1922

1922 (2017)

Dir. Zak Hilditch

Written by Zak Hilditch, based on the novella by Stephen King

Starring Thomas Janes, Dylan Schmid, Molly Parker, Neal McDonough

 

If you’ve been hearing a series of rattling thrums growing in intensity over the last few days, I have good news for you: it was just the sound of me revving up the ol’ CHAINSAWNUKAH to carve into another year of horror movies (we’ll return to our Oliver Stone retrospective in due time)! As you perhaps noticed over the course of the last year, my output of long-form reviews has dwindled significantly from the old days when I could count on cranking out a good 50 or 60 reviews over the course of October and November (and usually into December and maybe even the new year). But that doesn’t mean I’m not watching these turkeys, it just means that I no longer force myself to try and drag 1500 words out of some turd zombie flick that even its original makers didn’t think about that hard. Instead, I’ll write up a significantly shorter –but no less witty and incisive!—capsule review for the ol’ letterboxd account. If you don’t follow me on letterboxd, well… why the heck not? Same great content, more digestible portions. Everyone wins! It’s like a SAW movie except instead of a convoluted death trap with a specious moral lesson, you’re just given the choice of trudging on with your dull, empty existence OR being privy to my enlightening opinions on, say, BACKDRAFT 2 (yes, they made a Backdraft 2. Yes, William Baldwin’s back!). And because they’re shorter than these long rambles on the blog, I can crank ‘em out like Stephen King!

 

Speaking of which, we begin our long-form journey today with one of the many, many, many things King has cranked out. To give you a sense of just how god damn many movies have been adapted from (let alone ripped off) his even more voluminous bibliography: seven days into the month, I’ve already watched three without even trying. And 1922 THE MOVIE (based on his 2010 novella of the same name, which appears in his collection Full Dark, No Stars) is among the more rarified company of movies adapted faithfully from King’s work. That means there’s lots of Stephen King-y-ness in this one, for better or for worse –and while that’s not by any means a categorically advantageous feature, I think in this particular case it’s for the better. Part of its advantage here is that you can count on Stephen King to embrace simplicity. Where modern media has increasingly become the exclusive province of high-concept, hyperactively overplotted, narrative-driven genre fare, King retains a zen-like ability to focus on the details of a simple premise. Like GERALD’S GAME or THE NIGHT FLIER, 1922 THE MOVIE doesn’t have a lot of story, and in fact this can’t even boast an outré premise like those two; basically, a farmer murders his wife and then gradually starts to feel haunted by what he's done, and that's it. But the meat of the thing is in the feel of it. It's simply a closely-observed but not necessarily realism-driven portrait of this particular guy, eager to get us inside his head and simply let us sit there as King and script-writer/director Zak Hilditch (RATTLESNAKE) run him through the ringer to see what will happen.

Now, about that farmer: I think it's probably necessary to preface this by noting that Thomas Jane (BOOGIE NIGHTS), in portraying this character, goes all in on a country accent just this side of Foghorn Leghorn, very much playing with the fire of unintentional comedy. I think he's trying to sound like Tim Blake Nelson (who they probably should have just gotten for this role) but he lands dangerously in the neighborhood of SLING BLADE. The accent is not, like, imaginary; I mean, it's not like Ewan McGregor or somebody just making up an accent which has never before come out of a human. And he’s at least consistent with it. But it's a lot of accent, and it's pretty jarring to hear it coming out of Thomas Jane, especially if you have ever heard him talk before. There are certainly some people who are not going to be able to make it past that basic fact, especially since he's narrating and therefore talking through almost the entire runtime. But although your results may vary, I eventually got on board with it.

The accent is maybe even appropriate in this case, because Jane's performance very much rests on a kind of faux-folksiness which is at the core of a lot of King's stuff, and is the key to understanding how to read him. King is not a journalist, and doesn’t seem to draw heavily on his own observed experience. He isn’t interested in interviewing farmers and spend six months working on a rural farm to get the details right. He’s interested in a simulacrum of simple rural America which has little to do with lived reality, but everything to do with a strand of romantic American storytelling that he and his work are steeped in. It’s not realism, but it’s certainly not frivolous imagination either; the storybook-simplicity of the protagonist (complete with broad, nonspecific “country” accent and omnipresent overalls) allows King to slip past reality altogether and tap into the fundamental tropes that underlie our cultural stories, and, grounded in fact or not, inform who we are. This gives his work a kind of mythic quality, and turns 1922 THE MOVIE away from the gritty contemporary docu-realism which is so much in vogue in the age of the digital camera --with its unflinching crispness and ability to capture real-world lighting, potentially evoking the world of youtube—and towards something quite different, a dark folk tale which uses its hacky artifice to draw turbulent and troubled emotions to the surface from the deep world of the collective unconscious. Farmer Wilfred* James doesn't strike me as someone you could encounter in the real world (even in 1922, which is when the story takes place, and I suppose as good a title as any) but he definitely strikes me as the very quintessence of the small-time farmer in American fiction. He is mythic, archetypal; the simulacrum of a certain subset of real Americans as filtered through a couple hundred years of American cultural soup.

Which makes this a portrait not so much of a person as of a certain strand of brittle Americana. Farmer Wilfred seems at first to embody a kind of paradigmatic American ideal. He's hardworking, humble, practical, quiet, skeptical of pretension and scornful of faddish frippery. The 'Simple Kind Of Man' that Lynyrd Skynyrd sang about, or, more ominously, the "forgotten American" that Trump idealized. But the unpretentious country farmer is only admirable until up to a point; when his wife (Molly Parker, THE WICKER MAN 2006) brazenly challenges the small authority he does possess, something rather vicious and aggrieved rises to the surface --rather easily, in fact-- and before long he's convinced himself that murder is his only option. And crucially, he lets us know that the convinced himself is doing a lot of work here; this isn’t the story of a good man who makes a foolish mistake when backed into a corner. This is the story of a man who uses the false pretense of being backed into a corner to give himself license to unleash the violent retribution he’s been nursing all along. Who is able to tell himself a story about his own victimhood which is convincing enough to validate his seething anger and justify lashing out. Even with the accent, Jane locates the bitterness and impotent rage in this quiet agrarian, lets us see how his admirable qualities subtly transmogrify into monstrous ones in ways that even he --heck, maybe especially he-- doesn't understand. And indeed, it is his very inability to unpack his feelings that is at the root of this transformation.

I’m not sure what, if anything, was going on in King’s world in 2010 that made its way into this story, but in 2017, and especially 2021, one can hardly help but read this as a commentary on the roiling cultural tension of modern America. There’s a reason I felt compelled to name-check Trump back there; Wilfred James reflects a rigidly conservative strain of American thought. He is solitary, traditional, fiercely resistant to change (he doesn’t even have indoor plumbing) and contemptuous towards outsiders, especially the despised ‘city folk.’ The whole inciting incident, in fact, arises from his wife’s desire to sell their land and move to Omaha, Nebraska, a place he is convinced (with no discernable first-hand evidence) is a land of the debased and fallen. He, on the other hand, is dead-set on passing the farm down to their son (Dylan Schmid, HORNS), who is mostly ambivalent about carrying on his father’s lifestyle but is sufficiently besotted with the neighbor’s daughter to allow himself to be manipulated into becoming an accomplice. It’s telling that the son is only tangentially interested in staying on the farm; despite Wilfred’s empty assertions that he’s acting on behalf of his kid, we know it’s empty posturing. It’s not about misguided paternal concern, it’s about standing athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’ He simply wants things to stay the same forever, even after he’s gone, and he’s willing –eager, even-- to kill anyone who pushes back on that idea. It’s about control, about feeling powerless in the world and consequently pathologically defensive about his dominance among the few people he can control. But that just means he’s going to lose his soul first, and then lose everything anyway.

 

But I hasten to add, although the film is very much about this, it’s in no way an overtly political or didactic film. It’s simply a dark character piece, and a pretty exaggerated one at that. But that doesn’t mean it can’t still get at something interesting and valuable about the real world. I don’t want to overstate all this, but it just seems to me so intrinsic to, and yet so often ignored about, the reason we tell stories in the first place. The movie, unlike so much unbearable art from the last decade or so, has no interest in demonizing this guy or scoring cheap culture war points. It has no moral desire to condemn farmer Wilfred, who is, after all, a fictional character, and indeed, by adopting his perspective it even provides us reason to understand him, even sympathize with him. His wife’s snide imperiousness, layered with a subtle layer of condensation, is pretty abrasive, and it’s easy to understand why she is so loathsome to him, just as Parker’s excellent performance gives us all the evidence we’d need to re-imagine this story from her perspective. Of course she’s a little vindictive towards this stifling, selfish hayseed – but this is his story, not hers, and we need to understand his perspective to understand why he responds in the way he does. By simply placing us in the perspective of this particular character, we learn something about him, and, by extension, others who idealize the things he represents, and, to a certain extent, ourselves, since there’s certainly a part of us who can understand him. This is, I suppose, what people mean with the phrase ‘everything is political,’ in the sense that politics is just the expression of the way we want to organize the world, and the values that we believe should guide that organizing. But to my mind, this is a far, far better method to get at these underlying socio-cultural issues through art than the recent spate of genre movies which seem so eager to simply state the moral aloud and sit back and wait for the congratulations to pour in.

Which is good, because some thoughtful character work is all you really get here. There's a little sprinkling of gross corpses and ghosts and stuff (which may or may not be real, and it's such a small part of the film that it doesn't really matter which), but the horror is really more psychological. It's not a film about guilt, exactly, it's a film about decay, about everything --physically and spiritually-- in our protagonist's life falling apart the harder he tries to hold on, mostly because he's trying to hold on, whether or not he realizes that last detail. It wants us to go on this journey and simply experience it all, rather than drag the story this way or that in service of perceived genre goods. Which does not in itself sound like something that would make me happy; over the last few years, horror, or at least any horror with real ambition, has gradually just become drama with spooky music, not necessarily to the benefit of either genre. And you could very reasonably level the same criticism against 1922, which offers very little genre content you could point to; there’s probably less ghost content than Hamlet, which I doubt anyone would want to defend as a horror story. But again, the film’s willingness to go broader and more archetypal serves to its advantage; as horror has become drama, drama has increasingly become undramatic, focusing on intimate details of small stories, shrinking up into an actor’s exercise in minimalist realism. Something like 1922, with its baroque gothic affectations, neatly avoids that trap and simply delivers big, operatic, unreserved emotions. Not histrionics or camp, and not without nuance, but still far more extreme and outrageous than any self-respecting drama today would attempt, and it’s away to get away with it (assuming you think it does) by virtue of its willingness to announce itself as a horror story rather than a drama, freeing it up from the dull confines of naturalism to churn up some tumultuous human emotions into a larger-than-life frenzy which is more interested in the overwhelming way things feel than the mundane way they are.       

 

And in its unhurried way, it's pretty good at getting those emotions rolling; the performances are uniformly quite fine (as long as you can get on board with the accents), broad, certainly, but textured enough to feel specific and meaty, and the atmosphere is bolstered by some surprisingly nice cinematography by Ben Richardson (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, WIND RIVER), who clearly knows what he's doing in using the digital photography to get a lightly high-contrast, unobtrusively oversaturated effect which feels highly appropriate for the story's vaguely mythic affectation (making this a rare Netflix film which doesn't look implacably chintzy). The music, which I regret did not take much note of at the time, is apparently by Faith No More frontman Mike Patton, who, wow, I now see scored THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES also, which is weird. 

 

One might reasonably wish for a film this low-concept and generally lackadaisical about incident to get a little more aggressive with the style than Hilditch seems willing to do, but the drama is sturdy enough to make it consistently compelling, and sometimes it's maybe kinda nice to have a small-scale dark drama which has faith enough in King's keen eye for little details and complications which add character that it doesn't need to overthink things. I can definitely imagine this material feeling unendurably thin if you catch it in the wrong mood, but it mostly worked for me. Farmer Wilfred, you may be a murderous, conniving, unbalanced regressive, but I enjoyed spending this time in your head. Next time, though, maybe let’s do some kind of gimmick killer thing, huh?

* Everybody calls him "Wilf," which is weird; is it normal for people named "Wildred" to go by "Wilf"? "Wilf" sounds like the noise a dog makes when it smells something it doesn't like.