The Mothman Prophecies
*1/2
Cinema Releases - March 1, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 118
minutes. Directed by Mark Pellington. Written by Richard Hatem; from the
novel by John A. Keel. Starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton,
Debra Messing, Lucinda Jenney, Alan Bates.
There really is a Mothman phenomenon, I am told,
whereby people will be bothered by scary visions of blurred moth-like creatures
and have dreams or hear whispers that teasingly predict large-scale disasters
that cannot be stopped. A quick sniff around on the 'net tells me that Mothman
sightings have been reported in most of our seven continents, and the slippery
little bugger has foreseen such events as floods, earthquakes and structure
collapses.
"The Mothman Prophecies" stars Richard
Gere as a Washington Post reporter who inexplicably finds himself in a sleepy
West Virginia town where several of the locals have been hearing unexplained
knocks on their doors, getting phone messages featuring nothing but stormy
whistling and waking up with scrawlings of moth-like creatures by their
bedsides.
Gere teams up with the local police chief, played
by Laura Linney, and a disturbed local man played by Will Patton; together
the trio investigate sightings of the mysterious happenings and ponder what
it could all mean. They get confused and agitated, and eventually start receiving
phonecalls from a mindreading phantom called Indrid Cole, who sounds like
a cross between Greedo from "Star Wars" and Mr. Burns in that episode of
"The Simpsons" where he gets delirious from radiation therapy and thinks
he's an alien.
I think it's important for supernatural mystery
stories to present intriguing situations, and, if they really want to impress
us, show us the effects these situations have on real people. "The Mothman
Prophecies" is a boring and stupid movie because it really doesn't care about
the Mothman phenomenon; instead of exploring Mothman's spiritual implications
or the profound effect it might have on those coming into contact with it,
the movie tries to hide the fact that it's not telling us anything by distracting
us with smoke-and-mirror tactics. The director, Mark Pellington, keeps cutting
to long, gloomy and vague re-enactment scenes in which the events of the
frame are less clear than the filmmaking tactics used to show them -- rumbling
noises, smoke and fog whiffs, red camera lenses and fuzzy fadeouts are laid
on top of the material in a manner that's smothering and draws attention
to itself. I didn't feel like I was watching a discovery of paranormal mysticism,
but a parade of special effects.
The screenplay marches smugly towards an inevitable
conclusion, peppering the journey with lines such as "It's real!" and "It
knows things!", and that's about all the insight we get. Any piece of writing
attempting to amaze us with such devices as Richard Gere picking up the phone
and hearing metallic crunches is fundamentally laughable; prank phonecalls
are not inventions of imagination, whether they're made by ghosts or
not.
The most interesting thing "The Mothman Prophecies"
has led me to is a website called wvghosts.com, which is entirely devoted
to, yes, West Virginia ghost stories. I find it hard to imagine that this
tiny state is the centre of earth's paranormal activity, but I guess there
must be something weird going on, when it's a Democratic stronghold that
somehow managed to be won by George W. Bush in the last election. I wonder
if Mothman predicted that disaster.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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