Take Shelter
Angelika Film Centre, November 3, 2011
Movie #77 for 2011
Curtis (MICHAEL SHANNON, pictured) and Samantha (JESSICA CHASTAIN) are happily and comfortably married. They are good people, hard workers, good neighbours and, although money is tight, their deaf six year old daughter gets good care. When Curtis begins to have nightmares - both dreaming and waking - he channels his rising panic into building and kitting out a storm shelter for the apocalyptic storm he believes is coming. When a (perhaps the?) storm hits, he locks himself and his family in the shelter. Metaphor, much?
I responded so emotionally to Curtis. Shannon’s performance is so compelling and so sympathetic. Which is as it should be to create the kind of creepiness the film relies on - if I was sure that Curtis’ dreams were just dreams, or didn’t care either way, the film would fall over. But writer/director JEFF NICHOLS gives the film a kind of seething portent - I was as affected my Curtis’s terrifying dreams as he was (up to a point).
Although the story belongs to Curtis and the film belongs to Shannon, Samantha and Chastain are more than just window-dressing. Both the character and the actor are essential to the success of the film and both have a kind of pragmatic warmth that is immediately likeable.
For most of its running time, the film is played so subtly, there is lots of delicious ambiguity and may ways to read what’s going on. When I left the cinema, I was deeply unsatisfied by the ending, though, as I felt that it turned out that my reading was incorrect. On reflection, the immediacy of that disappointment has faded and I am left with a more overwhelming satisfaction with the film’s detail, look, characterization and narrative complexity.
