The luck of struggling actress/waitress Julie Rose (Mary Steenburgen) finally seem to turn. Her newest audition with the friendly Mr Murray (Roddy McDowell) goes swimmingly. Apparently, the lead actress of the project Mr Murray’s clients are shooting has very suddenly left the film, and they are basically searching for a lookalike who can take on the job as quickly as possible. Julie very much does look alike, apparently.
There’s only a screentest with the director somewhere in a mansion in the cold middle of nowhere in Canada to go through before fame and fortune come around. Once our heroine has arrived at said mansion, things with the director, one Joseph Lewis (Jan Rubes) go rather well too. That is, until Julie finds herself drugged and minus one finger. It’s not in the service of extreme method acting either, but part of an overcomplicated blackmail plot in which Murray and Lewis want to use Julie as a pawn, with rather dubious chances of survival for her afterwards.
A melodramatic and rather dark and intense thriller like Dead of Winter isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when I think about director Arthur Penn. However, the man clearly knew his way around this genre as well as most others he was working in, so this turns out to be a rather great time.
Despite what many a filmmaker working this particular mine seems to believe, this style of very constructed, twisty and implausible thriller is not terribly easy to make. It’s not enough to simply throw plot twists at your audience while the music gets very loud and to quote Hitchcock, badly. For this subtype of the thriller – which often at least borders on horror – to grab a viewer, a director really needs to pull out all the stops and create as intense and emotional a mood as possible, undermining the sceptical viewer’s ability to and interest in thinking the plot through as much as possible, instead manipulating us into buying into a heightened intensity of feelings and excitement; it’s very much the same approach you’d take in an action movie, a romantic comedy or a horror film, for the most part.
Penn does so wonderfully, pulling Julie into a series of paranoid set pieces that sometimes become pleasantly surreal at the edges, never really giving her – or the audience – the time or space to breathe and think things through. This way, implausible twists seem to fit perfectly into the film’s very own reality, the film’s moments of ruthless brutality feel absolutely logical, and the viewer is as much pulled into the narrative’s flow as are its characters.
There’s quite a bit of actual mood building as well as thematic work via gothic and domestic suspense tropes here too. So Julie does not just have to fight two pretty crazy men, but also the willingness of authority figures to buy into “hysterical woman” clichés (as real world authority figures, alas, love to do as well), while moving through the spaces of a very traditional (and very effectively filmed) old dark house in the middle of snowy nowhere. Interestingly enough, it’s not cool calculation as much as Julie’s ability to act just as crazy and brutal as her captors that saves her day here, the film perhaps ever so slightly suggesting that a woman losing her shit under the circumstances at hand and using just as bizarre ploys as her enemies may be just the most natural reaction and healthiest reaction to the proceedings, rather than “hysteria”.
Steenburgen sells all of this wonderfully, working with a fine understanding of how and when she needs to escalate to more extreme emotions, but never letting us forget the very basic human core of Julie. Whereas McDowall and Rubes really dive into moments of wonderful scenery chewing, both actors finding the point where this makes them creepy instead of ridiculous, which isn’t always – well, practically never - a given with McDowall in my experience.
So Dead of Winter turns out to be a particularly fine example of its style, barely stepping a foot wrong.
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