It (Part 1) (2017)
Dir. Andy Muschietti
Written by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, Gary
Dauberman
Starring Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård,
Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, The Incorrigible Finn Wolfhard, Wyatt Oleff,
Chosen Jacobs, Dylan Jacob Grazer
I
have never read Stephen King’s novel It. I have also never seen the
landmark 1990 ABC miniseries IT starring Tim Curry. Shocking, I know, but there
it is. Seems like the sort of thing a person would watch before resorting to,
say, THE AMERICAN SCREAM (1988) or SATAN’S BLADE or TIME WALKER or FROGS, but such is the path I walk. Somehow it just managed to slip through the
cracks. And yet, I still sort of know what the deal with IT is, just like you
do, just like everyone does. IT’s become an inescapable seasoning of the
cultural stew in which we all swim, and over time everyone just sort of absorbs
it through osmosis until we seem, almost instinctively, to know the basics.
Pennywise the clown, “we all float down here,” it jumps between 1957 and 1984,
and it ends with (spoilers for the book) an insane
unpublishable-yet-somehow-published prepubescent sewer gangbang.* And also it’s
really long.
The
2017 movie which bears the name IT incorporates two of those five elements
(mostly because it adapts only the 1957 part of the book [pushing the date for ‘childhood
nostalgia’ up to 1988 instead of ‘57], while leaving the adult years for the
inevitable sequel) and obviously they picked the two right ones, because the
damned thing made some 700 million dollars worldwide at the box office,
to comfortably become the highest-grossing horror movie of all time and the
3rd-highest grossing R-rated movie of all time (!) as of this writing. That’s
like, crazy money, like HARRY POTTER money (in fact, it actually outperformed
at least two POTTERs domestically). How on Earth did this happen? I honestly
have no idea. I mean, it’s a solid enough little movie, but so are lots of
movies that don’t make goddam 700 million bucks. It boggles the mind. Of
course, the last time we discussed such an inexplicable financial juggernaught
of a horror movie, we were talking about CONJURING 2, a film which I vaguely recall being well over two hours in
length, and yet the only thing I can specifically remember from it is that
there’s this huge improbable spike that Patrick Wilson has to avoid falling on.
So maybe I’m just out of touch with what people are into these days.
IT
2017 and CONJURING 2 do have one thing in common, though: they’re both fairly
extravagantly budgeted (for the horror genre) and invest most of that budget in
two things: elaborate (but not entirely convincing) CGI effects and a generally
slick, professional look with acting and production values closer to a real
movie than you’d typically get in any movie about a killer clown, or even a
Killer Klown. Those things have their value, but I’m bearish about how valuable
they are to a horror movie, and IT 2017 doesn’t exactly force me to
reevaluate that view. There’s plenty of expensive, elaborately rendered special
effect work here that looks pretty cool, but very little that wouldn’t be at
least as effective --and probably more so-- using cruder methods and hiding
them in shadow or through editing.
That’s the problem with
putting more resources into the hands of someone without a real distinct vision
(and I think it’s fair to call director Andy Muschietti --whose only previous
film was 2013’s equally solid but unimaginative MAMA-- such a person); it
becomes tempting to just foist everything off on the computer nerds instead of
really thinking through all your options. When you can easily just throw money
at the effects crew and immediately depict anything, the danger is that
you stop asking “how are we going to do this?” and just figure the one’s and
zero’s will take care of it. In theory, that sounds good -- the director can
realize his or her vision without any logistical compromises for puppets that don’t
work quite right, or composite effects that aren’t quite there and have to get
obscured by editing or lighting. But in practice, this can be a devil’s
bargain, because it means a director no longer has to really ponder how to make
a sequence work. Very often limitations, not resources, force artists to get
creative, to think about the scene in a different way, to carefully focus on
crafting the details so it works just right. I’m by no means some kind of
anti-CGI zealot, but I do think that the idea that it’s simply interchangeable
with practical effects overlooks some key distinctions which can end up having
a subtle but significant impact on the final product.
The end result of both
techniques looks superficially the same, of course -- a special effect on film.
But the means by which that effect is achieved are radically different, and
require entirely different skillsets. CGI effects are, essentially, animation;
not really meaningfully different from a WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT mix of
cartoons and real-world actors and objects. Practical effects have much more to
do with the kind of in-camera, real-world photography that exemplifies most
film directing. Some filmmakers are equally skilled at both; see, for example,
how Robert Zemeckis’s career has merrily criss-crossed the border between the
two words.*** Often, however, directors with great strength in one medium will
struggle in the other. Guillermo Del Toro is exhibit A: witness the enormous
difference in impact between the excellent (mostly) man-in-suit subway fight in
HELLBOY and it’s completely
enervating CGI tentacle finale. Or the profound contrast between the eye-popping practical
monsters in PAN’S LABYRINTH and the weightless afterthoughts of PACIFIC RIM.
Del Toro is something close to a genius when it comes to physical filmmaking,
but something about that massive talent just doesn’t seem to translate intact
to animation. (Conversely, anyone wanna argue that Brad Bird or Andrew
Stanton’s live-action work has anywhere near the potency of their animated
output? Anybody?)
 |
| That sure is a scary lot of 1's and 0's. |
What accounts for this
difference? In part, I suspect it’s a purely biological phenomenon: the
physical process of being present around real-world objects (in practical
effect work) gets the brain working in ways which looking at still images
simply cannot, and consequently inspires lines of thinking that you otherwise
wouldn’t get. There’s plenty of evidence for this in studies which measure the
difference between stimuli similar as reading on-screen text vs paper text. But more importantly, it is also an effect of different
creative process. CGI is actually kind of a static creative process,
because once the nerds get started doing the animation, you can’t really fuck
with it very much, it’s way too expensive to go back and significantly alter or
pare down. You can’t do a few takes and then see how it looks and try again, or
have an actor experiment a little with how he moves his body, or decide that
there’s not enough whammy and cut your sequence down to a single shot. Sure,
you get to storyboard it and see some models and mock-ups and stuff, but once
you’ve made it through the initial creative process, there’s not much
flexibility. You’re stuck with just your first batch of ideas, and can’t let it
naturally evolve while it’s being created. It’s a tightly controlled process,
utterly removed from happy accidents. Practical effects done on-camera, on the
other hand, are not just something that gets computered into existence far away
and then they send you a link -- someone has to be sitting there in person,
seeing how the lighting hits the effect, deciding how long each beat is going
to take, noticing how a particular tendril of smoke curls in a nifty way,
contemplating how to best capture the tangible artifacts on film. All this
takes hours and hours, sometimes days, of walking through physical
spaces and manipulating real objects. And that, I think, is where the
difference is: forcing that kind of slow-down, and that kind of direct,
feet-on-the-ground, hands-on interaction with real objects, forces a director
to engage with the scene, and the way it will play out, in a way which he or
she cannot meaningfully do with CGI.
Consequently, I nearly
always find that expensive, computer-assisted horror feel implacabley anemic,
like unknowingly drinking a diet soda or listening to Paul Ryan talk about an
ethical issue. You can’t put your finger on exactly what’s missing, but your brain
immediately registers an unmistakable and vital deficiency which makes the
whole endeavor completely pointless. And that’s usually gonna be a detriment to
a horror movie, which is gonna live or die on whether or not it can impact you
at a gut level. Which brings us back to IT 2017, the movie I was supposedly
writing about 50,000 words ago. Horror directors in particular -with their
necessary technique rooted in tightly controlled image, editing, and
mise-en-scene- are especially vulnerable to losing control of that kind of film
craft when they cede so much power to animators, and that’s certainly in
evidence here. There are maybe one or two sequences in IT 2017 that rise to the
level of “scary” --one, a scene where a burnt torso pursues a kid through a dingy
basement vault, was enough to get my heart racing a little-- but most falls
somewhere closer to “cool,” in that it’s cool to watch a flagrantly unreal
computerized clown body which is under no obligation to obey the laws of
physics float around in front of some scared-looking kids. I definitely enjoy
watching it, but it’s hard to argue it comes anywhere near actual horror.
Still, while obviously
you’d love to have pure, white-knuckled terror in your Stephen King killer
clown demon movie... that failing, “cool” is a not-unwelcome substitute.
There’s a moment where Pennywise the evil clown (in person played by an
excellent Bill Skarsgård, THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT****) starts crawling
out of a slide show projection, RING-style. But here’s the thing, since he’s
being projected on the wall, larger-than-life, when he emerges from the screen
he’s a gigantic teeth-gnashing monster who can’t even fit his whole body into
the tiny garage and has to awkwardly let his back half languish in 2-D. That is
pretty cool, I have to acknowledge. You don’t get to see something like that in
a horror movie very often, because who can afford it? It’s a highly enjoyable,
and even exciting sequence.
Not
very scary, though.
And
I guess that’s kinda the thing with IT; It’s really a pretty good movie, all
things considered. But it’s not all that great a horror movie, and I
think it would really like to be. It definitely posits itself as a horror
movie, and structures itself as a stately march from one fright set-piece to
the next, so it’s a palpable disappointment that it so rarely lands an
effective jolt, or even a sustained sense of dread.
Where it is surprisingly
adept, oddly, is as an ensemble kids’ movie -- and that’s no small thing in
itself. King is known as a horror writer, of course, but while his gift for
scary ideas is usually at the forefront of people's’ conceptions of him as a
writer, I’d be willing to argue that it’s his rock-solid gift for relatable
characterization that really makes his stories work in a way that most
other horror authors --Clive Barker, Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, etc-- either
can’t manage or don’t see as important. Even a horror icon as untouchable as
Poe was little interested in crafting relatable, likeable protagonists to
menace with unholy nightmares; he was interested in intense, extreme
psychological states, not characters we’d like to hang out with. But King is
the polar opposite;***** he cares about his protagonists, on a personal
level, and he does a surprisingly consistent job of ensuring his readers do,
too. That strength in his writing has only sporadically made it to the big
screen, and almost never to horror adaptations (STAND BY ME, THE GREEN MILE and
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION are probably the best examples, though you could
probably add SILVER BULLET and maybe THE MIST to that list) but it is the secret foundation of
IT 2017, and the thing that comfortably pushes the film from “decent enough
killer clown flick” to “legitimately pretty good movie.”
At
least as much as it is concerned with killer Clowns and/or Klowns (I
don’t think they ever specify), the movie is interested in its
seven protagonists, chiefly Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), Bev (Sophia Lillis), and
Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), but also Ritchie (Finn Wolfhard), Stan (Wyatt Oleff),
Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer) and Mike (Chosen Jacobs), a group which makes up a
loose gang known as the “Losers Club” (though the movie just barely
touches on the last point). That is a lot of characters for any film to
handle --even one with a comfortable 135 minutes to stretch out into-- and bear
in mind, those are only the protagonists, and we’ll meet most of their parents,
bullies, victimizers, classmates, and fellow citizens as well. So the fact that
anyone leaves much of an impression is by itself somewhat miraculous, and
amazingly, almost everyone manages to leave an impression. That’s
partially an effect of the generous script, which is impressively nimble at
giving each kid a rudimentary arc and at least one showpiece scene, but mostly
a function of the director and the young actors’ confident proficiency at
investing in the characters in more subtle, unspoken ways. With seven primary
characters running around, that approach can only take you so far --the film is
occasionally willing to substitute superficial characteristics as shorthand,
which leaves Eddie as “The hypochondriac one” and poor Stan and Mike as “The
Jewish one” and “the black one,” respectively-- but even in those cases,
the film’s obvious broad affection for its characters and its clear eye towards
the way they naturally organize and interact with each other, leave you with
the unmistakable sense that you’re one of the gang. It’s a surprisingly rare
thing in film, and IT can hold its own with the best of its competition, plus
it has a killer clown.
This
being IT, of course, the clown is really the featured attraction, and if he
must ultimately collapse into a dispiriting heap of shiny, weightless CGI
nonsense, at least for awhile we have the immense pleasure of Bill Skarsgård’s
magnificently inhuman portrayal. If King writes humans with surprising earthy
care, his other strength runs more Lovecraftian: creating strange, unknowable
intelligences for whom even adopting the physical form and human language seem
an awkward fit. I’m immensely partial to the suffocating, nonsense-babbling
entity in his short story 1408, for instance, which didn’t quite survive the
transition to the big screen version. But Skarsgård nails it here,
treating his Pennywise as a malignant intelligence which can only barely be
bothered to offer a passing facsimile of a human. He --with the likely assist,
I’m forced to admit, of some hated computers-- does this wonderful thing where
while he’s talking to you, his eyes subtly of wander off, as though keeping up
the illusion of a functional human face is a effort he can’t quite keep
together unless he’s really focusing on it. As I said, I haven’t seen the
original 1990 IT, but Skarsgård is so strong he I honestly can’t imagine how
even Curry could top it (I am given to understand that the performances are quite
different).
A
performance like that justifies the film’s existence all by itself, and paired
with the excellent young cast, a splendid evocation of everytown 1980s America
which mercifully eschews cheap nostalgia porn, and a brisk but unrushed pace
that spools through a capacious tangle of exposition and plot with an ease that
belies how much material it has to cover, the movie goes down real easy indeed.
I don’t know if all that justifies more than a half-billion dollars in profit,
but it does, I think, justify something a bit more honorable: the designation
of “good movie.” I don’t think the horror works quite the way it should, but it
turns out the movie writ large does -- which leads one to suspect it was really
about something other than horror in the first place. Probably something about
friendship and finding a community and growing up and stuff. And on that level,
it’s a pretty unmitigated triumph. I guess coming from my perspective, a great
killer clown movie with some decent coming-of-age drama in it would probably be
more welcome than a great coming-of-age drama with some decent killer clown
stuff, but I think I speak for everyone here when I decry the shameful paucity
of both of them. This might not be the IT that I want, but it’s a damn sight
better than anyone had any right to hope for. And that ain’t nothing.
So
let us all take a moment to really savor this feeling before they muck it up
with a sequel that, by all accounts, is going to be composed of 100% the bad
parts of the novel that they left out of this one.
Well, not the gangbang,
I guess. You don’t make 700 million bucks without knowing what to leave out.
*Look it up.**
** Wait for the love of God stop! Look up “End
of the novel IT,” not “prepubescent sewer gangbang,” come on dude what the hell
you know better than this.
*** Other notable crossovers: Steven Spielberg,
who’s animated TINTIN movie is one of his most Spierbergian efforts in modern
times, and Zack Snyder, whose animated owl movie was, OK, bad, but basically
indistinguishable in quality or style from his live-action works.
**** Huh?
***** If anything, he can sometimes be a little too sentimental about his characters, to the point of disliking THE SHINING because it makes Jack Torrence too unlikable.
CHAINSAWNUKAH
2017 CHECKLIST!
The Discreet Charm of
the Killing Spree
TAGLINE
|
You’ll Float Too
|
TITLE ACCURACY
|
They sure do say “it” a lot.
|
LITERARY ADAPTATION?
|
Yep, of half of Stephen King’s 1986 novel
|
SEQUEL?
|
First of a two-parter.
|
REMAKE?
|
It was previously made in 1990, though this is
billed as an adaptation of the book, not a remake of that film.
|
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
|
USA
|
HORROR SUB-GENRE
|
Stephen King, Killer Clown, Demons
|
SLUMMING A-LISTER?
|
None, actually, a cast of young
mostly-unknowns who really knock it out of the park
|
BELOVED HORROR ICON?
|
Stephen King, Pennywise the Clown
|
NUDITY?
|
None
|
SEXUAL ASSAULT?
|
There’s a strong suggestion that one of the
characters is being molested, or at least is in danger of it, though it’s not
explicit
|
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
|
Nah. IT sometimes embodies what you fear (when
it feels like it) but none of them are afraid of giant spiders or tapirs or
something.
|
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?
|
Not really, although there is an evil house,
as with so many King stories.
|
POSSESSION?
|
No, though Pennywise seems to be able to put
people into something like a hypnotic trance
|
CREEPY DOLLS?
|
Just the clown
|
EVIL CULT?
|
Nah
|
MADNESS?
|
No
|
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
|
Well, Pennywise does a good bit of
transforming
|
VOYEURISM?
|
Nothing notable
|
MORAL OF THE STORY
|
Might as well adapt just the good parts of a
book.
|
