DIRECTOR
Mark
Pellington
SCREENWRITER
Richard Hatem
based
upon the novel by
John A. Keel
PRODUCERS
Gary W. Goldstein
Tom Rosenberg
Gary Lucchesi
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Fred Murphy
MUSIC
tomandandy
EDITOR
Brian Berdan
CAST
Richard Gere (John Klein)
Laura Linney (Connie Parker)
Will Patton (Gordon)
Debra Messing (Mary)
Alan Bates (Alexander Leek)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 119m
U.S. release: January 25, 2002
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Mark
Pellington films
reviewed on this website:
- Arlington
Road
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Going into The Mothman Prophecies,
I was in the mood for a solid, haunting, intelligent supernatural
thriller. I'm still in the mood for one. The movie is based on
a supposedly true-life case -- a spectral creature dubbed the
Mothman, who has bothered a lot of people, many in West Virginia,
where this story unfolds. I'm reminded of Bill Hicks' observation
that aliens and other uncanny events seem to visit only rural
areas; Hicks concluded that aliens were probably intergalactic
hillbillies, looking for a place to "kick back and whittle
some."
Or, in the case of the Mothman,
to spook people with predictions of impending disaster. For his
other trick, he appears to people and messes with their perception
of time. This explains why Richard Gere, as Washington Post
reporter John Klein, makes a car trip from D.C. to West Virginia
in just under two hours when it should take six, though it doesn't
explain why the movie ends in just under two hours when it feels
like six. Klein's wife (Debra Messing) fell prey to the Mothman
in an apparent encounter with him/it two years prior; this is
happy news for Gere, who gets to indulge the fantasy that he
can express emotion onscreen. Klein's car breaks down, and he
finds himself on the doorstep of a gun-toting Will Patton, who
freaks out because he thinks Klein has visited his home on the
previous two nights. Is it the Mothman, or just a case of an
overworked West Virginian falling asleep in front of a Richard
Gere marathon on Cinemax?
Sanity prevails in the person
of Laura Linney, who plays a cop and gets to wear one of those
Marge Gunderson winter hats with the badge on the front. Linney
is sufficient reason to sit through anything, including this,
and her concerned tenderness towards the rattled Klein reads
as a superior actor's carrying Gere in their scenes together.
Klein gets baffling late-night calls from the Mothman, who talks
in one of those heavily sub-woofed spooky-guy voices (why don't
supernatural forces ever sound like Fran Drescher?) and predicts
things like plane crashes and earthquakes; he leaves it to the
audience to predict everything else in the movie.
Which we do. I'm more than
a little mystified by the "Directed by Mark Pellington"
credit on The Mothman Prophecies, since he gave us perhaps
1999's most underrated thriller, Arlington
Road. This director, it may so happen, is only as good
as the script he's shooting; on his previous outing he had a
twisty, shapely little number by Ehren Kruger, but here he's
stuck with a staggeringly uneventful plot by Richard Hatem (adapting
a book by John A. Keel). Eventually, the movie irreversibly becomes
the default second X-Files feature film, with Gere as
the fervent believer Mulder and Linney as the skeptical Scully.
Klein slouches around, talking to various people who have seen
the Mothman; he stops short of the next logical step, conducting
an extensive and fruitless search for someone who hasn't
seen the Mothman.
The last reel or so is an embarrassment
-- or entertainment at long last, depending on how you look at
it. Klein receives word that his dead wife will call him at noon
the next day, so of course when he's waiting by the phone at
11:55, who should call but Laura Linney with an invitation to
drop by for Christmas Eve. Given a choice between talking to
a dead person and sipping egg nog with Laura Linney, I know which
line I'd be in, but Klein gets all stressed out because
he might miss his noon call -- hasn't the man heard of Call Waiting?
There follows an elaborate destruction number on a bridge, staged
by Pellington (like everything else herein) in skittish fragments.
What should be a tragic event, slowed down so that we feel the
full horror of it, is shot and edited to make the most of the
fake-looking collapsing bridge parts. The Mothman Prophecies
is the most overdirected movie I've seen in a while; Pellington
does everything stylish and clever -- which is to say, pretentious
-- he never did in Arlington Road, perhaps because there
he had a story he trusted. Let's hope the next one doesn't require
him to work so hard, and so unsuccessfully, to rescue it.
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