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Movie review: 'The Box'
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The Box/2009 - Directed by Richard Kelly
Starring: Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella
The Plot: A satanic salesman, (Langella) offers a struggling family the opportunity of a lifetime. Earn a million bucks by pushing a big red button on the top of a wooden box. The catch? Somewhere, someone they don't know will die. Will they push the button? Well it wouldn't really be a movie if they put it in storage...
The Good: This magic Box almost works. Just like almost every other short-story-to-film-adaptation ever made The Box has a great premise but can't maintain the magic act long enough to warrant a two hour film. The Shawshank Redemption managed to adapt well to screen. More recently Where the Wild Things Are kinda' sorta' worked. The Box kicks off like gangbusters. The first hour is dark, odd, and thoroughly enthralling. Langella moves in on Diaz like the serpent did on Eve, way, way back in Eden of old. His offer is very much a forbidden fruit. And Diaz' housewife Norma, just like her ancient grandmother, nibbles at it deliciously.
What I dug about the film, or at least this part of the film, is that this wasn't a family totally in a financial crisis. These people didn't really need the cash to get by on. But the prospect of not having to just "get by" is just too tasty a prospect to pass up. Even though the film is set in the 70's, (another feather in movie's cap) it parallels today's financial climate. How much money do any of us need to be happy? The Box says around a million bucks... Oh, and some poor schmoe's life...
Like I said earlier, for the first hour the film really does work. Langella's great. Diaz absolutely disappears in a movie for the first time in her career. The pacing is terrific. And the movie throws enough odd curve balls at the audience to keep everyone still in their theater seat completely riveted to the screen... Then things begin to fall apart.
The Bad: Very few short story adaptations translate well to the screen. Unfortunately The Box is no different. The major problem with a short story adaptation is that short stories rarely, if ever, have to explain themselves. If they do the answer usually lies behind, and in between the lines of the tale. In a movie we need to give a pretty decent reason why there's a million dollar death box, what it could mean for the unfortunate fools who push the button, and just what kind of demon would ever create such an evil contraption. I get the feeling that director Richard Kelly has a good idea what the actual truth is and where it lies in the context of the film - I just don't think he delivered it to an audience wholly intact.
During the first two acts he's busy dolling out more red herrings than any film can properly manage. The Box has Lost syndrome. It keeps us guessing until the guessing becomes too tedious to put forth the effort to care anymore. No solution will ever be good enough - and in this case it's just nowhere near good enough. Where The Box began as a nice, beautifully wrapped little package, it soon becomes too heavy, tangled, and burdensome to bother with opening.
The Fugly: There's too many loose ends when the credits role. During our journey we meet many characters. Some good. Some evil. Some just there. They say odd things. Do odd things. And by film's end we're still wondering who they even were, or what their role was in this story. That's not a good thing...
The Verdict: Somebody call the bomb squad. There's a mysterious Box left on the doorway of our theater chains. It might look harmless and interesting, but it'll ultimately blow up in your face, leaving any and all who spent some time trying to decode it a bit burned by the effort.
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