WATCH THE SKIES: a review of "Take Shelter"

“TAKE SHELTER”
Written and Directed by Jeff Nichols
**** (four stars)

For the last several weeks, I have been reading and savoring the great Roger Ebert’s memoir Life Itself and for the purposes of this review, I wanted to illustrate one particular sentence in which he essentially describes his movie analyzing process. The words come from the brilliant movie critic, the late Pauline Kael, who once expressed to Ebert, “I go to the movie, I watch it and I ask myself what happened to me.” That sentence precisely describes my process when I compose these entries for myself and for you, dear readers. And as I sit at home nearly two hours after walking out of Writer/Director Jeff Nichols’ psychological drama “Take Shelter,” I can say that what happened to me still has me thoroughly shaken up.

“Take Shelter,” opens and closes in the throes of a man’s intimate yet epic nightmare, the kind of which that can still plague the dreamer long, long after waking. Michael Shannon stars as Ohio construction worker Curtis LaForche and at the beginning of the film we find him watching the clouds in the sky darken and begin to from into and ominously and oncoming storm. Rain begins to fall yet what wets Curtis’ clothes and skin are not simple raindrops but something that is the consistency of oil. Obviously, this is no ordinary summer storm and before long, Curtis awakens.

As if lost in a grim fog, Curtis arrives at the breakfast table with his loving family awaiting him. His wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) serves him scrambled eggs and toast while their hearing impaired daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart) plays with the family German Shepherd, yet to Curtis, everything feels disturbingly wrong.

Curtis’ nightmares continue with threats of horrific storms, birds flying and circling overhead in unnervingly odd patterns, the family dog savagely attacking him, faceless strangers breaking into his truck and home and carrying his child away into the darkness, all of which habitually make Curtis late for work, and increasingly distant from his family and friends. The inner terror increases and his dreams begin to interfere with his daily life as hallucinations, seeing storm clouds that no one else can witness and hearing lurking thunder no one else can experience, threaten to take over his life.

I have to say that it is difficult to express much more about this film without delving into spoilers (even though a MAJOR point is revealed in the film’s trailer) but I will try my best. Let’s just say that Curtis reaches a crossroads where he has to uncover whether his dreams are the symptoms of a deteriorating psyche or whether the dreams are serving as a warning for an unspeakable cataclysm.

“Take Shelter” despite its omnipresent sense of doom is a film Nichols presents at its most humane. This is not a film about histrionics and apocalyptic special effects (although the cloud and bird effects and one moment set in Curtis’ living room are special indeed). “Take Shelter” is a distressingly quiet film, deliberately paced but always keeps the audience as unbalanced as poor Curtis. As soon as we feel that we have found our bearings, our perceptions are disturbingly altered all over again. The cinematic spell Nichols weaves is entrancing to the point of almost being lulled yet it is unnervingly terrifying.

The film’s humanity arrives in the form of Curtis’s devotion to his family and his unshakable desire to keep them safe at all costs. This craving need begins to consume him as he becomes increasingly focused on the building of a tornado shelter in the backyard. For all of the scenes where Curtis is building the shelter or spending night after night inside of the bunker like space, I was reminded profoundly of no less than Richard Dreyfuss’ iconic performance in Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” (1977). I would like for you to take a moment and remember how Dreyfuss seemingly descended into a level of madness as his mind and spirit were consumed with the image and re-creation of Devil’s Tower, from mashed potatoes to larger scaled sized versions inside and outside of his suburban home. Much like how Dreyfuss’ obsessions cost him his wife and children, Curtis’ pleas for safety also possesses an adverse effect as the stability of his marriage, his job (with crucial health insurance) is jeopardized as well as the ability to pay for a Cochlear implant surgical procedure for Hannah are all dramatically on the line.

I greatly appreciated how much “Take Shelter” is a deeply perceptive and sensitive drama about a debilitating mental illness like paranoid schizophrenia. I loved how Nichols utilized every dream sequence and especially each clap of thunder and flashing streak of lightning to serve as the potentially fractured state of Curtis’ mind. Most impressive is the actual tornado shelter itself, which may serve as a metaphor to the last piece of sanity Curtis desperately holds onto as the shelter is the area where his family is completely protected against whatever horrific disaster he fears will ultimately take them all away from him forever. The film’s near climax, set completely inside of the shelter, is the film at its most bracing as we, along with Curtis, are left to painfully ponder if the danger on the other side of the door is real or not and to find out, all we have to do is open that door. Nichols’ approached this sequence with Hitchcockian heft, urgency and almost unbearable terror as our collective imaginations are left to whisk us away to sights unmentionable.

When it is time to begin honoring the finest performances of 2011, I deeply hope that many accolades are delivered to Michael Shannon. After gaining notoriety in films like Sam Mendes’ “Revolutionary Road” (2008), Floria Sigismondi’s “The Runaways” (2010) and a recurring role upon Martin Scorsese’s HBO series “Boardwalk Empire,” it is more than pleasing to see Shannon in a leading performance, which he handles with incredible presence and heartbreaking power.

If you choose to see this film, please pay strict attention to Shannon’s wonderful body language. Watch Shannon’s jaw clench tighter, his elongated, hulking body constricting to the point of almost folding in towards itself, his footsteps grow increasingly tentative as if he fears that one wrong move will upend the world. And then, there is his voice and eyes which quiver, grow softer, and more frightened like a child gripped with the worst of night terrors. When he speaks, he is so gripped with fear that he can barely utter the words lest he unravel any remaining confidence his wife rests with him. It is a sensational, completely empathetic performance.

And so, taking a cue from Kael and Ebert, I feel that I need to express what happened to me as I watched “Take Shelter” in order to make this review feel complete. I have to say that like the character of Curtis, I too was gripped with an evolving sense of crippling fear. It was the fear of losing whatever control I thought that I had possessed over my life. It was the fear of loss and losing what was most important to me, whether through my own actions, through events entirely out of my control, or a mixture of both. It was the fear of holding so tightly onto my family and discovering that no matter how tightly I grasped, it was all for nothing. I found myself becoming paralyzed, weakened and filled with a sense of despair and helplessness as I empathized with Curtis’ horrible dilemma. And by the time the film reached its final moments, there was a fateful sense of resignation and surrender that felt ultimate and inevitable. Like I said, it all felt like being caught within an especially bad dream. And while this all sounds to be so unpleasant, it is definitely cinematic excellence as Jeff Nichols assures the audience that we are in the hands of a masterful storyteller.

“Take Shelter,” featuring the performance of Michael Shannon at its core, is an experience which builds supreme, mounting intensity and tension with absolutely no release or relief in sight. Combining an intimate family drama, an exploration of mental illness and an element of the most disquieting “Twilight Zone” episode you have ever seen, “Take Shelter” is the kind of cinema that grabs you and refuses to let go.