| PSYCHIC TV : Geoffrey Sax’s White Noise [6/10] |
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| Thursday, 17 February 2005 | |
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"Savvy marketing-campaign and intriguing subject-matter may be enough to corral even ticketbuyers normally averse to creepy-spooky fare," wrote Variety magazine's Joe Leydon in his appraisal of White Noise's prospects (issue Jan 10-16, 2005). "But," he went on, "word of mouth generated by disappointed auds [audiences] won't be kind, making rapid B.O. [box office] drop off a dead certainty." As it turned out, Leydon wasn't far off the mark: White Noise's North American take slumped 50% from its first weekend to the second - but as the first weekend had harvested $24m, exceeding all expectations and predictions. Roughly the same thing had happened a couple of months before, when similarly spooky thriller The Forgotten had shrugged off sniffy reviews and low-key expectations to top the box-office charts. Even the posters for the two films were strikingly similar, dominated by shadowy, distorted, phantom-like figures looming in a miasmic, wavy horizontal band. The success of both White Noise and The Forgotten - in which a bereaved individual, consumed with grief, tries to "communicate" with their departed loved one - perhaps suggest that the aftermath of 9/11 continues to resonate deep in the American heartland grain. Or perhaps it's just the case that there's always a market for slickly-mounted sci-fi actioners with a new-age twist. But whereas The Forgotten functioned brilliantly as a breathlessly fast-paced paranoid conspiracy mystery, White Noise opts for more old-school shocks and chills - with much more uneven, and ultimately more unsatisfying, results. Despite its ostensibly ‘American' setting, this is a Canadian-UK co-production, shot entirely in watery Vancouver - and featuring Canada's ever-watchable Deborah Kara Unger as the female lead - directed by British TV veteran Geoffrey Sax (his belated feature-film debut) and written by Welshman Niall Johnson (whose next project is, incongruously enough, the Rowan Atkinson-as-vicar comedy Keeping Mum). While his script borrows liberally from a range of antecedents, the basic consituents are Poltergeist, Nigel Kneale's seminal teleplay The Stone Tape, The Dead Zone and The Sixth Sense - the finished, somewhat cobbled-together product bearing a quite striking resemblance to 2001's "creepy-spooky" mid-range hit The Mothman Prophecies. As in that picture, we have a youthfully middle-aged hero (Michael Keaton as architect John Rivers) who, in the first reel, loses his thirtysomething wife (Chandra West as Anna) then receives distorted phone-messages which turn out to have a supernatural explanation. Mothman turned to Alan Bates to fill the role of exposition-spouting Brit expert - here we have Ian McNeice (as Raymond Price) to handily explain what's going on to both protagonist and audience. Since the 1930s, we're told, scientists have been aware of something known as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) - in which dead folk communicate with the living through the ‘static' or ‘white noise' of TVs, radios, etc. These communications often take the form of simple greetings - but occasionally they provide premonitory "flashes" of future events. Price has been receiving such messages for decades, primarily using them to help grieving folk like Sarah Tate - played by Canada's Deborah Kara Unger, always an asset to this kind of production thanks to (a) her odd, gritty ethereality and (b) her ability to keep a poker-straight face as the absurdities mount. The escalation of daftness doesn't take long in White Noise - for reasons which are never made fully clear, EVP can't be experienced ‘live' but only via recordings. This pitches the movie firmly into Blow Up / Blow Out territory as the increasingly frantic Keaton becomes obsessed with poring over white-noise tapes in search of messages from the departed Anna. Which he duly receives - as well as other, less welcome manifestations... White Noise is an interesting example of how films can have an odd, complex effect on their viewers. The events in the movie are, by any standard, preposterous: whatever internal logic originally sustained the EVP idea must have evaporated during the various script rewrites, and the second half of the picture becomes a diffuse confusion of inconsistencies, loose ends and a somewhat arbitrary, this'll-do-for-a-climax, serial-killer subplot. Subjected to rational analysis, White Noise is nonsense - but this doesn't mean it isn't effective in other ways. Because, at certain points, even the most hardened chiller veteran may experience genuine tension and jolts - notwithstanding Sax and Johnson's fondness for cheap shocks of the jack-in-the-box ‘boo' variety. Crude as this approach may be, White Noise - which, either by accident or design, leaves much to the viewer's imagination - ends up achieving its basic visceral function. Sufficiently persuasive is it that the majority of viewers may well end up thinking that EVP is a genuine phenomenon - rather than what it is, namely the invention of an imaginative scriptwriter. And, at its best, this is simply a genuinely scary movie - in an era when such things are startlingly far and far between. Neil Young 17th February, 2004 WHITE NOISE : Canada/UK 2005 (copyright date 2005) : Geoffrey Sax : 101 mins Seen at UGC cinema (Boldon, UK) 16th February, 2004 - public show |
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