weird by design vs. weird by accident: stoker and shadow of a doubt

Last weekend at the theater I saw Stoker, which was inspired by Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt .

Shadow of a Doubt's big contribution to Stoker is the general set-up and dynamic: Both movies kick off with a character named "Uncle Charlie" moving in with a young woman and her family, and in both movies the guy turns out to be a supercreep.

In Shadow of a Doubt, Uncle Charlie has just fled New York City, where he was being pursued for reasons unknown, and has been warmly welcomed by his sister's family, including the college-aged girl who will serve as protagonist, "Charlie," named after the uncle. As you guessed, Uncle Charlie's vileness comes to light, but the meat of the movie is in the connection between Charlie and Charlie. Uncle Charlie will eventually serve as the means by which Young Charlie wakes up from the idyllic but maybe oppressively sane dream of life in a small town. Uncle Charlie is her catalyst, which becomes clear in the most affecting scene of the movie, when Young Charlie finally threatens to kill her evil namesake.

I was probably just as compelled by all of this as the next person, if that person is generally interested in movies. But I felt a bit like I was missing something in a film whose DVD spine literally says "An Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece," and which is, moreover, one of the director's avowed personal favorites. For one, it seemed odd to me that no one in the family besides Young Charlie seems to be picking up on the inordinately creepy vibes the uncle is giving off. In a dinner scene later in the movie, Uncle Charlie begins a completely impromptu rant about how much he dislikes the widows of rich men.

Here's that ending:

Uncle Charlie: Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women.

Young Charlie: They're alive! They're human beings!

Uncle Charlie: Are they? Are they, Charlie? Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?

It's a great shot as the camera pushes closer and closer into his face as he gets absorbed in this polemic, and after that build up you might expect Hitchcock's next cut to be to the family's startled reaction to the realization that Dear Uncle Charlie has a serious (and oddly arbitrary-seeming) hatred of widows. Yet nobody in the family except Young Charlie really reacts to the sheer disgust Uncle C. has for those "wheezing animals," to the point that you wonder if Hitchcock is trying to suggest heavy denial.

If that's the point though, that pay-off never quite comes. The family is more than a little off in other ways, too, but it's not clear to what end. As the dinner scene continues, the father's friend wanders in. Joe, the dad, and his friend Herb like to talk about how one could get away with murder. Again, Young Charlie is the only one who objects:

Young Charlie: Oh, what's the matter with you two? Do you always have to talk about killing people?

Joe: We're not talking about killing people! Herb's talking about killing me, and I'm talking about killing him!

Emma: It's your father's way of relaxing!

Huh? This is all fascinating stuff (and I will admit to being entranced by the freakishly large mouth of the actor playing Herb), but if this movie is actually about a for-serious dysfunctional family, I wish that had been probed more. There are other bits that I feel are inexplicable and never addressed, leaving me to wonder if I am the only one seeing how odd it is.

For example, in nearly every scene and especially this one, I found Emma (Young Charlie's mom and sister to Nutjob Uncle) to be disturbing in her own particular manner; her smile is manic and strained, in a way that makes me feel not as if she's presenting that face to the world so much as she's putting on the face of incessant, eerie cheerfulness for herself. If this is what Hitchcock intended, however, I have no clue, because there doesn't seem to be any other hint that we should be focused on her denial, leaving me to believe maybe I'm the only one creeped out by the feral nature of her teeth and the voice that sounds on the edge of a hysterical breakdown.

Stoker doesn't try to be about ordinary people, nor does it strive for plausibility, so it doesn't have any of these disconcerting ambiguities. Instead, the movie is like a trip in the head of the young-woman protagonist who is Young Charlie's rough counterpart in this movie. In Stoker her name is "India," though the uncle in Stoker is named "Uncle Charlie" as in the Hitchcock film. As the movie opens, India's father has just died, and so enter his brother Charlie, about whom apparently next to nothing is known.

As Tasha Robinson at the avclub.com puts it, "people somehow don't realize that there's something profoundly off about creepy, unblinking Matthew Goode." (Goode is the actor playing playing the Uncle Charlie of Stoker.) It's not just Charlie who's off. There's also the mom, played by Nicole Kidman, who alternately flirts with Uncle Charlie and comes off as cool to India in a painfully un-motherly way.

But, in Stoker, somehow all of the oddball behavior flies just fine. Robinson likes the movie and seems to see the same thing I do: "Stoker frankly works better as coming-of-age metaphor than as literal narrative." If everything is off enough, then any given weird thing doesn't ruin the mood.

It helps that Stoker signals right off the bat that it's going to be feeding you a world that isn't tethered too tightly to reality. In the first scene, India announces in voice-over that she has a heightened sense of hearing, and we hear many of the whispers and errant sounds that she does; the dreamy tone is set up right there, and the more time we spend in her head the less we expect it to mean anything objectively. All we care about is whether the narrative is as moving as her actual experience is, and there it succeeds.

There's another tactic director Chan-wook Park (director of Oldboy) uses that aligns us very closely with India's fractured perspective. As the movie develops, you realize that some of what is occurring is merely in her head and not real at all, and in certain instances I had the impression I had not been notified what, after all, was the real story. This echoes the artiest and most inventive aspect of Shadow of a Doubt: A short vision of people dancing a waltz — "The Merry Widow" waltz — is seen four times over the course of the film. Frankly, I haven't gone back through the story to check the math on this article, but apparently it's never clear whose imagination it might be springing from, Uncle Charlie's or Young Charlie's. But that's the only part of that film where the very story presented by Doubt is ambiguous, whereas Stoker has major plot points that I am still not even sure occurred.

One last point in Stoker's favor: It is better than Doubt in balancing its young female protagonist against the demonic uncle, insofar as Stoker doesn't bother to balance them at all. It's almost entirely about India — her feelings and incipient power grab — and her Uncle Charlie is mostly just a foil for her. Shadow of a Doubt doesn't get as much into the head of the only person whose head you'd want to get into, Young Charlie's. The odd moments that seem like misfires in Shadow of a Doubt just come across as part of India's mental wallpaper in Stoker. So my point is, you can make inscrutable creative choices in your movie, just don't let them appear inadvertent.