Take Shelter is a movie that
literally haunted me, planting in my head images and feelings of fear and dread
that kept coming back to me for days after I saw it, whenever my mind wasn’t
otherwise occupied. I just couldn’t
shake it. For me, this normally happens
only with really good scary films (The
Shining, The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project), but Take Shelter is not a horror movie, even
if there are a few scenes that play that way.
Nonetheless, it conjures as powerful a sense of gut-wrenching dread as
any horror film I’ve seen. It does this
not primarily by being directly frightening to the viewer, but rather by
engaging the overwhelming fear the protagonist himself feels at what he is
experiencing.
A large part of the movie’s success,
then, necessarily rests on the central performance of Michael Shannon. I first became aware of
Curtis LaForche is a loving husband and
father and a responsible crew supervisor at work, but he has started to
experience dark things he doesn’t understand.
The birds are flying in strange patterns. He is having apocalyptic dreams of approaching
storms and malevolent figures—and sometimes he has them when he’s not even
asleep. As his visions grow more intense
and disturbing, Curtis doesn’t know whether he’s falling into the same mental
illness that took his mother away from him many years ago, or if these visions
are actually warning him of some impending disaster. We see him start to withdraw from his
increasingly confused and upset family, as he gets it in his head that his only
hope is to build a survivalist-style storm shelter in his back yard that can
withstand the potential onslaught of…whatever might be coming.
It is probably not difficult to cast this
story as an allegorical exploration of the anxieties of a society in freefall
and/or a planet in dire ecological distress, if you are so disposed. I’m not.
I’m more interested in just watching Shannon capture Curtis’s agonizing
inner turmoil, his uncertainty about what is happening and what it all means crashing
against his absolute certainty that
something is earthshakingly wrong and he must defend himself and his family
against it. There is nothing he cares
about more than protecting his family, and yet he can only watch as his efforts
to do so first alienate and then anger and then ultimately terrify them. He must continue doing what he is convinced
has to be done, regardless of how much it is hurting everyone. That’s a tough road, and as Curtis tries
desperately to stay on it, so
Much credit also to writer/director Jeff
Nichols, not only for his ambitious vision, but also for his deliberate pacing,
his careful observation of the details of lower-middle-class Midwestern life,
and his unswerving focus on the human beings caught up in the brewing
storm. Under his confident guidance, Take Shelter manages to be both a
poignant slice-of-life character study and a harrowing psychological
thriller. When was the last time you saw
that?
© 2012 dondi demarco