harrison ford

WHaT LIES BENEATH poster

Robert Zemeckis had an incredible run in the 1980s through the 1990s. It started with Romancing the Stone in 1984 and ran through the Back to the Future Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Death Becomes Her, and Contact. I was a big fan. When I learned he was making a thriller with Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford, I was completely on board. I believe I saw it opening weekend in the theater. I was highly disappointed. I’ve not seen it since.

The Criterion Channel is currently running a bunch of horror films from the 2000s. This is one of them. Lately, I’ve been revisiting films from my youth that I didn’t much care for at the time to see if the decades since might have made me more attuned to their wavelength. This is especially true for films that my critic friends seem to like.

So, I figured it was time to revisit this one and see if I’ve changed my mind. Friends, it still stinks. Well, okay, it isn’t that bad, but it is a bit of a mess.

This is basically Zemeckis doing Hitchcock, but that’s not really a thing in his wheelhouse.

It begins like a Rear Window homage. Claire Spencer (Pfeiffer) and her husband, Norman (Ford) live in a big, beautiful, lakeside house in Vermont. He’s a fancy researcher at a fancy college. She gave up her musical career to be a mom. As the film begins, they are saying goodbye to their daughter, who is headed off to college. Claire is having a hard time with this. She’s lonely and bored.

She notices the new neighbors are often fighting. Loudly. One rainy night she spies him loading something (a big covered something) into the trunk of his car. Did he just murder his wife? Suspicions run even higher when she stops by with a welcoming package and realizes that the wife’s car is in the garage, but she seems to be gone. And the husband is being cagey.

But just as that idea gets going, the film shifts gears. Now Claire is seeing ghosts. She hears whispers, the front door keeps finding itself open, and the bath is filled with hot water when nobody’s home.

All of this works well enough. Ford and Pfeiffer are too good of actors, and Zemekis too talented a director for it not to, but it never rises above. It never quite thrilled me. I never really believed the ghost angle, and without that there isn’t much more to the story. I kept half expecting the neighbor to show back up and to be an actual killer. I think I would have preferred that to what we actually get.

The trailer for the film famously spoils half the movie and the big twist towards the end. I won’t do that in case you haven’t seen it. The first time I watched the film, I felt the ending really killed the film’s momentum, but this time I found the final act to be the most interesting. That’s when Zemeckis goes into full Hitchcock mode, allowing himself to move away from the problematic script (by Clark Gregg!) and into pure direction. Although, I’ll still admit there are some really silly bits to its conclusion.

It isn’t a terrible film, just not a great one. And with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how this marks the beginning of a downside to the director and his two stars.

the mosquito coast poster

I’m watching one movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order. We’re now up to 1986.

Harrison Ford is such an iconic actor, he’s portrayed so many characters that are a part of our cultural consciousness – from Han Solo and Indiana Jones to Rick Deckard and Richard Kimble that it is difficult to remember just how much of an interesting actor he was. I don’t mean to take away from anything he’s doing now, but there was a time when he took risks. He made movies with some of the world’s greatest directors – Roman Polanski, Mike Nichols, Alan J. Pakula, and Peter Weir. He was so much more than the icon he has become.

In 1986 he made The Mosquito Coast with Peter Weir and it feels so many lightyears away from the types of films he’s known for, the types of films people dress up as at cons, that he’s almost unrecognizable.

He plays Allie Fox, a brilliant inventor who is what we now might call a kooky conspiracy theorist. He’s lost his faith in the American Dream and its consumerism, and undying thirst for the almighty dollar. He thinks the government is out to destroy everything good in the world. He fears an oncoming nuclear holocaust.

So, he sells everything he has and moves his family to Belize. There he buys a small village on a river in the middle of the jungle. There he tries to set up a utopian society. It kind of works for a while, especially when he invents a machine that makes ice – a novelty in the isolated village. The machine is huge and lingers over the village like a giant, metallic god. When missionaries visit the village he kicks them out. When three rebels visit…well, things don’t go so well.

The jungle and the isolation don’t alleviate any of Allie’s fears. His madness only grows worse. Eventually, he destroys nearly everything he cares for, even as he slowly stops caring for just about everything.

Harrison Ford is magnificent in this. It is so fascinating to watch him play what could only kindly be called an anti-hero, and might more correctly be called an outright villain. But he’s never intentionally terrible. Allie is a man who knows down to his bones that he is righteous, but everything keeps getting in his way. Hellen Mirren, as his wife, is good as well, but she’s not given much to do. River Phoenix reminds us of what a wonderful young actor he was and makes me wish he’s lived longer.

It is an odd little film, not really fun to watch, but interesting nonetheless.