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COLD
CREEK MANOR
3/10
USA 2003 : Mike FIGGIS : 119 mins
Many of Figgis’s previous movies have had noirish and/or thriller aspects, but
Cold Creek Manor is plunges into new, luridly gothic, potboiling
territory - to which he proves spectacularly ill-suited. To be fair, he’s
saddled with a dreadful screenplay (by Richard Jefferies) which seems
to lack several crucial scenes – problems which were perhaps exacerbated
in post-production. Editor Dylan Tichenor’s amazing track-record (Magnolia,
Boogie Nights, Unbreakable),
however, suggests the blame shouldn’t be laid at the cutting-room door.
And Figgis must definitely carry the can for his thuddingly over-emphatic
score, a blatant and counter-productive attempt to convince us we’re watching
a full-blooded nailbiter.
Well-off-but-stressed-out Manhattanites – businesswoman Leah Tilson (Sharon
Stone) and documentary film-maker husband Cooper (Dennis Quaid) – move
to the country, reckoning it’s a safer environment for their children:
stroppy adolescent Kristen (Kristen Stewart) and pre-teen Jesse (Ryan
Wilson). Trawling the upstate countryside, they buy secluded Cold Creek
Manor and its entire, copious contents - which Cooper immediately starts
assembling as family-history research for a future documentary. He’s startled
when the house’s previous owner Dale Massie (Stephen Dorff) shows up,
fresh from three years in prison during which time the bank foreclosed
on his mortgage. Despite his redneck appearance and boorish table-habits,
Massie seems friendly, and starts working for the Tilsons as they restore
the neglected mansion. But it isn’t long before Cooper suspects Massie
of ulterior motives and, perhaps, psychotic tendencies…
Cold Creek Manor is a limp re-hash of Scorsese’s Cape Fear – a fact which casting
that movie’s Juliette Lewis (as Dale’s trailer-tramp girlfriend Ruby)
only serves to emphasise. In the ‘Max Cady’ role of tattooed, ranting,
musclebound, unhinged ‘avenger’, Dorff glowers for all his worth - if
nothing else he provides a little energy and sexual tension, while the
young Stewart confirms the strong impression she made in Panic
Room. Quaid and Stone, however, seem uncomfortable in their sloppily
characterised roles: he’s rather too rugged and over-muscled to convince
as the his wishy-washy, easily-intimidated Cooper, while Stone is asked
to be a take-no-nonsense Noo Yawker one minute, a hapless damsel-in-distress
the next.
Their most ludicrous moment comes when, mistaking Leah for Dale through a mucky
tarpaulin, Cooper knocks her to the ground - from which supine position
she plays out the rest of the scene. There’s another laughable bit when
the pair discover a mysterious hidden well known as ‘The Devil’s Throat’
(the film’s original title): watch out for an unexplained and very fake-looking
piece of timber with ‘EVIL’ carved on it, which an baffled-looking Cooper
discards without comment. Of course, somebody ends up getting thrown down
the well, where they slosh around in the water among decaying corpses
– a very unwise ‘homage’ to Hideo Nakata’s Ring,
perhaps.
Figgis also makes a complete hash of the climactic, unsatisfactorily brief rooftop
confrontation with the demented Dale. By this point, the sloppiness of
the storytelling is really starting to take its toll – simultaneous developments
elsewhere involving Ruby and her sister, the local Sheriff (Dana Eskelson,
very good in a nothing role), prove nothing more than a time-wasting diversion.
Likewise, it isn’t at all clear how Cooper has managed to puzzle out Dale’s
terrible secrets given the meagre ‘clues’ available.
Incompetence, of course, is no crime – and Cold Creek Manor does at least
boast some interesting tracking camerawork and mildly fish-eyed lensing
from cinematographer Declan Quinn. But it’s otherwise so sloppily as to
verges on an insult to its viewers’ intelligence. The most offensive aspect
of the film, however, is the subtext: Jefferies and Figgis’ crass handling
of class conflict. The audience is invited to identify with the smug,
sophisticated Tillsons in their hatred of the animalistic, violent, beer-swilling
Dale, a cardboard-demon caricature of an underclass (simultaneously old-money
and trailer-trash) which must be eradicated and/or exorcised as
the rural landscape becomes progressively gentrified and suburbanised.
It’s cautionary, bourgeois-nightmare material at its most perfunctory
and irresponsible.
22nd November, 2003
(seen 21st November : Tyneside
Cinema, Newcastle – screening introduced by Figgis)
by Neil
Young
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