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| Hugh Jackman's intensity in "Prisoners" is something to behold. |
The film opens with a shot of a deer grazing through snowy
woods. As the camera creeps backwards the tip of a shotgun comes into view, a
prayer is whispered and the deer is slain. Here, innocence is overtaken by the
crueler workings of the world, a sign of things to come for the hunters, Keller
Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his son, Ralph.
Dover, his wife Grace and his two
children, teenage Ralph and six-year-old Anna are visiting their neighbors for
Thanksgiving dinner. Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis)
have two children as well, teenage Eliza and six-year-old Joy. While taking
their younger sisters on a walk, Ralph and Eliza spot an unfamiliar RV parked
on a nearby street. The two stop their sisters from playing on it, and take
them back. Soon after returning to the Birch residence, Anna and Joy ask to
walk back over to the Dover household to look for a red whistle Anna was given
by her father. It is lost, and so too become the little girls. When the two
little girls go missing, the disappearance of the strange RV becomes the focus
of the two panicking families.
Enter Alex Jones (Paul Dano). As
the owner of the RV, Jones very quickly becomes the prime suspect in the
kidnapping. It does not help his case that although tall and lanky, he is
dressed like a 10-year old, has a far off look in his eyes and speaks in
high-pitched, broken sentences. Despite being taken into custody, no evidence
of any kind is found on Jones or his RV, and he is soon released to the care of
his aunt and guardian, Holly (an almost unrecognizable Melissa Leo). Outraged
by the police’s handling of the case, particularly a broken promise to keep the
suspect in custody by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), and vehemently certain
that Jones is guilty and knows the whereabouts of the girls, Dover takes it
upon himself to move the case forward and subsequently kidnaps the suspect.
Dover brings Jones to a boarded up
and abandoned house in a presumably quiet part of town and begins to attempt to
beat the whereabouts of the girls out of him. Jones says nothing, so Dover is
forced to call upon both Franklin and Nancy for help.
Here, the film asks serious moral
questions of its audience. Franklin is horrified by Dover’s actions. He knows
it’s not right, yet at the same time there is the pull of the clock ticking on
his chances of ever seeing his daughter again. How far are you willing to go to
save a loved one? Should you be willing
to go that far? Is it acceptable under these circumstances, or any for that
matter?
“In the maze,” Jones tells Dover
between scalding showers in a wooden cell. “That’s where you’ll find them.”
Dover has no idea what this means,
of course, but “the maze” is a recurring symbol throughout the film and also
effectively serves as a metaphor for each characters struggle; each is trapped
in a seemingly inescapable maze. Franklin and Nancy are trapped between their
guilt in allowing Dover to brutalize Jones and their desire to save their daughter; Jones is trapped in both the physical
confines of Dover’s torture and his own mental confines, as there is very
obviously something preventing him from telling what he knows; Anna and Joy are
trapped in the hands on their abductor; Dover is trapped between the desperation
to find his daughter and the growing likelihood that he will not be around to
provide for her (should he find her) once the police discover what he is doing
with Jones. Each character is a “prisoner” to his or her own maze.
Though the storyline asks compelling questions of its viewers, it is its haunting cinematography and score that lift it to its highest points. Academy Award nominated cinematographer
Roger Deakins (“The Shawshank Redemption,”
“No Country for Old Men”)
instills a constant sense of dread and filth throughout the film with his often
jarring, yet always visually compelling camera work. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s
original score, meanwhile, shows deep range; from slowly building the suspense
and dread involved in the mystery of it all to the emotional weight the events
take on those involved, Jóhannsson covers it flawlessly.
Another driving force of the
film is its intensity. Jackman’s performance comes to the
forefront for sheer explosiveness and effective transparency; his eruptions
are not of ultimate assurance, but rather a lack thereof he is compensating
for. The performance of Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki, while not as forthcoming as Jackman’s, is nonetheless a major part of the foundation of the film’s sense of
dread. He has a facial tick that grows more and more prominent as tension builds
in the plot. He is implosive, appearing calm and collected throughout, his
deterioration only noticeable through the slightest of details until he finally
explodes in one of the more compelling set pieces of recent years.
Where this film loses steam,
however, is in its latter half. While suspense built is constantly rewarded
with real results throughout the first half of the film, it is repeatedly left empty as the film nears its conclusion, which turns out to be its weakest point. There is a
very distinct difference between an effectively ambiguous ending and a
non-ending. “Prisoners,” unfortunately,
for all its ambition, features the latter.
Perhaps more so than any other film in recent years, "Prisoners" is a half film. Er, about three-quarters of a film to be more specific. It is almost as if Villeneuve got injured and sat out the fourth quarter, leaving a substitute to try to bring home the win. Though there is much to appreciate in "Prisoners," the fourth quarter is crunch-time and taking it off does not lead to victory. (Grade: C+)
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