a godawful movie, that's what lies there.
All things JK Rowling, according to the New York Times.
One year ago: Diane buys ginger ale for her morning sickness. (See, there's subtext!)
Two years ago: I don't see Saving Private Ryan.
Four years ago: World Nap Organization: communist front?
Today's news question:Who is Richard B. Cheney and why is he in the news these days?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
I think Sophia is trying to kill Darin and me. But more on that in a moment.
Therese, Brent's wife, called me the other day and said, Hey, wanna go to a movie? Like Brent and Darin need any excuse to spend time together. So I said yes. When it came time to choosing a movie to see, the only one we were the teeniest bit interested in was What Lies Beneath, which had gotten so-so reviews. But we decided to brave it anyhow.
Boy, what a big mistake that was. I've already telegraphed my review for those on my notify list, but here it goes anyhow: What Lies Beneath is a bad, bad movie. It is a movie that, were it a book, I would have thrown it across the room.
Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her husband Norman (Harrison Ford) bid adieu to their college-age daughter Kaitlin and return home to their empty nest. Norman, who has a chair in genetics at the university, has plenty to keep him busy, but Claire, who gave up her successful career as a concert cellist when she married Norman, has nothing to do.
So when the couple who move in next door--he's with the Psych Department, she's his wife (no woman in this movie has a job, apparently)--evidently have some problems, Claire starts spying on them. She suspects that the husband might have offed the wife and done away with her body. When freaky things start happening around Claire's house, she suspects it is the ghost of the wife trying to communicate with her. When the wife turns up looking fine-and-dandy, Claire begins to suspect something else is going on. Norman tells her he suspects the problem may be with her head.
There are so many things wrong with What Lies Beneath I hardly know where to begin.
For one thing, it is slow. I think The Sixth Sense bears some responsibility here: somebody noticed the ticket-buying public responded enthusiastically to a languorous psychological thriller and thought that the pacing was the key to the success of the movie. They forgot to notice that the pacing was key to understanding Bruce Willis's experience of what was going on. In What Lies Beneath, the pacing might put you to sleep.
The story and the screenplay both suck. I point out the screenplay because so much has been made publicity-wise that this is a first-time screenplay and the writer was kept on the project the whole time. While I am quite sure that director Robert Zemeckis had a hand in the script, I am going to blame the framework on the writer, Clark Gregg. Unfortunately, I can't tell you what's wrong with it without spoiling the movie, so if you're interested you can look in the spoilers section below.
There are tons of details thrown in that are clearly meant to be red herrings but are so inexpertly included I felt huge sections must have been edited out of the finished film. (They probably could have kept them, had they speeded up other sections a little. Okay, a lot.) Periodically Therese and I, while recounting the movie to Brent and Darin, would say, "Wait...remember this? What about this?" I think it's kind to call these elements "red herrings"; I think it's more apt to call them "a messy script."
There are also a lot--way too many--scenes that rely on a sudden shock for the viewer rather than genuine thrills earned the old-fashioned way. Too many scenes of someone suddenly appearing in the frame--Michelle Pfeiffer is scared out of her wits and suddenly Harrison Ford walks into the frame behind her! The audience jumps, sure, but it's cheap. Particularly when it's done over and over and over and over (I'm not kidding) again. It got so bad that during certain scenes I started looking at the edges of the frame rather than at the main part of the movie because I just knew that we were going to get the "Eeek!" instead of something truly scary.
This movie also contains what must be the two most boring star performances ever put on film. I wish there had not been so many damn extreme closeups of Michelle Pfeiffer's face; all they kept doing was pointing out how much work she's had done. (You could get a paper cut by touching her nose.) Harrison Ford is barely in the first half of the movie and sleepwalks through the second half. I kept expecting Michelle to explain to someone that her husband was never around because he was off filming another movie.
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So that you're not in the slightest bit tempted to go see this movie or to rent it or even to watch it on cable, I'll ruin everything for you right here: Claire is being haunted by the ghost of husband Norman's girlfriend, a college student he killed when she threatened to go to the Dean and ruin his career. She gets Claire investigating her disappearance, Norman finally confesses that he hid her body (though not that he killed her), Claire insists they have to tell the police, at which point Norman decides he's going to kill Claire too in what is possibly the stupidest climax I've ever seen. At the very end, as Norman is killing Claire underwater, the dead girlfriend floats up, frees Claire, and kills Norman.
It was ludicrous. I laughed.
One of the biggest problems with the movie is that it cheats. It does not play fair with the viewer, and for that reason I am not inclined to be kind to it. The movie wants to have it both ways--keep you thinking it might be a ghost story or it might be a psychological thriller, and the only way to do it is to cheat.
We are 100 percent with Claire's POV for the first half of the movie. POV in a movie is tough, because movies tend to be like novels that have several limited-omniscient characters in them: for example, in X-Men we have a scene where Wolverine sees something happen, then we cut over here to Magneto and Co. doing something, then we go to Professor X's school, then back to Wolverine, etc. etc. What Lies Beneath sets up the rules early: we are always with Claire. We know what she knows. We are as confused as she is by some of the things going on.
Midway through the movie, we are suddenly with Norman's POV, and it becomes obvious why: Claire is acting really, really strangely. Is she possessed? Is she playacting? And there's a reason the movie suddenly goes to another POV--because if we stay with Claire the whole time, the jig is up, the secret is revealed.
In this same scene, Claire hallucinates that she sees something in the mirror--she sees herself, drenched, walking in the front door. As far as I can tell, this is the only time she hallucinates anything in the movie. This is cheating. Why is this scene in here? Plot reasons: so we can find out a bit more of the backstory. It's annoying and badly handled. Ergh.
One of the major problems with What Lies Beneath is the enormous backstory that is so extraordinarily badly handled I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. We know that two things happened a year ago: Norman got the Chair in Genetics, there was a party to celebrate this, and Claire plowed into a tree with her car.
We have no idea in which order any of this happened.
We also discover that Claire saw her husband's girlfriend at the party last year. From something one character says, Claire knew she was Norman's girlfriend. Claire seems to have forgotten this, however--but no one ever mentions that she's had amnesia about anything, probably as a result of that car accident.
At another point--again, a year ago--Claire walked into their house, drenched, and saw Norman and his girlfriend doing something--having sex? him murdering her?--and then rushed out again, probably to get into that accident. But we have no idea when that happened in relation to anything else, because everything that happened a year ago is told to us. Recounting backstory in dialogue is one of the things movies do the worst, in my opinion, and this movie does it worse than most.
There's also backstory about Norman's father being really famous in his field (mathematics) and this grates on Norman...but it's never paid off. And there are so many mentions of renovations Claire and Norman have done on their house I expected something to come of that, but no. And there's the whole thing about Claire giving up her musical career--what's the point of that? And what's the whole deal with having Claire's daughter go off to college--other than to give an ostensible reason she's freaking out (extremely underused) or to give Norman something icky to say during the climax of the movie?
Exposition (as mentioned in the spoiler paragraphs above) is handled badly. Little factoids we're going to need for later are dropped with all the finesse of a piano dropping on someone in a cartoon. red herrings that might go somewhere--the neighbors next door are with the Psych department--are unused.
The movie could have been a lot more. Instead, it's a mess.
I'll admit that I kept hoping that the "haunting" was all an enormous con job and someone was gaslighting Claire: Norman, Norman's girlfriend (who was, of course, not dead), the neighbors next door, or some combination thereof. I was sure that the whole bit about the house getting renovated was going to reveal little tricks had been installed in the walls in order to perpetrate the haunting. Color me depressed when I discover all the bits dropped here and there do not lead to a big payoff but instead are just little bits dropped here and there.
Ted Elliott, on Wordplay, neatly divides up What Lies Beneath as a history of psychological suspense movies:
ACT I: Hitchcock -- Psychological suspens as thriller. The psychology of the protagonist is reactive to the external environment; we do not doubt the protagonist's sanity; nor do we doubt veracity of the information we receive through or about the protagonist.
ACT II: Polanski -- Psychological suspense as horror. The psychology of the protagonist is reflective of and reflects on external environment. We doubt the protagonist's sanity; the veracity of the information we receive through and about the protagonist is also in doubt.
ACT III: DaPalma -- Psychological suspense as spectacle. The psychology of the protagonist (or any other character) is given short shrift in favor of playing to the the psychology of the audience. The question of the protagonist's sanity or the veracity of information we recieve through and about the protagonist is moot; the only thing that matters is the suspense/surprise mechanisms of the plot.
I think he's right--he sure nails the various tones of parts of the movie. But he also is pointing out, by proxy, what a mess this movie is. They don't know what kind of movie they wanted to make, or if they did, they didn't want to put in the effort to truly keep the audience guessing. They cheat left and right, as I said before, and they don't make use of what they do give you.
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The past few nights Sophia had does something she hasn't done in her five months up until this point--she's woken us up four or five times a night, crying and hungry. By the morning, I'm a total zombie. Darin's a little bit of a zombie--bad, but not terrible.
This morning at 5:30 I yelled, "For the love of Pete!" and Darin became very upset at me for getting so angry at Sophia. He was so upset he had to leave the bedroom and he was up for the day at that point.
Darin surmised this morning that what she is doing is changing her feeding schedule because we've been giving her the cup in the afternoons. She's simply decided she won't eat during the afternoons and will save her hunger until Mommy feeds her--that is, night. I think this is a hypothesis with merit.
I mentioned this to Fernando when he called and Fernando's instantaneous response was: "Well, then you have to feed her with the bottle all the time, until she realizes she has to eat from it."
He's got a point.
We haven't fed Sophia exclusively by bottle since she was two or three weeks old and I had to pump exclusively because my nipples were in such bad shape. (I was bleeding and had sizeable gashes, for those who don't remember my early breastfeeding horror stories.) We haven't used bottles since, which was a big mistake.
I have to work out with Darin how we can go to a regimen where he has to feed her most of the time, since that will interfere with work. (If I feed her, she will smell the milk on me and refuse to eat from the bottle.) Maybe I will nurse her only as the last thing at night, so she will tank up and go to sleep. i don't know.
This is Not Fun.
Give your baby the occasional bottle so he or she won't forget how to use them!
In the forum:
If you know where "grrl" comes from, please inform our discussion.
Did you find breastfeeding leads to weight loss? Mysteries: the good, the bad, the ugly.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@nobody-knows-anything.com