Richard Kelly's 'The Box' is a somewhat unconfident mess that will have you talking after you leave the cinema. It will be a debate about what it all meant, and while this is fun, I suspect from the number of themes and issues thrown into the film, Richard Kelly is a little uncertain what it all means himself.
'The Box' follows Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur Lewis (James Marsden), a struggling middle class couple with a young child. A mysterious box with one red button is given to them by a stranger with the instructions that if they push the button within 24 hours they will receive $1 million but also kill a complete stranger.
The film is, like 'Southland Tales', overcrowded with ideas (the opposite to most American cinema nowadays) but no one idea is prevalent. Kelly bounds from scene-to-scene with twists that present new possibilities, it would be difficult to argue that this film is in anyway predictable. With no overarching theme however or a direction in the story it is difficult to find Kelly's voice and what it is exactly that he is trying to say or to get you thinking about.
Richard Kelly also struggles to get decent performances out of both Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, two actors who have yet to convince me (except for Diaz in 'There's Something About Mary' but she seemed born for that role alone). Even Frank Langella seemed to be struggling in his somewhat confused role (motivation please). The wooden and somewhat shallow characterisations of Norma and Arthur leaves the film feeling cold as it is somewhat hard to identify with the choices they make and to sympathise with the hardships they endure.
It must also be said that for a period film, the time and place of middle America in the 1970s is never really felt, never in the characters, the narrative or the miss-en-scene. 'Donnie Darko' was firmly in the 1980s with its array of high school characters and the activities they followed. 'The Box' does not share this and one must wonder if Kelly choose the setting owing only the fact that much of the appeal of 'Darko' was the period setting.
I did not hate this film, much as I did not hate 'Southland Tales'. I found both thought provoking but this is again a disappointment compared to 'Donnie Darko'. 'Donnie Darko' was taken out of Richard Kelly's hands for the final edit and the producers effectively saved that film from being the mess that was the director's cut. Going from that and his films since, sometime soon Kelly will really need to find a producing partner that can let his ideas flourish and be reigned in at the same time.
