Cynical Cinema

The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a movie that works almost entirely because of Laura Linney.  On the surface, the film shouldn’t work at all, except perhaps as a made-for-TV movie.  It’s a courtroom drama, where a priest who performed an exorcism is put on trial.  His attempts to exorcise a demon (or, in this case, six of them) from the titular character Emily Rose, may or may not have killed her.  And so Father Richard Moore (the always-reliable Tom Wilkinson) is on trial for negligent homicide.  The prosecution says that his belief in these demons, and his suggestion to young Emily that she stop taking her medication, were the causes of her death.

The courtroom scenes, which make up the bulk of the movie, are vaguely silly.  The film is obviously not concerned with the actual practice of the law, nor with realism when it comes to courtroom procedure.  Instead, it is more of a contrived proceeding, tweaked and altered for dramatic effect.  The characters are a little cartoonish - Tom Wilkinson as the stoic and dignified priest, the parents of Emily Rose as devout and marginally fanatic religious followers, Colm Feore as the almost-evil soulless manager of a nameless legal firm.  The prosecuting attorney is an overly slick, patronizing, verging-on-mean-spirited man, such that it becomes easy to root against him.

Emily Rose herself is played by Jennifer Carpenter.  The back of the DVD box (which my girlfriend got for Christmas, hence the review today) touts her merits by making mention of the fact that she starred in White Chicks.  Of course, she hadn’t yet become a familiar face with her role as Dexter’s sister on Dexter, but are you really going to put White Chicks on a DVD box?  In an effort to get people to watch?  Is anyone really going to read the back of the box for The Exorcism of Emily Rose and say to themselves “oh, that girl from White Chicks is in this?  I must have it!”  Anyway, it appears this role could have been played by just about anyone - all she does is freak out and make crazy demon-possessed faces and gets her voice dubbed over by other people to create the demon-disembodied voice effect.

Some of this is actually effective.  Some of her facial expressions are quite good, and some of the demonic-possession scenes, especially one in a church with her college boyfriend, are chilling.  But then, so much of it is unnecessary, and it grows tiresome in a TV-movie sort of cheesy way.  And her boyfriend - he’s fine, but why bother?  This guy has no significance to the story whatsoever, except that he is a witness to certain episodes of crazy, psychotic possession-type behaviour.  In fact, there are about seven characters in this film that are entirely unnecessary.

But then there’s Laura Linney.  As the lawyer for Father Moore, she ought to be the most cartoonish character of them all.  After all, she is written that way.  The hard-nosed, career-driven, cold-hearted lawyer whose experiences with religious figures like this priest, and her sudden exposure to the struggle between good and evil, cause her to have a change of heart and become a good person after all.  This character is one we’ve seen in countless movies before, and it has become a really, really awful cliche.  And it’s a huge compliment to Linney, I think, to say that she rises above it. 

Most actresses would have just gone through the motions with this cheesy, poorly written role.  They would have phoned it in, and collected their paycheques, and moved on to bigger and better things.  But Linney didn’t do that.  I think she is smart enough to realize that she is appearing in a movie that is only slightly more interesting than the TBS Movie-of-the-week.  I don’t think The Exorcism of Emily Rose is to her what Mommy Dearest was to Faye Dunaway.  In the sense that I don’t think Faye Dunaway knew she was in a terrible movie, and therefore delivered a top-notch performance that elevated the film.  Linney, I think, knows this is a bad film, but gives a top-notch performance anyway.  And kudos to her.

Her character, attorney Erin Bruner, is far more than the script suggests.  Linney is able to create a character that is at once sympathetic and callous.  And as the movie goes on, her transformation is subtle, and moderate, and totally believable.  In the hands of almost any other actress, her growth and her change of heart would be silly, cartoonish and terribly cheesy.  As Linney plays it, however, Erin Bruner is a marvel.  Terrific stuff in an otherwise silly movie, another one of those movies that throws the “based on a true story” line at movie-watchers in order to create a more realistic sense of terror in the audience. 

If The Exorcism of Emily Rose IS based on a true story, I can only assume that that story was far more interesting and far deeper than this movie is willing to go.  There are so many contrived Hollywood moments and contrived Horror moments, and contrived Personal Revelation moments that the story is completely obscured.  If it wasn’t for Linney, that’s all this movie would be.

The premise behind Diary of the Dead seems like old hat. In fact, it seems unbearably lame, the Frankenstein-monster piecing together of all the modern successful horror movies, thrown into a pot and stirred and spit out in six hours. However, the director is very intriguing. George A. Romero is one of the all-time great directors not just in horror, but in cinema. And with Diary of the Dead, he returns to his uber-successful roots, the zombie flick. Romero is the genius behind such zombie classics as the one that started it all, Night Of The Living Dead, and the one that many would suggest perfected the genre, Dawn of the Dead. (The original, not the poorly-thought-out crazy-kinetic 2005 sequel.) So the question with Diary of the Dead was this: Which Romero was going to show up? The one who made many of the most classic and original zombie movies of all time, or the one who jumped on the fast-moving zombie bandwagon and laid the turd that was that recent Land of the Dead?

Diary of the Dead is shot like Blair Witch, and Cloverfield. First-person, hand-held camera narrative, where the guy with the camera keeps it on because either “it’s the only thing keeping me sane in all this chaos”, or “if this turns out to be something big I want to record it for posterity”. Which is always a lame explanation for continuing to film during a monster attack or a scary time in the woods, but in the end, they’re the only explanations that work. The first good news - Romero has reverted to the slow-moving zombies of yore. The second good news, in fact, great news - Romero retains his sense of social commentary and political bent throughout this movie. This is something he has never lost, and it exists as much in the tone of his movies as it does in the actual story and dialogue. In this case, the entire construct of the film is a commentary on the media itself. The set-up tells us that this is the story the mainstream news media will not tell you, that this film is the only way to find out what really happened.

And what really happened is awesome! The dead are genuinely creepy, the scares are real, and the dialogue is terrific. It’s that classic Romero dialogue, that borders on the cheesy in making it’s point, but it works nearly every time. The voiceovers are suitably amateurish, and the best speeches about the nature of violence and war and the capabilities of individual men to confront their worst fears come from the film professor who accompanies the protagonists. The one, key line that is repeated more than once, refers to a gun. Three different characters hand it off to someone else saying “here, take this. It’s too easy to use.” There is some great black humour, suitable only for the zombie movie genre, like the bit with the deaf Amish guy who blows up some zombies with dynamite.

After a while, however, the voiceover narration from the girl who (obviously) has survived the zombie massacre becomes pretty tiresome, since it all seems so obvious and cliched. And there are a few scenes that are nothing new, in fact they are so familiar it’s almost insulting in the middle of a movie like this one. Like the one where a girl gets attacked by her own zombified family member and doesn’t know what to do, and the scenes where the military who show up to save the day might be too good to be true…but all in all, it works. Diary of the Dead is a quality film from a quality director who hasn’t lost a step. It’s impossible to make another Night Of The Living Dead. Once Romero made that one, he changed the zombie game for everyone, including himself. And he can’t make another Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead either. So he makes a Diary of the Dead and adds to his already considerable legacy. Diary of the Dead comes out Tuesday May 20th from Alliance Films.