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EVERYTHING
PUT TOGETHER
7/10
US 2000
dir.
Marc Forster
scr. Forster, Catherine Lloyd Burns, Adam Forgash
cin. Roberto Schaefer
stars Radha Mitchell, Justin Louis
89 minutes
Everything
Put Together is a low-budget psychological drama that makes striking
use of new digital technologies - its director freely admits his direct
debt to Thomas Vinterberg's masterful Festen, though this
is by no means a dogme film. There's background music, hauntingly
spare and ambient, and the director employs many post-production effects
in order to distort the image and sound in order to convey the chaos of
its heroine's mind. He's also open about his other influences: Repulsion
and Rosemary's Baby and, to a lesser extent, Don't Look Now
and The Shining. And whilee Everything Put Together doesn't
quite match the standard of those films, it's a bold, original debut that
taking a vibrant approach to difficult, too-little-understood subject
matter: the impact upon families of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
But
it's difficult to fully engage with Everything Put Together if
you've also seen Todd Haynes' 1995 film Safe, which also depicts
the breakdown of a young housewife in modern suburban America. There are
plenty of divergences, principally stylistic - Safe is calm, objective,
careful, detached: the camera steadily observes the central figure (Julianne
Moore) from a distance, and it's impossible to say whether what's wrong
with her is entirely physical - she develops the symptoms of an almost
universal allergy - or entirely mental, or a mixture of both. Everything
Put Together is a jagged contrast - jarring, abrupt, the hand-held
camera mirroring the mental traumas suffered by Angie (an effectively
restrained Mitchell), whose tragedy is not a matter of doubt or opinion.
Her baby son Gabriel succumbs to SIDS while only one day old, sending
Angie spiralling into an abyss she's unable to comprehend or begin to
cope with - and neither can any of her so-called friends.
But
while the two films are very different in terms of their approach, and
in the specifics of their protagonists' plight, the basic arcs of the
stories are very close, right down to specifics: there's a pivotal crisis
with the woman behind the wheel of a car - Julianne Moore has what appears
to an allergic seizure, Radha Mitchell has a mental breakdown and ends
up smashing her head into the windscreen - and both films end on very
similar notes of careful ambiguity.
Forster's
film operates in Safe's shadow. It's also paradoxical that one
of Everything Put Together's most powerful effects on the viewer
- the way it steadily builds up a vivid sense of foreboding and tension
- is also one of the aspects that's most questionable. This is overwhelmingly
serious subject matter, and Forster's approach runs the risk of trivialising
it: the director employs the techniques of a thriller (right down
to a somewhat clumsy use of heartbeats on the soundtrack) and, if you've
read the reviews and press notes that compare it to Don't Look Now,
you may think that the film will develop some kind of supernatural angle.
Personally, I watched the film in a state of unease that it was about
to head off down that particular alley - and I was considerably relieved,
at the end, that it never had. This is one of the very few films in recent
years during which I've found myself hiding my eyes - testament to the
spookily unnerving atmosphere Forster creates, but also, I think, an indictment
that he hasn't harmonised the subject matter, the script, and the directorial
techniques needed to bring them to the screen.
The
film smacks most unsatisfactorily of contrivance, for example, during
a pivotal sequence dealing with the christening of one of Angie's friends'
babies. Angie had originally been asked to be godparent, but contact was
broken off following Gabriel's death - initially as a result of genuine
bewilderment, as the friends had no idea how to console Angie, and thought
she would need time alone with her husband Russ (Louis, a younger version
of Aidan Quinn). But, due to a series of accidents and misunderstandings,
Angie turns up at the christening, only to find, when the vicar calls
up the godparents, that she is no longer required - the whole movie takes
a step backwards as a result of the sheer implausibility of this chain
of events.
The
christening scene is the most notable example of Forster stacking the
deck against Angie - is it really necessary for her friends to turn out
to be quite so shallow and unsupportive? And do minor characters
- I'm thinking in particular of a storage clerk late on - have to be quite
so threatening and sinister. The film works much better during those moments
when it presents the outside world as more neutral, when Angie's perceptions
contain the clouds of doubt. There's a very strong scene when Angie asks
to see Gabriel's body, and then, confronted with a tiny corpse on a mortuary
slab, asserts "That's not my baby," exactly the reaction we,
and the mortuary attendant, expect. But perhaps, as in Rosemary's Baby,
Angie's paranoia may be justified after all - it turns out that the baby
isn't Gabriel after all. At this point Forster delivers another
twist - Angie is equally forceful in rejecting the second child placed
before her.
I'm
being hard on Everything Put Together. I feel the need to qualify
my enthusiasm, but it's enthusiasm all the same. Even though it was shot
on video, this is a refreshingly, excitingly cinematic piece of
work, one whose evident budgetary limitations actually add to its power
on screen. Everything Put Together is equally intriguing to the
ear as well as the eye: many sounds are sharply magnified and metallic,
to the point of grating on the nerves, and scenes often begin or end with
abrupt bangs, or, during crisis points, oppressive cacophonies. The film
is never less than fascinating to look at in terms of angles and lighting,
even if Forster's use of his digital camera never quite surpasses the
striking directness of the moment in The Blair Witch Project when
Heather Donahue thrusts hers into a plastic bag full of marshmallows.
Forster
pulls off numerous visual coups with his supposedly rudimentary equipment
- the image momentarily turns monochrome for the shattering moment when
Angie realises her son is dead; later, the lights of a multi-storey car-park
strobe slowly over the bonnet, windscreen and roof of Angie and Russ's
car as they descend to street level; and the tiny size of the camera enables
shots to be made through distorting drinks glasses on a shelf, or between
the struts of a bannister - the imagined perspective of the absent child?
A different
kind of coup comes with the casting of Angie's mother, for the majority
of the film a distant, disembodied voice on the telephone - which, in
this film, is primarily an instrument of mis-communication and alienation,
crucially so during the final, supremely ambiguous fade-out. When the
mother finally appears, it turns out to be Judy Geeson - best known for
her appearances in low-budget 60s and 70s British psychological thrillers
about women in peril. But while it's great to see Geeson on screen again,
her presence again raises questions of Forster's choice of tone. Everything
Put Together isn't really a woman-in-peril film - or at least Angie
isn't in the sort of peril faced by the characters Geeson used to play.
Forster
would no doubt defend his approach by pointing out that, for Angie, the
death of Gabriel has made her life seem like a living horror film, a real-life
psycho-thriller. Perhaps this is fair justification. I'm just not
convinced that being thrilled - which is what happened to me during
the course of this movie - is the appropriate effect such tragic, touchingly
poignant events should produce. It seems an odd complaint, but Everything
Put Together is just too effective.
by Neil
Young
Buy Everything
Put Together
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