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Reality
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Movie Takes
Take Shelter
A willingness to blur the difference between reality and unreality undermines what would otherwise be a fine movie.
It’s a law of narrative as old as narrative itself: if the prophecy comes true, you’ve got a story; if it doesn’t come true, no story. Why is that? I think it must be because we are programmed by God or Evolution (the “God-gene”) to think that the universe makes sense. At any rate, people certainly do seem to cling to the notion that there is a logic in things as they are, also known as reality, which some of them at least can see all at once. If you recognize the pattern, then you can predict the future. That’s what story-tellers themselves are doing, after all. And if the universe is a story, someone must know how it comes out. Well, there is a prophecy in Take Shelter, written and directed by Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories), but he obviously thinks it makes a better story if he plays coy about whether it comes true or not.
Prophecies may come in dreams, of course, but the word “dream” also has a special meaning when it comes to movies, which are so often dream-like themselves. It’s not for nothing that Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen go together under the collective name “Dreamworks.” But the Hollywood dream-factory has its own complicated relationship with the country that is its primary market and that has its own peculiar relationship with something called “The American Dream.” The Hollywood version of this is the dream, often an “impossible” one, which can be “followed” to the inevitable moment when the dream comes true. Following one’s dreams is as predictably profitable as believing in prophecy, and this is the case even when the dreams are bad. That’s why, in the movies, conspiracy theorists and other sorts of crazy people are nearly always right. No movie conspiracy is ever imaginary.
These are complex and difficult matters that were already firmly in place as so many snares for the unwary long before Mr. Nichols took up his pen, and to judge by the critical acclaim you might imagine that he has made a considerable success in navigating his way around them. It’s true, too, that his movie has a lot going for it — especially spellbinding performances from his two leading characters, Michael Shannon as Curtis LaForche and Jessica Chastain as his wife Samantha, and some spectacular visual effects that invite comparison with Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990). The problem with it is that in the end it cannot reconcile Curtis’s dreams — which are all to do with threats of a spectacular and quasi-supernatural nature to his little family, including a deaf daughter (Tova Stewart) — with reality.
The strength of the movie is that Curtis himself sees the problem. When he was ten years old, he watched as his mother (Kathy Baker) drifted away into the dreamland of paranoid schizophrenia and had to be institutionalized. Now he is afraid that the terrible dreams he is having portend a similar fate for himself, which would be scarcely less horrific than the alternative peril, namely that he is getting some kind of supernatural warning of impending doom to his family. Methodically, manfully, he pursues both explanations simultaneously, consulting his doctor, reading books from the library (Understanding Mental Illness), and visiting a counselor at a mental health clinic at the same time he is taking out a risky home improvement loan to build an elaborate storm shelter in his backyard.
All this is rather touching on Curtis’s part, though not so much on that of Mr. Nichols who, it seems to me, really does have to make up his mind between the two alternative explanations. Trying to have it both ways, as he does, is a cop-out, a lapse of verisimilitude, which may be no big deal to those who live comfortably in our age of cinematic fantasy but which to me devalues and cheapens all the hard work he has done up to this point to make the movie look real. The movie’s ending, which is bound to provoke a great deal of unprofitable discussion, seems to me to serve no other purpose than to indulge that tiresome adolescent profundity about the ultimate uncertainty of the boundary between reality and illusion. Thus he avoids breaking with Hollywood magic and comfort the audience with the reflection that we are still in movieland after all.
Beneath the surface of Take Shelter, I’m afraid, there lurks a trace, or maybe more than a trace of the '60s belief in the truth underlying madness — that old sophistry associated, perhaps unjustly, with the names of Norman Mailer or R.D. Laing that the insane are not delusional but merely in touch with different realities from the rest of us. There is a half-hearted attempt to relate Curtis’s fears to those that we all have of natural and environmental perils, but anyone with any experience of madness knows that there is a huge and unbridgeable chasm between the fears of mental health and those of mental illness. The movie is much better when it focuses on what almost emerges as the central matter of trust between husband and wife, but even this loses much of its impact in the face of the author’s ill-considered agnosticism about what’s real and what isn’t. He only succeeds in reminding us that the movies, nowadays, are what isn’t.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (23) | Leave a comment
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Timothy L. Pennell| 10.21.11 @ 6:15AM
Apparently, this is some kind of a Slow News Day, today, for Mr. Bowman.
Alan Brooks| 10.22.11 @ 4:58PM
Hollywood has to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and since no one has ever gone broke doing so that means bending down pretty low. I can't get over how Hollyood ruins some otherwise *** or ** films. The senescent old lady swallowing the diamond, that Di Caprio gave her, in 'Titanic' comes immediately to mind.
What cinematic self-sabotage!
Alan Brooks| 10.22.11 @ 5:02PM
...No, wait, Di Caprio's old flame threw the diamond overboard-- I'm confusing the scene with Olivier swallowing the diamond in Central Park in 'The Marathoon Man'.
Well, no wonder for the confusion!
ugg en france | 10.21.11 @ 6:32AM
new...
Bill| 10.21.11 @ 9:06AM
No person who has seen the lives of people who suffer from psychosis could possibly be "agnostic" about what is real and what is not, at least not when it comes to observing the perceptions that the seriously mentally ill live with.
Bill| 10.21.11 @ 9:07AM
Artists who try to make something out that kind of thing have little or no experience with such ailments.
Occam's Tool| 10.21.11 @ 10:35AM
Thank you, Bill. Beautifully put. And I hope your family member or friend is doing well.
Bill| 10.21.11 @ 10:40AM
Eight years in a county mental hospital as a psychiatric nurses' aide.
POST American| 10.21.11 @ 9:35AM
FORGET entirely 'moral authority'
----since capstone franchise slum Hollywood
sold out to the Globalist TREASON OP
decades ago Hollywood has had ZERO
creative credibility.
Must say, even looking back at the praised
to death 'Godfather' --or the promising
first works of Scorsese, for all the skill,
all the riveting ensemble, NONE of them
took us through a threshold. NONE of
them kindled anything lasting in the heart
or soul.
----And, come to think of it, ;Godfather', released
in the year of Nixon's Rockefeller Globalist
set up with MAO ----and grouped with the flag
fetish PATTON, and the Weimar 'decadent'
Cabaret----were clearly, one and all, predictive
programming for what followed ---HIV
and abortion 'culture' ----resignation to mafia (ie Globalist)
biz nihilist values ---and FOX News
fake front fetish 'patriotism'.
Le Cracquere| 10.21.11 @ 10:18AM
Apparently, printing "mental illness" three times has an effect similar to saying "Beetlejuice" three times.
Skinner| 10.21.11 @ 12:37PM
I know, I know.....don't feed the trolls, but......
Once, just ONCE, please post a response that makes some sense? Please?
And don't use the word global in any form?
Peter McGrath| 10.21.11 @ 9:48AM
Michael Shannon was a revelation to me when I first saw him perform in ""Bug" (w/ Ashley Judd) and later "Revolutionary Road" (w/ Winslet and DiCaprio). Can't wait to see him in this new film - despite Mr. Bowman's well stated misgivings.
Seek| 10.21.11 @ 11:24AM
He also was terrific last year as the real-life record producer-maestro Kim Fowley, in "The Runaways," whipping those gals into shape. Joan Jett approved.
Skinner| 10.21.11 @ 12:42PM
"WrestleMania" fanatic Fred in Groundhog Day?
Walden| 10.21.11 @ 9:56AM
Mr. Bowman, you are a great writer, but I find it tedious to read your movie reviews, and rarely do I come away knowing anything about the movie itself, and whether I should invest time and money in going to see it.
Occam's Tool| 10.21.11 @ 10:37AM
Walden---check out Debbie Schlussel's website. Conservative but fair, she will tell you what you want to know about movies--- if you can bring your kids to it, how much gore is present, etc.
Seek| 10.21.11 @ 11:26AM
Debbie is the best there is on the subject of Islamic infiltration, but simply lacks the skill and patience to write good film criticism.
Kenneth Olsen | 10.21.11 @ 6:48PM
The movie might have been better if the character (and the director) read "The Myth of Mental Illness" by Dr. Thomas Szasz.
POST American| 10.22.11 @ 12:15AM
------AGAIN-------
AS RED China, that is Globalist created,
US taxpayer underwritten and enabled,
RED China, is brought up to speed as world
'model' and, very soon, 'enforcer'
------capstone, franchise slum Hollywood
has BALKED
---------------the 20th
-------------------the 30th
----------------------the 40th
-------------------------the 50th
----------------------------and NOW 60th
Anniversaries of the awesomely relevant,
yet unfolding, Globalism--RED China and
EUGENICS 'unfriendly'
--------------------KOREAN WAR-----------------------
AS you sit there in Tower #2, slurping
those GMO '90's Show' lattes -----take a deep
breath.
----CAN YOU SMELL THE SMOKE? ---YET?
----------HUAC meets NUREMBERG 2012----------
Cabermon| 10.22.11 @ 1:23PM
Dude! Take a 'lude.
Or I should say
DUDE! Take a LUDE.
We tire of your shouting.
Janis| 10.23.11 @ 10:37PM
I wish they would stop remake great movies..
The Woman
Mildred Pierce
The Day the Earth Stood Still
To name a few...
Can they not think up any original ideas..
Seek| 10.24.11 @ 3:48PM
Anyone can cherry-pick a handful of remakes and use their existence to "prove" just about anything they want to prove. The new (HBO-exclusive) "Mildred Pierce," by the way, is miles above the 1945 original. Joan Crawford couldn't hold a candle to today's Kate Winslet.
POST American| 10.23.11 @ 10:38PM
----------------BEYOND BOTTOMLESS---------------
Response to the rectum worshippers above:
----All this as the thrice Globalist destroyed,
good people of China are left in the grips of
the very interests, the very families, who
formented and executed to RED Chinese
Halocaust a few decades ago.
That is --the yet unfolding, Hollywood 'overlooked'
'EUGENICS friendly'
RED Chinese Halocaust.
"---Now everyone! ---Pipe down!
Sit back down!
--------STAY Chai-CALM!"
Tooooooo funny and truly ---
----------------BEYOND BOTTOMLESS----------------