This week’s Friday Noon Movie Club witnessed the first ever attendance by an adult male! This brave man and his lovely wife joined me for a couple of hours of ominous dread, as I had promised in the weekly announcement. We went to see Take Shelter, a film about a man who may be having visions warning of coming disaster, or he may be on the brink of a psychotic break. Is he a prophet, madman or both?
Curtis is a hard-working man with all the kinds of shelter we look for in life: his own home, a good job as a foreman on a construction drilling crew, good health insurance, friends, and a good marriage to his near-saint of a wife, Samantha. The two are working through the hurdles of bringing up their young, deaf daughter, Hannah, acting as shelter to her as well, as they learn how to use sign language and try to help her connect socially.
That kind of shelter is what we all hope for, often called the American Dream. But Curtis’s fears are becoming much larger than that shelter can handle. And the only way he can find to combat his fear is to protect his family. He becomes obsessed with building a tornado shelter, among other measures. His sources of protection strain his relationships, including his marriage.
This movie is strange and different. It is also extremely well made. The acting is stellar. Michael Shannon plays the perfect everyman—average looks, no particular charisma, but you somehow know that Curtis is a good man, a strong man, an honest man, even as he tries to hide what is happening to him. Jessica Chastain is luminous (and what a year she’s had—The Help, The Tree of Life, The Debt), giving us a demonstration of the Proverbs 31 woman at work, providing for her family in every way she can. I’m trying not to hate her.
Director Jeff Nichols lets us into the horror of Curtis’s fears. After a few of his nightmares I was afraid that I’d stumbled into a horror movie by accident, wondering where this would go. I don’t do horror. But while they took me to the limit of my comfort, they never went beyond it. The nightmares themselves are not the focal point. It’s the fear they inspire and the reactions to that fear that the movie builds on.
There are effective images of ascending and descending, going towards light and away from it, out in the open or underground. Even his job working with drilling makes you feel that somehow he is probing the earth, disturbing or trying to break through something hard and ungiving.
As Curtis goes through this trying experience, he turns on the TV only to see chemical spills on the news. His search for help leads him to a counselor at the hospital who uses a room covered with medical posters warning of HIV and H1N1. All of the everyday horror that becomes normal to us intensifies his feelings of dread—dread that he is either mentally ill or that something horrible is about to happen.
Hiding his fears only disconnects him from everyone else. They don’t understand what is happening, and they react badly. In one scene, members of his community see exactly how afraid he is, and his vulnerability and fear are palpable.
I’ve been thinking about why the movie includes a deaf daughter. There is one obvious plot reason that I won’t tell you about. But I think the disconnectedness that the parents know she experiences, even when she doesn’t know it, is part of the picture somehow. The inability to communicate or to hear what others try to communicate definitely plays a part in the story.
Last fall I saw Martha Marcy May Marlene, in which a young woman is taken in by and becomes a victim of a cult. I wouldn’t recommend it, because it was too disturbing. I wish I could un-see it. But I mention it here because between Take Shelter and the four M’s, the American Dream takes an allegorical beating. Not because it’s a bad thing in and of itself, but because it’s not enough to sustain you when you face the valley of the shadow of death.
If you enjoy movies that leave you wondering, and that give you food for thought for days, see Take Shelter. Take Shelter manages to nail the dread without leaving me feeling violated or hopeless. If you do see it, please let me know what you thought, particularly of the ending. This one will likely be on my mind for a couple of weeks.
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