Movie 120: Maggie

Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson, Douglas M. Griffin, Richael Whitman Groves.

Director: Henry Hobson.

I've actually had this kicking around for awhile.  I was going to wait for when I do my inevitable zombie movie run, but with my running new horror flicks for a year end list, it seemed like this was as good a time as any.  I have doubts that it will make much of an impact on said list, but I've heard some okay things (and some not okay things) and figured I'd see for myself.  Arnold is more capable than he usually shows in film, so I have some faith that he can pull a good performance here...and Breslin is dynamite more often than not.

We open on a fairly grim environment: Arnold is on his way to the hospital to get his Daughter-who is infected by some sort of slow moving zombie virus-despite her telling him not to.  He's told the bad news: no cure, she'll turn, etc.  But he's allowed to take her home to "say his goodbyes."  None of this is very logical, but this is clearly a story of emotion over reason: A Father willing to do anything to keep his child with him, no matter the cost.

The whole color scheme of the film is very grey, and very subdued.  As Arnold drives past the graying, desolate countryside we see fires burning across the fields: we can see this is a world with little hope for recovery.  Like Arnold's Daughter, everything is slowly dying. Even when we see sunlight(after Wade gets Maggie out of the hospital), it's a washed-out, cold sunshine. It's a little heavy-handed, but it feels honest enough.

It doesn't take long for a regular zombie attack.  Wade and Maggie stop at a gas station and Wade is attacked by one of the living dead.  Being Arnold, he makes short work of his assailant.  It's brief, maybe a little too brief, but it's there.  We arrive home to see a worried (seemingly more skeptical) Mom, and two other children.  

Seems to me that this film is going to go for a pretty obvious allegory: that of terminal illness.  As Maggie's condition worsens, and the grief and confusion of her family increases, so will the world start to make less and less sense.  It's not a bad direction to take: most zombie films are, at their heart, a story of sociological deterioration. To take that element and point it at the microcosm of a single, American Heartland Family is actually a pretty intelligent perspective. But that allegory does work well.  Mom struggles with being angry at her Daughter's distance (apparently she had been gone for two weeks) while wanting to be happy she's home and to make the most of the short time Maggie has left.  Rather typical terminal illness response.

There are some beautifully arranged shots here, too: Arnold walks through his fields as the light dies, carrying a torch to burn his crops (apparently, the disease may be spread through crops?  A lot of plot details feel fuzzy here, possibly to purposefully mimic the confusion of our characters)...some really pretty shots.  Director Henry Hobson knows his way around camera movements and compositional framing: After an accident on the swings mangles Maggie's rotting finger, a shaky camera half exposes and half obscures the horror and confusion on Maggie's face: tears rolling her down her cheeks as she struggles with a pretty intense bout of body horror.

Zombie scenes are very quick but deliberate here. The director clearly wants to stay away from too much of the horror stuff here, perhaps as a desire to try and stay away from genre misconceptions(i.e. wanting to be seen as an art-house film and not a genre film).  This doesn't do the material any favors.  The script keeps falling into a "tell-not-show" mode of storytelling: we cut away from Wade having to put an axe through the head of a child zombie to Wade discussing the emotional weight of his actions with the police and his Wife(allowing two scenes to say basically the same thing: you know you're probably gonna have to kill your own Daughter, right?).  It allows Arnold to offer some emotional line reads but it doesn't help the overall emotional resonance of the film: showing Wade having to destroy those Zombies, perhaps in sight of his Daughter, would give us that recognition (assuming Arnold could do the acting job, which is at least a little in question) in a stronger fashion.

The hushed tones of dialogue and jumpy scene progression-Arnold has a midnight conversation with a gun toting neighbor that suddenly leads the pair into the woods for a scene that probably could have used more intensity, to her being taken away by police in fractured, blurry cuts-all screams pretension while attempting to appear artsy.  Heart is in the right place, but it all comes off as a futile attempt to be high-minded.  Some raw emotion is really needed here, and quickly.  The existential discussion of inevitability is an interesting one, but it isn't super engaging.

Yeah, my initial reaction was clearly on target.  We're discussing terminal illness here.  Wade is told by his Doctor that he has three options: turn Maggie over to the government(for "quarantine" which here means obvious destruction), wait awhile and euthanize her humanely with the same meds the government would use(allowing her to be with family instead of strangers), or put a gun against her head and end it quickly.  Not super subtle.  It's an effective conversation, but not subtle.  Nor is the (admittedly freaky) scene of Breslin waking up in the middle of the night to see rot spreading down her arm.

Living your life knowing how quickly it will end really seems to be the name of the game here.  Maggie, still deteriorating slowly, goes to spend time with her friends at a camp fire (among them other infected), discussing the nature of the illness and the costs of fighting with it: for the third time the argument against "quarantine" is made, still driving home the dehumanizing element of terminal illness.  I do wish we'd get a little more subtle, but...it works well enough.  It's a poignant film, even if it is manipulative and does way more hand-holding than necessary.

Final Thoughts: That's all of it a nutshell, really: it's all hand holding.  This couldn't be any less subtle.  That isn't to say that it's bad, though: a lot of the emotional beats do hit pretty well.  Again, it's all about the idea of terminal illness-albeit one that can legally, and responsibly, be euthanized-and the direct affect it has both for the family and for the society seeking to maintain itself.  There is a lot of sadness, confusion, anger and coldness throughout(and a fine sense of inevitable doom), all of which is logically presented, but the lack of subtlety and the over-emphasis on pretentious posturing ultimately make it ironically feel more hollow than poignant.  Everything looks good on the surface, but any effort to go deeper mostly falls flat.  Performance wise...well, Arnold is okay, Breslin is excellent.

Final Rating: Three Stars.