve that, despite the help the director gets from the cinematographer and the actors, doesn’t quite feel like a final cut, although it’s a good try.

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.

Prisoners and Mystic River