In years to come they will teach the early work of the director Richard Kelly in film schools as a cautionary lesson in how to destroy a promising career in three easy moves. In retrospect, even the honeymoon period after the release of Donnie Darko contained ominous hints of what was to come. The enigmatic cult cool of that movie was tainted by the fact that Kelly whinged about how much better the film would have been had is evil producers not wrested control in the editing suite. He then released a “director’s cut” of Donnie that was at best muddled and overlong, and at worst, pretentious and incompetent.
Next came the elaborate but disastrously unsuccessful dystopian satire Southland Tales, in which Kelly wheeled out the big guns (Justin Timberlake, Seann William Scott, and, er, The Rock) and mortally wounded his own career. Now, with his latest picture The Box, the clueless and overreaching ambition which has started to characterise his cinematic failures comes into play again. Kelly takes an idea that might have made a halfway decent episode of Tales of the Unexpected and inflates it full of to bursting point with hot air and pompous thematic conceits.
Cameron Diaz and James Marsden star as Norma and Arthur Lewis, a happily married couple with one child, one prosthetic foot (Norma’s) and a few niggling financial pressures. A 5.45am ring on the doorbell heralds an opportunity that will change everything. On the doorstep is a box, and in the box is a red button, covered in a glass dome. There’s a note enclosed, promising a visit from a Mr Steward at 5pm. Steward turns out to be Frank Langella with a huge chunk of his face missing. He offers Norma a choice: if they push the button, they will receive $1million in cash, but somebody, somewhere, will die as a direct response. Quite the moral dilemma.
No prizes for guessing whether or not they push the button. Suffice to say, Kelly delves into his big book of creepy 1970s sci-fi tropes and comes up with a few corkers. Supporting characters start developing chronic nose bleeds; dead-eyed strangers fix the family with sinister, lobotomised stares. In one effective, if unintentionally hilarious sequence, Arthur is pursued through a library by Steward’s baleful drones. But what does it all mean? Even Kelly must realise that the carefully constructed atmosphere doesn’t, ultimately, amount to a hill of beans. Which is presumably why he peppers the film with Sartre references in the hope of accruing intellectual gravity.
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Donnie Darko’s popularity was due to the film’s tantalisingly knotty plotting and the sense that somewhere, around the next labyrinthine twist or within some opaque philosophical reference, enlightenment lay. If the narrative conundrum didn’t quite slot into place, we were inclined to blame ourselves for stupidly overlooking a vital piece of the puzzle. As Kelly’s film career unfolds, however, it is becoming depressingly clear that we, the audience, are not the stupid ones in this particular equation.