WHAT
LIES BENEATH
6/10
US
2000
dir.
Robert Zemeckis
scr. Clark Gregg (story Gregg, Sarah Kernochan)
cin. Don Burgess
stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Harrison Ford
129 minutes
Yes,
129 minutes. Somebody called ‘Arthur Schmidt’ is billed as the ‘editor’
on this movie, but can it be a coincidence he shares his initials with
‘Allan Smithee’, Hollywood’s most famously non-existent director. What
editing can possibly have been done What Lies Beneath? What can
they have left out?
There’s
a decent thriller lurking somewhere deep inside this mass of footage,
but finding it doesn’t seem to have figured high on Zemeckis’s list of
priorities. Instead, he appears to think that, by stringing together a
series of visual and thematic nods to Psycho, Rear Window,
Vertigo and Suspicion, then lathering a pseudo-Bernard Herrmann
score over the results, he’s crafting some kind of Hitchcock hommage.
It’s
as if Ford and Pfeiffer’s presence on board panicked everybody into trying
to produce worthily ‘prestigious’ work, when what the material really
demands is pulpy briskness. Slowing everything down to a sluggishly funereal
pace just ends up telegraphing every single shock and twist a long way
in advance, and the only real fun lies in trying to second guess the movie’s
next piece of thievery, whether it be from Hitchcock, Gaslight
or Les Diaboliques – the last-named being hinted at as the prime
model in both the film’s trailer and poster.
This
thankfully turns out to be something of a red herring, though Ford is
such an obvious heavy from the outset that few audiences will be much
surprised when his character, Norman Spencer, turns out to be rather less
than ‘perfect husband’ he initially appears. A brilliant (i.e. unstable)
geneticist, Norman is married to Claire (Pfeiffer), who has a teenage
daughter from an earlier relationship – despite the film’s length, much
of this back story remains muddy. They all live in a vast, opulent house
on an isolated lakeshore in rural Vermont.
The
plot kicks off with the daughter handily going off to college, leaving
Claire with a mild case of ‘empty nest’ syndrome that rapidly darkens
into more sinister territory: mild poltergeist shocks, weird noises, spooky
apparitions in the bathtub. And it doesn’t help her jittery mood when
her next door neighbour (an unrecognisably bearded, long-haired James
Remar) appears to have done away with his wife (Miranda Otto, almost as
underused as in The Thin Red Line). Or are the ‘murder’, and the
‘haunting’ all in Claire’s mind? And how does it all tie in with the disappearance
of a beautiful local student, exactly one year before?
From
the first scene, Zemeckis constantly resorts to cheap ‘boo’ scares, with
diminishing results. He deploys some of the most cobwebbed tricks in the
book – even the ‘angled bathroom mirror’ and the ‘closing fridge door’
are dragged out of mothballs and pressed into service. In some quarters,
this kind of relentless old-fashionedness has been somehow praised as
a virtue, but the film’s predictability too often teeters on the edge
of full-blown tedium. If it remains watchable by never quite crossing
that fatal line, then it’s Pfeiffer who deserves most of the credit –
she brings unexpected (perhaps unwarranted) depth to the central but somewhat
underwritten role of ‘scared wife.’
According
to press notes, What Lies Beneath is based on an original idea
by uncredited co-producer Stephen Spielberg - but having seen the film,
I’m no wiser as to what this idea can possibly be. It’s a standard star
vehicle, spicing up a lazily twisty domestic melodrama with mild supernatural
high-jinks. But ideas? Original ideas? I think not.
by Neil
Young
Buy What Lies Beneath on DVD
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