POLTERGEIST Review: Built On The Burial Ground Of A Much Better Movie
Gil Kenan's Poltergeist remake changes the name of the afflicted little girl from Carol Anne to Madison, and while, on the outside, that's a pretty innocuous change, it also feels like a perfect symbol of the blandification of Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper's extraordinary original: Carol Anne is such a quaint and specific character name. And how many of your friends' kids are named Madison? All of them, right?
This remake had a tough row to hoe from the beginning: Poltergeist is a universally beloved film that has meant so much to so many. What chance did a remake have to win the hearts of these furiously loyal fans? And I'll give the movie this: they tried. Most notably in the foundation of the family dynamic, by far the most effective part of the original film. The Freelings' marriage is so authentic, so affecting, that the audience feels every ounce of misery that is dealt to them after their affectionate first scenes.
Of the new remake, this is the part the filmmakers and performers get closest to right. Mad Men's Rosemarie DeWitt plays Amy Bowen, and everybody's favorite Sam Rockwell is her recently laid off husband Eric, and the two share an accord that's frank and funny and pretty believable, if missing some of the effortless kinship between Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams. The Bowens are struggling financially, and they're kind of stuck with this new house that no one really wants - especially after a new friend tells them that their subdivision was built on a former cemetery that was relocated "to a nicer neighborhood." Rockwell in particular, playing precisely the character you expect, gets plenty of laughs - and even, less commendably, continues to crack one-liners after his home has been wrecked and his daughter abducted by the trapped souls of that cemetery.
Their kids are fairly credible, as well. Saxon Sharbino is the teenage daughter, Kendra, who spends most of the movie ignoring her family in favor of her cell phone, so that seems about right. And Kyle Catlett plays the middle child, Griffin, who becomes something of the center of the film. Griffin's a nervous kid who first suspects something is amiss with their new home, specifically as it relates to his younger sister, Maddie. Of course, thanks to his terminal anxiety, no one takes Griffin's claims seriously until it's too late.
Wait, so the little boy's the focus? While that bothered me a bit at first, it soon became clear that Griffin is the most compelling of the three children onscreen. It's hard to review a child's performance and not sound like an asshole, but there's an otherworldly charm to Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke) that's missing from Madison (Kennedi Clements). Griffin's got a bit of the supernatural about him - more than anyone else onscreen, including the team of paranormal investigators headed by Jared Harris and Jane Adams. Both terrific actors, but certainly nowhere near the uncanny weirdness of Zelda Rubinstein. Harris plays a television exorcist by the name of Carrigan Burke, and he brings some presence to the film a little too late, and then a shoehorned romance between Burke and Adams' Dr. Brooke Powell dissolves whatever little mystique was still remaining after we see the tagline #THISHOUSEISCLEAN flash across the screen of Burke's reality show.
I'm being unfair. I'm spending too much time comparing the Poltergeist remake to its incomparable original, against which it can only fail. So let's judge it on its own attributes: this movie is aggressively unscary. The film goes big early on, with a tree breaking through a window and hanging Griffin upside down in the yard, while the garage floor opens up, allowing a corpse claw to start dragging Kendra down into a bottomless grave. Big, but not scary. For some reason, the Bowens thought it wise to make their most nervous child sleep in the attic, and Griffin soon finds an alarming collection of antique clown dolls that come to life and attack him with athletic zeal. Toy scares are really the bread and butter of Poltergeist - probably a third of the film's frights are initiated by some sort of interaction with a toy. My press screening was also a free public screening, and the audience was made up of the sort of noisy, enthusiastic crowd that's ready to be scared by anything. Even they, after a while, grew tired of feigning shrieks at the lackluster effects onscreen.
The movie is missing any sort of visual distinction, other than the alienating 3D (these press screenings are always in 3D, and it rarely does the film any favors). It looks fine, a bit slick, pretty tame - much like the rest of the movie, actually. If even a single scare had landed, it might have garnered a more positive reaction, but as is, this remake feels ready-made to be forgotten in two months' time. Poltergeist isn't especially bad, but - even if it weren't a remake of one of the greatest horror films of all time - it's nothing special.
