If you haven't seen one or both of them yet and still might have some interest in doing so, I'd suggest coming back later or just waiting until I get a chance to write about District 9 and Inglorious Basterds. Because I'm gonna be spoiling like crazy here. Consider yourselves notified.
Before I get into what I thought of these movies, I wanted to post this quote from the Washington Post's review of Orphan.
"...the only people who should escape unscathed from 'Orphan' are the three young actors who play [Vera] Farmiga and [Peter] Sarsgaard's children, adopted and biological. The sadistic violence, symbolic incest and flirtation with pedophilia in the film -- not to mention its shameless perpetuation of toxic stereotypes surrounding the adoption of older children -- leads one to think their work on this film wasn't employment so much as child abuse. Finally, let's hear it for those fearless executives at Warner Bros., currently bloated like engorged ticks with billions made from Batman and Harry Potter, for using all the time, talent and treasure at their disposal to put out bilge like this. Their lust for money, apparently, is exceeded only by their contempt for the suckers who keep on forking it over. Shame on them all, every single one." -- Ann Hornaday
Wow. I'm sorry, but any movie that gets a review like that is a must-see for someone like me. What on earth could have raised the bile so viciously into Ms. Hornaday's throat? I have to know.
Orphan and A Perfect Getaway are both "twist" thrillers, which seems to be the only type of thriller Hollywood knows how to make in this post-Shyamalan world. I'm not complaining, exactly, because I dig twist thrillers. They get knocked all the time for being gimmicky and artificial. I totally agree. That's part of what I love about them. To my mind, dismissing a twist movie as cheesy and artificial completely misses the point of what a twist thriller is. It's like telling Motley Crue they should try to sound a little more like Beethoven. To mix metaphors here, not everything can be filet mignon. Sometimes you just want candy. It may rot your teeth and make you want to puke later, but when you're eating it it tastes so good.
With that out of the way, I have to say that I liked both but didn't love either of these movies. They're both fun and pretty well executed for what they are, which are B movies. Orphan is The Bad Seed all dolled up to resemble a taut, arthouse thriller. It seems to want to be more than it is, and for that I found it kind of adorable. Getaway, for its part, is much more aware of its limitations.
Each film has a genre setup that can, if you're inclined to be forgiving, be described as "conventional." Orphan gives us John and Kate (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga), two loving parents who -- after a tragic miscarriage -- decide to adopt a precocious (and weird) little Russian girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) from one of those antiquated, down-country Catholic orphanages that I'm inclined to believe exist only in movies. Apparently it doesn't occur to either of them that it might be a good idea to introduce Esther to their two biological children, Danny and Max (Jimmy Bennett and Aryana Engineer), before tossing her headfirst into the family. But if they had there wouldn't be a movie, so whatever.
Esther at first seems to be a model child. She's hyper-articulate, preturnaturally talented, obnoxiously devoted to John and endlessly respectful towards Kate. So far so good. But she's also a weirdo. She refuses to wear anything but little baby-doll dresses that seem to have floated right up out of a Tim Burton daydream, and she freaks out if anyone tries to remove the cloth ribbons she uses to cover her wrists and neck...
Hmmm...
I think we all sort of know where this is going (twist notwithstanding). What makes Orphan work moderately better than it should have is a flawed but basically well-constructed script by Alex Mace and David Johnson, assured (if uninventive) direction by Collet-Serra, and strong acting almost across the board.
Collet-Serra directed Paris Hilton in House of Wax. I recently happened to catch that one on FX while laid up with a bad back a few weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was only bad, not awful. In Orphan -- with somewhat better material and actual actors to work with -- Collet-Serra settles into a style that remains (until the end) refreshingly understated without ever quite being turgid. He clearly understands the value of taking his time, and he knows when to get out of the way of the actors. There's nothing he does here that will blow anyone away (he does resort to a couple unfortunate cat-in-the-closet scares early on) but he surpasses "competent" (which is the best you can say for his work in House of Wax) and progresses all the way to "okay."
It's the performances that really make the movie hum. Farmiga is impressive if only for managing to play essentially the same role she did in Joshua (2007) without completely feeling like she's repeating herself. Farmiga is one of those instantly believable actresses who has found a niche turning rote characters into something memorable. She stood out in Joshua, and owned her few scenes as a Russian hooker in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering (2006). She even managed to take one of the most extraneous characters ever conceived -- the pyschiatrist/girlfriend in The Departed -- and nearly steal the show from Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
In Orphan, she has the thankless task of portraying a grieving mom with a drinking problem who slowly starts to realize that her adopted replacement child is a psychopathic killer. In a lesser actress's hands, this would have tipped over into melodrama right quick. Farmiga manages to keep Kate grounded, and lets the back story seep through the performance in an organic way rather than force it through histrionics. She never plays either the grief or the addiction; they're just there, infused in every glance, gesture, and movement.
Sarsgaard is okay, but he never manages to bring his equally thankless character to life. Roger Ebert had the best line, so I'm going to go ahead and steal it: "John is the kind of understanding husband who doesn’t understand a damned thing except that he is understanding." The script does a nice job of motivating his relentless obtuseness (he's understandably dubious about Kate's suspicions because of her history with the booze). But Sarsgaard never manages to get the audience on his side. By the end of the movie, I found myself hoping that Kate would just give up on trying to convince him and just crack his skull open with a bottle or something.
The real revelations here are the kids (Bennett, Engineer, and Fuhrman). All three are very, very good. Danny is another stock character -- the spoiled brat who is immediately jealous his new sister -- but Bennett manages to hit all the right notes. In his hands, Danny comes off like a real kid with understandible (if primitive) motivations.
Little Max is more interesting. She's hearing-impaired, cute as a button, and takes an immediate shine to her new big sister. But as Esther starts to show her true nature -- first smashing a pigeon with a brick, then pushing another girl off a jungle gym, and finally inviting Max to play Russian roullette with a loaded pistol before enlisting her help in disposing of the body of a nun she just murdered -- Engineer has to strike a very delicate balance. Her feelings towards Esther move from adoration to concern to outright terror, and she must portray Max's childish moral quandary -- to tattle or not to tattle -- without the crutch of dialogue to guide her. That's a feat that would be difficult for an actress twenty years her senior. Engineer nails it.
It's Fuhrman, however, who really steals the show. Her Esther is genuinely chilling. When she puts a pistol to little Max's head and asks "want to play?" or sneaks into Danny's room and threatens to cut his balls off with a box cutter, she does so with all the cold malice and devillish poise that De Niro brought to Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas and Alan Arkin brought to Harry Roat in Wait Until Dark. It's a remarkably disciplined and self-assure performance. Forget Dakota Fanning or whoever else is being groomed to take her place. This evil little girl is the real deal.
Perhaps my favorite thing about the movie -- and what seems to have made Ms. Hornaday so livid -- is the kid's-eye-view perspective. Esther remains perfectly behaved around the parents but shows her true face to Danny and Max early on. Their growing terror and eventual resolve to stop her rests at the heart of the film. It's a heavy burden for any child actor to carry, and here we have three who handle it beautifully.
A Perfect Getaway is, in many ways, the weaker of the two movies. It's goofier, and the plot contrivances are eye-rolling from the start. Yet, in a strange way, I found that awkwardness somehow endearing. The movie reminded me of a big German Shepherd puppy not quite used to its gangly big-dog legs. The way it slides and stumbles all over the screen in its panting, eager-to-please way only adds to the charm.
Steve Zahn and Mila Jovovich play Cliff and Cydney, a newlywed couple honeymooning in Hawaii. They are city-folk all the way: a budding screenwriter and a rich girl who wants nothing more than to be a stay-at-home mom. On their way to a renowned but hard-to-get-to beach they stop and pick up a couple creepy hitchhikers named Cleo and Kale (Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth). They quickly make their escape, and just as they start their hike they overhear some vacationing girls (so outlandishly caricatured as to engender a number of surprised laughs from the audience) talking about another honeymooning couple who were recently butchered in Honolulu. Now the police think the killers -- a couple -- have jumped to another island.
Trying to stay ahead of the obvious Kale and Cleo, Cliff and Cydney encounter Nick (Timothy Olyphant), a friendly but slightly peculiar Army vet with a love of knives and a plate in his skull. Nick leads them to a waterfall, where his naked Southern girlfriend Gina (Kiele Sanchez) suns herself on a raft.
Cliff's fevered, screenwriter's imagination starts to churn away. Could Nick and Gina be the killers? Or is it Cleo and Kale? Meanwhile, the Honolulu newspaper has posted a grainy photo of the suspected murderers online, conveniently captured by a well-placed surveillance camera. Now if only Cliff's cell phone would get better service...
Hmmmm.....
Writer/director David Twohy is best known for his Vin Diesel sci-fi/horror twofer Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004). Genre fans will also know him from the low-budget submarine horror film Below (2002) and as a writer on such films as Critters 2 and Warlock. He's no auteur, but he's got a solid enough grasp of genre storytelling, he's pretty good with character, and he adds a refreshingly off-kilter tone that keeps A Perfect Getaway from ever feeling entirely like a retread. There's not a whole lot more to say about him, other than that he knows what he's doing, within a limited scope.
The performances are decent, if not exceptional. I've always liked Zahn, almost in spite of myself. He does a solid job here giving us the many faces of Steve Zahn, and I enjoyed him. Sanchez is alternately sultry and sweetly likeable, punctuated with little stabs of menace here and there. Jovovich (not one of my favorite actresses) manages not to be too irritating, even if the demands of the role are clearly way outside her pay grade. Only Olyphant really delivers. He brings a goofball sense of humor and almost lovable agreeableness to his ostensibly villainous Nick.
And now, on to the twists.
Last chance to turn back...
Okay, you've been warned.
Both twists are unexpected and jaw dropping ... not because they are so cleverly set up (a la The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects) but rather because they are so brazenly outlandish that I couldn't help but respect the balls it took to throw them out there.
In Orphan, we learn that Esther is not a nine-year-old girl at all. She's actually a 32-year-old Russian woman with a rare genetic form of "primordial dwarfism" (whatever that is) and a really massive daddy complex. She has spent her life in and out of Russian mental institutions between bouts of posing as a little girl so that she can be adopted by unsuspecting families, where she tries to seduce the father and -- after being predictably rebuffed -- murders the entire family. She's sort of the reverse of Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather (1987).
We learn all this via one of those frantic "get your family out of the house" phone conversations that takes place near the end of the movie. Kate, after some too-easy sleuthing, manages to track down the administrator (Karel Roden) of the last institution where Esther was committed. Roden delivers an ungainly but mercifully brief chunk of exposition, and then it's off to the races as Kate -- at the hospital with an injured Danny -- rushes home to get John and Max away from Esther.
In A Perfect Getaway, we discover that Cliff and Cydney are the killers, not Nick and Gina or Kale and Cleo. It's a red herring on top of red herring (awkwardly telegraphed in an early conversation about movies between Cliff and Nick that should have been left on the cutting-room floor). Cliff's nervousness throughout the hike was not about being in danger, we learn, but about being discovered. Nick and Gina figure out -- too late, of course -- that they are his next targets.
Trust me, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Not only is it not set up earlier in the film, it flagrantly contradicts everything we've seen. Twohy tries to stitch a pig's ear onto a cow by reaching to the very bottom of the desperate filmmaker's tool box and resorting to the time-honored tradition of stopping the story altogether and giving us a really long black-and-white flashback, where we're supposed to reevaluate all the previous scenes, dialogue, etc. It doesn't help.
At least in Orphan, the twist is within earshot of believability. Luckily, Collet-Serra and screenwriters Mace and Johnson have a couple tricks up their sleeve. Rather than do the hard work necessary to patch the logic holes, they try to distract us with an eye-poppingly tasteless scene where Esther puts on makeup and a slinky black dress, then goes to a drunk and weepy John and tries to give him a handie.
Yeah, you read that right. Esther, played by 10-year-old Fuhrman, tries to give John, played by 38-year-old Peter Sarsgaard, a hand job.
And no, this movie isn't French.
It's no wonder that critics like Hornaday are up in arms. I, for one, kind of loved it. It's so wantonly over-the-top, so wickedly debauched, as to be truly awe-inspiring. (For the record, I don't think anything about this was likely to have traumatized Fuhrman. The action itself is merely suggested, and if you blink you'll miss it.)
The rest of the movie is pretty by-the-numbers, and Collet-Serra wisely gives us almost no time to think about what we just witnessed and gets us out of there as quickly as he can. John rejects Esther, Esther kills John, Esther chases Max around the house with a gun, Kate shows up, Kate kills Esther. I was still reeling as the end credits started to roll, and Fuhrman is the reason why. She sold it. As stupid as it is, narratively, I never doubted Esther's transformation into an adult. She moves like an adult, talks like an adult, even seduces like an adult. When the shit hits the fan and she starts shooting at Max and Kate, it's an adult firing the gun.
It's a little hard to defend this, both on moral and analytical grounds. So I won't even try. If you think it's wrong to have a 10-year-old actress act out a seduction scene, I'm not going to be able to say anything to convince you otherwise. In the end, what I dug about it is that the filmmakers were shooting for something. They didn't come anywhere the bullseye, but at least they stayed on the dartboard. That's something, at least.
What Twohy does in A Perfect Getaway is not nearly as debauched, but what it lacks in teeth it more than makes up for in pure idiot shamelessness. To employ a perfectly gross metaphor, I'd say that Getaway is like a guy/girl trying to convince a prospective suitor that he/she is still a virgin immediately after showing said prospective suitor a sex-tape of him/her on the receiving end of a high-school gangbang.
From what I was able to gather, Cliff (whose actual name is Rocky) is supposed to be some sort of pathological liar and psychopath who likes to kill people and then live out their lives for as long as he can before moving on to his next victim. Cydney is his somewhat reluctant girlfriend. The last twenty minutes or so turn into an extended three-way chase scene, and the narrative violation is so deep and so complete that I was happy enough to just shut my brain off and watch all the pretty Hawaiin scenery drift across the screen.
That said, however, I kind of liked it. Like Orphan, the twist is so brazen, artless, and unapologetic that I just couldn't help but enjoy it for what was.
For some reason, I always find it really cute when little kids try to lie. They're just so bad at it. They understand the concept of deceit in a blunt way, but they don't understand how to perpetrate it. But they don't give up. I remember once watching my nephew -- maybe six or seven at the time -- throw a ball in the house and break something. When I asked him why he did it, he just looked at me right in the eye and denied throwing the ball at all. The lie was so blatant that I just couldn't be angry at him. In fact, some dark part of me kind of wanted to encourage him to keep it up (this is why I should probably not have kids, by the way).
That's what Twoy and -- to a slightly lesser degree -- Collet-Serra do here. Neither of them come anywhere near pulling off the lie, but I have to give them credit for even going for it in the first place.
