Keep the bad accents out of ‘The Box’

James Marsden (left) and Cameron Diaz in ‘The Box’

Many quizzical brow furrows invaded my face during Richard Kelly’s latest sci-fi/thriller/drama/mystery (and if you include Cameron Diaz’s accent, you can call it a comedy) creation titled The Box.

Based on Richard Matheson’s short story, Buttons, Buttons, we are introduced to an All-American couple Norma and Arthur Lewis (Diaz and James Marsden). They get a mysterious box with a button on their doorstep. The stoically ominous and facially disfigured Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) pays them a visit. He presents them with an ultimatum: press the button and you get a million dollars and someone in the world that you don’t know dies; don’t press the button and they can go on with their financially unstable lives in retro ‘70s Virginia.

Needless to say, she presses the button and someone dies (much like getting a Whammy in the classic game show ‘Press Your Luck’). Otherwise, the movie would’ve just been 15 minutes.

The story unravels with a tense sense of urgency – an urgency that eventually eclipses Diaz’s accent. Witnessing the initial consequences are intriguing but after, many WTF’s popped up in thought bubbles all over the movie-going audience.

Things start to get complicated. Really complicated. Arthur and Norma get paranoid as random people give them Riddler-like clues about enigmatic things all pertaining to Steward. They try to get help. Steward catches them. They try to play detective. Steward catches them. They try to do some research at the library and – well – that’s when things just start to skyrocket into the land of clusterfuck. All the while, there isn’t clarity of why Steward has done this to them. Even the tender moment when Arthur gives Norma a prosthetic foot gadget (her foot, like Arlington’s face, is also disfigured) doesn’t alleviate any of this out-of-orbit scavenger hunt.

Nose bleeds, peace signs, lightning strikes, aquatic dimensional gateways – all of them are expected from Kelly based on the Donnie Darko experience he bestowed upon us. Kelly knows how to intellectually bully his audience. Although The Box was more streamlined and diluted, it still had the tendency to invoke painful thought that wasn’t necessary.

After a while, the only option was to stop thinking about what Kelly was trying to convey. I began appreciating the aesthetic that kissed the film: dusty lighting, a score infested dissonant chords and other retro elements that hollered back to eerie films like Stepford Wives (the original; not the Nicole Kidman malarkey) and Carrie. From the huge shirt collars to the Kellogg’s Cornflakes cereal box, the film’s style seemed as accurate as a Mad Men episode – except it was set in the ‘70s. And Arlington’s face may have been grotesquely disfigured, but he sure knew how to rock a bowler (or was it a derby?) and a dapper suit.

Even though the movie had something to do with moral decisions, alien invasions and inter-dimensional traveling, I found more solace in appreciating the ruffled tuxedos and episodes of What’s Happening. I am sure that even the disfigurements had some poignant meaning as well, but that pales in comparison to how much I enjoyed Diaz’s costuming in the film.

Thought provoking? Yes. A fun movie-going experience? Not so much. Sitting through The Box was like sitting through AP Physics with Mr. Weishaar in the 11th grade. I was scared and confused about the content, but I really didn’t care to learn about it.

Overall critique: The “smart” and pompous cinephiles will leave the theater claiming to have understood the relevance and meaning of the film; but they’ll just be as clueless as the rest of us. Grade: C