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The Others | ||
 espite
the fact that Nicole Kidman was my first wife, at least in the punchline-serving
fashion that I frequently mention her, I've seen very few of her movies.
This one got good reviews and made good box office back when it was
released in the early 00s, but I never got around to seeing it and never
really intended to. At least not until one evening in July 2004, when
Malaya was channel-surfing, happened upon this one near the start on
TNT, and after we sat through 10 minutes of it we were interested enough
to stick with it. Despite the frequent commercial interruptions.
A very slow, very character-driven ghost story, The Others is full of great acting performances, very moody scenery, numerous creepy scenes, and 90 minutes of Nicole Kidman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I saw it on cable TV late one night, and enjoyed it enough to sit through the commercial breaks, though I muted them, of course. Rare is the film I want to see enough to keep watching it through commercials. I enjoyed it, even though I had read in reviews what the big ending plot twist was. It was interesting to watch the performances, and to see how they built up to revealing the secret in the end. The reveal wasn't done that well, I didn't think, and in retrospect a lot of things didn't make sense or were overly-convenient for the film's plot. Of course Nicole and her kids didn't notice X and Y and Z when they were happening, and of course they all conveniently sleep for 12 or 18 hours at a time whenever any major changes need to take place, etc. But it's a good ghost story if you see it when you don't know the plot (Malaya didn't know the twist in advance and she liked it), and I can see watching it once more just to see how it works when you know the secret; Sixth Sense style. After that... well, I'd be bored watching it again, since it's pretty monotonous. Just the kids, Nicole, the servants, the house in the fog, etc. It's an extremely monochromatic film with an almost total lack of color or light; hence my very low score in "eye candy." Even Nicole's usually gorgeous face/body doesn't perk up that rating any, since she's always very pale, very skinny, and fully swaddled in multiple layers of early eighteenth century clothing. Spoiler time! Since the film was released in 2001 I'm sort of assuming that no one reading this doesn't know about the twist yet, but if you don't know and don't want to, stop reading now.
The big twist is that Nicole and her kids are dead, and have been for decades. They are ghosts who don't know they're dead, and that their servants are ghosts as well. The movie is set up so it appears that they are alive and trapped in a sporadically-haunted house, but at the end we find out that they were actually the ghosts, and the mysterious footsteps and moving objects and opened drapes and such were the work of the real people who now live in the house and are very unhappy to be dealing with Nicole the ghost. It's a clever twist, and other than some very convenient stuff here and there, the plot works well and is intelligent, with everything explained in the end. At least I thought so, but upon looking at IMDB for the user ratings, and seeing that this had a ridiculously high 7.8/10 star average score (good enough to make it the 233rd best film in history), I clicked on the first forum post listed, and it made my head hurt.
The thread goes on and on, and fortunately most of the posters grasped the concept of the movie, but enough of them didn't, or keep arguing if the husband really was dead that I wanted to claw my eyes out. Of course he's dead! His death in the war was the pivotal event of the entire tragedy, since news of his death in WWI drove Nicole's character crazy, and she smothered her children with pillows, then killed herself with the shotgun. That's the entire point of the movie, and why the husband is so freaked out when he returns for his quick visit; he's confused from being dead, but at the same time he's a little weirded out to spend time with his wife and kids, knowing how they died. The movie doesn't explain how he returns, but it seems that someone or something supernatural (god?) has sent him to help his wife understand what's happening to her, since she doesn't know she's a ghost, until the very ending, in that dramatic sιance scene. So yes, the husband is dead in WWI, and the three servants died at the estate of tuberculosis, way back in the 1800s, as the photo one leaves out for Nicole says. I give the movie bonus points for tying all the plot threads up so nicely, though I thought the ending was a bit too obvious, as everything was explained so neatly and the tragedy of realization fading so quickly to "we'll just keep living here as ghosts."
Reader Feedback Here's part of an email from Caaroid in which he comments on one of my reviews from last time, and spurs me to give some thought to one of my rating categories. His email is in purple: the double intentions are him quoting me from Friday's review:
He's got a point. Perhaps I should have a score for "effectively monochromatic" since it's not entirely fair to The Others to give it a 2? I mean yeah, it's all gray and drab and visually depressing, but as Caaroid points out, what else should it look like? The colors go perfectly with the mood and theme, and bright colors would not and would actually detract from the movie, while raising the eye candy score only slightly. So in retrospect, should give The Others a 7* in eye candy, and explain the asterisk, or maybe change my score to eye candy/quality and give it a 3/9? The problem there is that it's confusing. The other problem is that I'm totally inconsistent with that rating. The first other movie I thought of with a color scheme of 1 was Underworld, which I reviewed at length last year. That entire film was a long sequence of white people wearing black leather and walking around black, wet streets, at night, or walking through dark black stone tunnels at night, while wearing black cloaks. You get the idea. So since I gave The Others a 2 in eye candy, I must have given Underworld something similar, right? Oops. I gave it a 7 in eye candy; the highest rating it earned in any category. How in the hell can Underworld get a 7, when it's as or more monochromatic as The Others, and just by laziness and bad lighting, rather than a conscious design choice? True, the black works for the film's characters, but it's far from visually inventive, and it's frequently confusing. The ending action sequence was a machine gun battle between vampires and werewolves, all of whom were in black SWAT uniforms, in black tunnels, shooting at each other while running around in circles. I had no idea who was who half the time, but since the werewolves were using special photosynthesis bullets and the vampires were using special liquid silver bullets, I guess the participants could just hose each other down at will, since their bullets wouldn't kill their own guys anyway. That's beside the point of the 7 in eye candy though. In retrospect, Underworld doesn't deserve a 7, but it does deserve more than the 2 I gave The Others, since eye candy includes more than color scheme. It includes costumes, special effects, sets, etc, and while The Others had nothing but an old house, foggy countryside, and my first wife hyperventilating in old-fashioned dresses, Underworld had nice werewolf transformations, some cool costumes, Kate Beckinsale's latex-wrapped ass, and lots of nice special effects of dying vampires. The question this brings up though, is how much validity my Eye Candy rating has anyway? The reviews key says:
So I guess I'm being true to that, but should I be? I mean really, how likely are you to see a shitty movie just because I say it's got some pretty things to look at? This isn't a porn review, after all. Perhaps I'll change the "eye candy" rating to "visual appeal" or "visual effectiveness" or something like that, so as not to unjustly-reward bright but pointless visual shows (Pictures such as Episode 2 and Goldmember, for instance.), while still having a rating of how good the movie looked. Or maybe change it to a two-part rating, with eye candy cross referenced by visual effectiveness. What good are pretty sights if they don't work with the film? I mean besides being pretty... Hell, I don't know, maybe I'll just stick with eye candy as it is. You'd think with 7+ rating categories per movie, I could at least decide what each category actually rated, wouldn't you? Caaroid's email continued: ying attraction to her (I could name like 20 celebrities who I think are more attractive than her; and even though she's not here and does not see what I'm writing, I would be willing to state that I think my GF is hotter than her -- a thing I could not say, for example, about Salma Hayek). Ok, she's better than Kirsten "SCREAM SCREAM HELP SCREAM" Dunst, but I consider her the paragon of "unremarkable", and she can't act worth a damn, either. Kidman is at least a very good actress, but going out with Tom "I believe in UFO-s and am not dyslexic any more" Cruise for more than a weekend is a sure sign of an uns table mind, in my opinion.
As for Nicole, I found her painfully beautiful in photos from the late 90s, though never enough to actually see her in any movies, and she's got the sort of look that I'm really drawn to, (as somewhat described in March's mailbag) but the years have not been kind. Most recent sightings have left me disillusioned with her emaciated frame and skin-over-bones facial features. Still, she was my first wife, and so long as that punchline lives on, so does our purple-handed love. |
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