Brian de Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie” is
not only one of my favorite horror movies of all time, but among one of the
greatest films of the 70s. It’s full of surprising performances, tender sentiments
and it brilliantly walks a stylistic tight-rope between intentionally campy
melodrama and operatic terror. But
despite my adoration of the original film, I can confidently say that this 2013
remake really, really sucks.
The idea
of Kimberly Peirce taking a stab at this story isn’t the worst idea anyone ever
had. After all, this is the indie director of 1999’s “Boys Don’t Cry”, the film
that got Hilary Swank her first Oscar, playing a transgendered victim of
intolerance. In a lot of ways the
structure and themes of that film is not too far off from King’s first novel— a
teenage female protagonist with a secret, spends the first two thirds of the
story heading towards a violent but inevitable conclusion. And though we didn’t exactly need a new
iteration of “Carrie”, at least Pierce’s approach to “Boys Don’t Cry” was
unflinching and painfully honest. However, none of that nuance or personality is
explored in this flaccid, overproduced remix of a remake.
Whether
trying to remain faithful to the original novel or paying homage to de Palma’s
1976 version, this new adaptation doesn’t stray far enough from what we have
already seen. Carrie White (Chloe Grace Moretz) is a depressed, unpopular high
school senior who’s bullied at school by the other students and emotional and
psychologically abused at home by her religious zealot mother (Julianne Moore).
Upon secretly realizing that she has the
ability to move things with her mind, a fellow student surprises her with kindness
by having her football star boyfriend take her out to the prom, where she is
unwittingly targeted by her enemies with a dark and disgusting prank.
What
makes this story unique to the horror genre is the way the audience is asked to
sympathize with Carrie’s plight. She’s a
meek and vulnerable character in a cruel and mean spirited world, and when the
violence and mayhem does take place, it’s not only supposed to be cathartic and
thrilling but also tragic and unfair as well.
Unfortunately, this updated version seems so poised to get to the action
that it blandly glosses over the gravity and pain that’s necessary to inform
the characters and their motivations. This is in no small part due to the
obvious miss-casting of Chloe Moretz in the lead role.
Unlike the
mousy pathos that dripped from every gesture and tick that Sissy Spacek encoded
her character with, Moretz simply mugs and pouts as a way of ineffectively
masking her natural confidence. By the
end of the film, when she does get to boldly enact her revenge, Chloe’s
physicality, combined with the film’s artificial looking special effects, more
closely resembles a superhero than an enraged victim of life-long abuse. Either
way, she never makes an effective connection with audience.
Julianne Moore does her best to downplay the
histrionics of Piper Laurie’s iconic portrayal as the monstrous Margaret White,
but in trading Piper’s operatic tantrums with whispered brooding, the character
recedes to the point of barely registering on camera.
Stylistically,
this lazy remake doesn’t have a specific vision. It’s vaguely modernized, as we
can tell by the inclusion of smart phones and Youtube, but even this
semi-clever cyber-bullying conceit isn’t explored deep enough to fully realize its
potential. Most of all, and most
importantly, this film is frustratingly boring. It slavishly copies the original beat-per-beat
but somehow still manages to miss the power and the sorrow inherent to this
story. It isn’t scary when it’s supposed to be scary, it isn’t sad when it’s
supposed to be sad, and it’s only funny when it isn’t supposed to be at all.
Grade: D-
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2013
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