The Innocents

"The Innocents" (1961) probably holds up better than most old horror movies. The frightening elements are psychosexual, but in a subtle, layered way--and it's subtle not just because the movie is old. If the undertones were any stronger--even if the film were made today--it would've become instant camp. (This isn't to say that a campy version wouldn't be entertaining.)

"The Innocents" is based on Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), which I started reading awhile back, but I was so bored with the prologue that I gave up--a mistake, perhaps, that I should rectify. (The change in name does more than make the title sleeker.) Deborah Kerr plays the young-and-pretty preacher's daughter, Miss Giddens, who goes off to an English manor and becomes the governess for a pair of orphans whose uncle willfully neglects them. She begins to see visions of the children's deceased former governess and the estate's deceased valet who, according to the good-hearted maid (Megs Jenkins), were lewd, flawed people. The former governess was obsessively, masochistically in love with the n'er-do-well valet, a cruel, abusive man who had a Rasputin-like appeal and influence. The maid is ashamed to tell Miss Giddens of their proclivity to make love when and wherever they wanted--even if the innocent children were watching. In a scene that the director, Jack Clayton, cleverly withholds from us, Miss Giddens somehow learns from her predecessor that the old governess and valet can only be together (sexually) if they possess the children; the lecherous elders were, of course, the isolated kids' idols, and Flora and Miles seem to have taken on some of the lovers' characteristics (Miles, for instance, flirts with Miss Giddens and kisses her lips good night). Giddens, who exhibits no sexual urges of her own, wishes to protect the children and believes that if the truth can be wrung out of them they'll be saved. The children claim to not see the ghosts when Miss Giddens does, and the maid is content to not wake the children from this bad dream; she doesn't see the specters either, and is skeptical of Miss Giddens, but minds the governess's authority. It's never resolved whether ghosts are present and Giddens's truth-bating does not go as planned.

The Victorian writing and setting, and the early-’60s production enrich and confound the sexual analogies. The children are referred to as "the innocents," but, if Miss Giddens is correct, they've been unwittingly corrupted. But is our virtuous, virginal heroine correct? Is the maid right in trying not to disturb the children’s' idyll, and what would it mean if she did? Since we're not clear on whether their excessively childlike behavior is really "innocent" or, in actuality, corrupted, we're not sure whether Miss Giddens' virtue is devoted to postponing their sexual awakening or whether or not that is a good or bad thing. If Giddens is right, then their sexuality is improper (both by Victorian and modern standards): possessed, the kids are made to be incestuous. However, they show no tangible signs of being truly harmed, and, as with many horror movies, we're forced to doubt the supernatural as much as we are made to believe in it. Although the movie never truly "frightened" me, I think its leaving me with these questions was enough to make it a chilling, intellectual and satisfactory experience.

The direction is simple and fluid and even Clayton's montages hardly seem dated (although sometimes the tendentious score does). Freddie Francis's vivid grayscale photography doesn't hurt (although the framing itself is hurt when not presented in its proper aspect ratio) and neither does the traditionally Victorian production design. Also, I'm sure that the film owes a lot to Truman Capote, who co-wrote the movie with John Mortimer and William Archibald in the midst of writing "In Cold Blood"--his spaciousness and journalistic formality in that book fit snugly here.

"The Innocents" in mood and manner has left its mark on more recent psychological-horror movies like "The Shining" and "The Others." If those movies appeal to you, then don't let this one's age be an impediment to your seeing it.

Sid and Nancy

Sid (Gary Oldman) and Nancy (Chloe Webb) are well-played, considering how little the movie reveals about them. The heroin-addled vicissitudes of the Sex Pistols' bassist and his beloved floozy seem to stretch on forever, though, historically, the setting isn't longer than two years; and, although the movie mostly improves as it goes on, its heroes never become much more than deviant morons fueled by (particularly on Nancy's part) self-indulgence. Their love for one another, though passionate, seems arbitrary. This is probably because the director, Alex Cox, doesn't give us any context--we're given next to nothing about the characters' histories or the punk movement that they were a part of. "Sid and Nancy," which has been denounced by Johnny Rotten, is carried by its angry, laudatory verve, but not much else.

Superbad

The comedy in Superbad works, I think, because of the absurd innocence behind the characters’ attempt to lose theirs. From the Animal House perspective—which generated a large degree of commercial, youth-oriented schlock in its wake—the kids are cynical narcissists living for the trashed weekend hook-up. In Mean Girls, the kids are the slick products of a sophisticated farce—honestly depicted, but detached from reality. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, however, who wrote the first draft of Superbad while they were adolescents themselves, are far from detached; they are only so far beyond high school age—and have made much of themselves in the meantime. Thus, they portray the banal, rockin’-the-suburbs rites of passage with very balanced nostalgia.

The last-party-of-high school, trying-to-buy-liquor-underage, gotta-get-the-girl coming-of-age superstructure of Superbad is nothing new. And, technically, neither are Seth (Jonah Hill) or Evan (Michael Cera); the corpulent bore and his lanky sidekick predate the teen movie by a long shot. Even the much-lauded deluge of “dirty words” is just Porky’s: The Next Generation. Don’t other critics get that censorship (and teenagers’ vocabularies, upon seeing these movies) is continually getting laxer? (Using swear words isn’t really boldness on the filmmakers’ part.) What works is not the all-too-universal plot line, but the lovingly absurd point of view, which consumes it. With the penis drawings and, in a lazier way, the dialogue, Goldberg and Rogen are livening up the usual circumstances; it becomes a farce, all right, but one that teenagers would want to write about themselves. The writers (Rogen was 25 when Superbad came out) aren’t reliving their high school past; they’re rewriting it as they wish it had been—but, fortunately, they’re not narcissists.

Why else would Rogen (also executive producer) cast himself as one of the cops that picks up Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and takes him for a joyride to prove that grown-ups can have fun, too? (He’s not trying to convince just Fogell of that.) Teen movies often feed into teenage self-absorption and pretend that the adult world is like some weird, parallel dimension beyond the viewer’s scope (or interest). When adults are actually given dialogue, it might as well be the wonk-wonk-wonk of the Peanuts’ parents. Mom and Dad don’t make an appearance in Superbad, either, but the sequences with those strange creatures beyond the drinking age are generally the best. Quasi-virginal Seth acts as a shrewd pragmatist, blackmailing a shady addict into drawing them to a lurid house party. David Edelstein of New York compared the scene where Evan is made to sing for a group of cokeheads in a bedroom to Dean Stockwell’s orgasmic ditty in Blue Velvet, but I think Edelstein got it in reverse. As in the David Lynch film, the kids aren’t the surreal spectacle, the postlapsarian grown-ups are. It’s a strange world these twenty- and thirty-somethings are mired in, but the great irony is that this is just what the party Seth and Evan would be relegated to in a few years time—high school is indeed a “magical” age.

The unscrupulous cops—Animal House brothers that, much to their chagrin, graduated—are even queasier role models. Their target-practice, drunk-driving tomfoolery would be a nightmare in Training Day; it’s a testament to these filmmakers that it comes off comically in Superbad. The teen-triumvirate wants to get out of high school “accomplished”; the policemen want back in. The cops’ sentimentality keeps them from being immoral buffoons, but the level of sentiment is just right: they don’t want to get back into the pool so much as they just want to dip their feet in. Otherwise, the fantasy would become acridly anti-adult, and the cops’ woebegone misanthropy would be a stone-cold bummer.

I’d be remiss not to mention the actors, though they’ve been greatly publicized elsewhere. Cera’s Evan is not naïve: he’s sweetly, shyly moral. He’s in opposition to the brutal masculine figure who’d come back into style with the Burger King commercials of a few years back; in fact, his femininity is made into a joke—but not a cruel one. Cera blends goodwill with good timing, and exudes a cowboy’s laconic chivalry and conscientiousness without the kind of ego that fosters pretensions of superiority. When he says, matter-of-factly, that he wants to respect women, you believe him. Hill, on the other hand... I can identify with the bullies who want to beat this violently undersexed loudmouth up. But his seeming authenticity in this role is also his strength. It’s almost impossible (and undesirable) to play this role without irony; he doesn’t, but neither does he wink at the camera. Mintz-Plasse is such an authentic dork (being as he was, an actual high school student at the time) that saying anything more about him would be superfluous. (Except maybe, Why does everyone think his McLovin license is such comedic gold? It just passed over me, I guess.)

I’m sure that Superbad will soon join the pantheon of generational teen movies, somewhere between Empire Records and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and up there it deserves a place. I’m certain, too, that this is exactly the kind of movie that will become iconic of this generation and decade (even though its 70s-chic will seem confusing), and will gloss over, to some, all the bad memories of high school. One shouldn’t forget, however, that it has the failings of all its antecedents, as well: the two-dimensional, all-their-shit-together mythical girls, for instance. But, it’s a small, winsome movie (even a nicely lighted one, for what it’s worth) that gears one up for illicit summertime partying.