for ‘Tribune’ : Jeff Nichols’ TAKE SHELTER [6/10]

Take Shelter
Director: Jeff Nichols

“WHERE joy should reign, these skies restrain” – so sang Norway’s A-ha, that most Ingmar Bergman-esque of boy-bands, on their 1988 hit ‘Stay on these Roads.’ It’s a track that would have made an ideal end-credits accompaniment for Jeff Nichols’ paean to the ominous power of cumulo-nimbus, Take Shelter, in which an ordinary blue-collar American becomes gradually unhinged by nightmare visions of imminent meteorological apocalypse.

As played by the toweringly intense, bug-eyed and reliably excellent Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, Boardwalk Empire, My Son My Son What Have Ye Done) Curtis Laforche makes for a compelling protagonist, even when his actions strain both our credulity and our sympathy.

He’s married to the increasingly long-suffering Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and the pair have a cute young daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart) who’s hearing-impaired to the point of deafness (and who registers less as a character than a tearjerking plot-contrivance.) Curtis’s construction job provides him with enough health-insurance to pay for operations which could rectify Hannah’s condition. But there are clouds on the horizon – convinced that his dreams are premonitions, Curtis becomes so obsessed with extending his back-yard storm-shelter (a common feature of detached US homes) that he runs up a $6,875 bill, imperilling his job by borrowing work-equipment without permission…

In this follow-up to 2007’s promisingly atmospheric family-saga Shotgun Stories (also starring Shannon), writer-director Nichols ambitiously seeks to combine elements of Todd Haynes’ 1995 Safe (in which a housewife’s over-sensitivity to environmental factors spiralled towards insanity) with Don Delillo’s seminal 1985 novel White Noise, a portrait of a provincial American city under the paranoid shadows of nuclear war.

The results play like a darker, more intense variant of the recent Coen brothers’ Book-of-Job-with-laughs, A Serious Man – indeed, the intensity often gets out of hand, especially during a first half which features an excess of dream-sequences reliant on cheap horror-movie ‘boo’ scares.

And while Curtis’s painful struggle with psychiatric issues compels (his schizophrenic mother has been hospitalised for decades) at some 120 minutes Take Shelter makes rather heavy weather of its material, Curtis’s behaviour being too extreme and idiosyncratic to offer much allegorical commentary about America’s security-dominated insularity. The finale, meanwhile, is a classic case of a writer having his cake and eat it – so grandiosely ambiguous that its implications hit us with a moderately invigorating gust rather than a headspinningly mighty wind.

Neil Young
15th November, 2011
written for Tribune magazine