Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/10/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, October 10, 2019

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

Cast: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward, Leon Russom. Screenplay: Bryan Woods, Scott Beck, John Krasinski. Cinematography: Charlotte Bruus Christensen. Production design: Jeffrey Beecroft. Film editing: Christopher Tellefsen. Music: Marco Beltrami.

Given the generally enthusiastic critical and audience reception of A Quiet Place, I was prepared to enjoy it. And for the most part I did. I liked the prevailing mood of the film, its sure-footed pacing and neatly timed shocks. But I am such an inveterate skeptic, such an indefatigable asker of Questions You're Not Supposed to Ask, that I wasn't completely won over. I found myself wondering why the Abbotts, so nicely played by John Krasinski and the always wonderful Emily Blunt, would conceive another child in the midst of post-apocalyptic horror. They have taken so much care, especially after the loss of one of their children, to maintain a life of silence, then why would they risk it all for such an uncontrollable noisemaker as an infant? And then, when their daughter discovers that the feedback from her malfunctioning hearing aid could disable one of the predators, I wondered why scientists and the military hadn't already figured out that the best way to attack creatures who hunt by sound is to turn that sense against them, or if they have, why they haven't come to the rescue of the Abbotts and their neighbors. These are quibbles, of course, but A Quiet Place is meant to be taken fairly seriously, as a drama of family dynamics -- the daughter feels guilty for the death of her little brother and thinks her father doesn't love her, while her remaining brother feels like he can't live up to the heroics of his father and her mother blames herself for the death of the child. In the end everything is subordinated to shocks and thrills, so that the film ends up like a more sophisticated version of a 1950s invaders from outer space movie, or a better-made episode of a series like The Walking Dead.