While reading reviews of Subservience, I noticed quite a few people referencing The Hand That Rocks the Cradle as a clear influence. I couldn’t remember if I had watched that one before so I queued it Saturday morning.
It is a movie I distinctly remember knowing about when it came out. I remember the trailers and people talking about it. It was a part of a slew of films that came out in the early 1990s that were like big-budgeted, R-rated Lifetime movies. They usually featured Rockwell-esque domestic life being shattered by some pretty, young woman.
Directed by Curtis Hanson, this film is better than most of those films. It sometimes subverts the genre in interesting ways, but even when it plays it straight, Hanson is a good enough director to make it rise above.
Claire Bartell (Annabella Sciorra) is a happy housewife. She has a loving husband, Michael (Matt McCoy), a young daughter Emma (Madeline Zima – who played the mother in Subservience which is a nice bit of casting), and a baby on the way.
When she is sexually assaulted by her obstetrician (in a scene that foreshadows its creepiness so much that my wife left the room before anything untoward actually happened) she comes forward. Other women come forward after that and the Doctor decides to kill himself before he can be arrested. The doctor’s wife, Peyton (Rebecca DeMornay) miscarriages when she learns the news.
Flash forward a few months. The baby is born and Claire decides she wants a nanny. Not to go back to some job, mind you, but she volunteers at a nursery and she wants to build a greenhouse in her backyard. So she’ll be close by, but it would be nice to have someone watch the kids, clean up a little, and maybe cook once in a while.
Enter Peyton and her devious ways. What’s interesting about the film is that it doesn’t do what you expect it to. In most films like this Peyton would seduce the husband, then turn him against the wife. But here, despite nearly every other male character saying something about how beautiful Peyton is and how they wish she was their nanny, and despite Peyton actually trying, Michael will not give in to temptation.
Likewise rather than attempting to turn the family against Claire, she turns Claire against everyone close to her. The local handyman (Ernie Hudson) who dotes on Emma, might just be a pervert. The friendly relationship between Michael and her best friend Marlene (Julianne Moore) might have turned into an affair. Peyton manipulates every situation to make Claire feel like she’s going crazy.
The film begins with the handyman riding his bike in a hoodie. He stops by the Bartell house and knocks on the door. Nobody hears the knock or answers the door. He walks around the house and looks through the windows. When Claire sees him she screams and panics. Suburban white woman screams as an unknown black man stands outside her house.
But he was expected. Claire had requested a handyman be sent to her house. The film doesn’t directly comment on her inherent racism in this scene, but it is certainly there. When we see him riding that bike the music is peaceful. When he approaches the house and looks through the windows the film doesn’t make it menacing. So that when she screams and when he is recognized as a kind person, it is surprising. It is just another way the film lightly subverts our expectations of the genre.
It is still a white, suburban family being, um, rocked by a beautiful, young woman, so it doesn’t stray too far from the formula, but I appreciate that it was at least trying to do something different.
themidnightcafe.org 