Prisoners (2013)

Rated R for torture, for the most part.  There's language, gore, and a lot of bad things happening to little kids.  It's one of those gritty thrillers that is meant to make you squirm.  As part of that, it hits a lot of those buttons.  It's pretty bad that I was more comfortable with the movie than I should have been.  It also has the tone of a lot of suspense movies.  There's nothing kid friendly about the movie, so just keep that in mind when watching this.

DIRECTOR:  Denis Villeneuve

Here's a paradox.  I'm writing this on a brand new laptop, which has a keyboard that is absolutely conducive to typing.  It's a joy to type on and I've been looking for an excuse to type.  That being said, I have had the least amount of motivation to writing the blog on Prisoners.  Like, this typing right now is laborious.  I don't know what it is.  Maybe it's because it's a really sleepy Saturday.  (For those with keen senses, you'll notice that the date doesn't match the day of the week.  I'm so low motivated that I started this little bit yesterday and I'm still low energy when it comes to writing my blog on Prisoners.) 

The reason that I watched Prisoners (potentially for the second time! I don't remember if I've already seen this movie or not!) is that it was my last film class's favorite movie.  I mean, they all lost their minds over this movie.  When I discovered that Denis Villeneuve directed this, way before Blade Runner 2049 or Dune, that was even more enticing.  Sure, I discovered that halfway through the film that he directed it, but it made me watch it with new eyes.  Now, I will say, there was a time in this movie where I saw where this movie was genius.  Maybe it's because Hugh Jackman is in this movie, but it felt like Prisoners shared DNA with The Prestige.  It's that whole wheels-within-wheels thing.  But the thing is, the further that I got into the movie and the deeper into the labyrinth, the less I liked it.  I know!  Probably the reason that everyone really liked the movie is the reason that I didn't necessarily love it.  As a thriller, it completely works.  Like, if this wasn't a movie by Denis Villeneuve or if it wasn't my film class's favorite movie, I would say that everything was done right.  And if we were in the halcyon Blockbuster days, I would also contend that this was definitely worth a rental.  Like, better than Enemy of the State good.  (There's a lot to unpack with that reference.  Take it with the knowledge that Enemy of the State was a run-of-the-mill thriller that I would have rented and probably moderately enjoyed during the Blockbuster era of films and that Prisoners was significantly better than that.)

The problem lies with the ethics of the piece.  Watch that trailer for me.  Tell me that this is not a movie about ethics.  The foundation of the piece is that Hugh Jackman's Keller Dover crosses a line that should never be crossed.  He does something absolutely evil for what he considers a moral act.  Now, a lot of the movie hinges on the commentary that Dover is doing something wrong.  As much as we all acknowledge that, as a parent, Keller Dover should move Heaven and Earth to bring back his kid, the fact that he's torturing an innocent man is the moral evil.  The movie telegraphs that Alex Jones (no, not that Alex Jones.  That guy deserves whatever he gets) is an innocent man and Keller Dover, in his blind righteous fury, strips Jones of his humanity.  Now, that is a story that I'm really into.  Villeneuve weaves in all of this religious imagery and commentary that makes Dover's choices all the more damning, especially as provided as satire on the religious right.

But here's where the whole thing falls apart.  Villeneuve is trying to get one of those amazing Christopher Nolan-esque (The Prestige!) plots to work with the theme of the piece and the two are in direct conflict.  The first half of the movie is incredibly damning for Dover, who keeps crossing line-after-line in his pursuit of a justice that is ultimately unfounded.  That's the core.  That's the thing that I want to think about and what I want to talk about.  I mean, on a surface level, I want to think whether or not I would do the same thing.  I'm going to talk now as if the entire movie was about this moment.  Spoiler for the end of this blog:  I don't love how Prisoners semi-sorta justifies Dover's actions.  I mean, round of applause for the ending where he's pseudo-punished for his treatment of Alex.  But the big takeaway that I had was that, if Keller Dover never tortured Alex, he wouldn't have saved his daughter.  Okay, so let's back up and live in a world where Prisoners forces Keller to draw attention away from the actual criminal Bob (which isn't true given the whole narrative unspooled).  There is so much to unpack in that version of the story and I want to explore that.  I want to talk about the rise of Christian Nationalism.  If the story went the way that it went in my mind --a version where Keller Dover, in his form of vigilante justice, impedes the actual investigation for his daughter --that speaks volumes about morality.  The entire movie would be a commentary on the Christian Right and the false conception of the right of the individual.

Again, all under the banner of my version.

If my version went through, Keller Dover is the poster child for the uninformed conscience.  From all perspectives, Dover sees himself as God's swift sword of justice.  Understandably so.  He's given this moral evil that he recognizes.  He recognizes as clearly as can be because he is the one suffering for the evil unleashed in the world.  Okay.  But Dover isn't informing his conscience.  Instead, he's taken his version of Christ, or more accurately, the Wrathful God of the Old Testament.  (I'm not saying that God doesn't intervene when it comes to miracles in either testament.  But Dover's use of the Lord's Prayer as the opening of the film gives me the impression that he has that image of Christ with a sword rather than the Sacred Heart of Jesus.) Dover, devoid of religion, has real issues with the torture of Alex.  Not completely.  Dover does let his natural violent instincts lead the charge early on in the torture sequences.  He's very comfortable with the bludgeoning of Jones with his fist.  But when the hammer comes in, he resorts to shattering the sink rather than use it on Dover himself.  All of this is pre-religious imagery here.  Here, he's the Libertarian father.  He doesn't trust government to take care of a job that he thinks he can do better himself.  But as torture fails to get him results, he builds a far more upsetting form of torture.  It's a torture that he doesn't have to see.  He locks Alex in a wall and showers him with scalding or freezing water.

It's here that Dover sees himself as doing the Lord's work.  He prays to God to give him strength to continue in his --what he deems --holy quest.  It's not that he asks God for what is right and what is wrong.  That's a very different story and one that I wouldn't mind seeing.  No, he's praying that he can continue doing something that is beyond what he considered part of himself as a man or as a Christian.  He has that image that Christians are nice as opposed to good.  This, in his mind, is one of those moments when goodness and niceness are in direct conflict and he needs to help him overcome any sense of Christian niceties if he is to find his daughter.  In fact, it's fellow Christians that bring up more moral complexities.  Both of his friends who also have a daughter missing verbally condemn his actions.  He thinks that they are simple and do no love their daughter as much as he loves his daughter.  He becomes Michael the Archangel, the one who is willing to level fields of demons for the moral truth.  But like Michael the Archangel, they --as much as they verbally condemn his actions --encourage him to keep going.  As long as they don't have to see the atrocities he's committing, they need him to keep doing what he's doing.  I've been kind of coming to this thought (and part of it is stolen from a pastor's argument) that Christians are really good and being moral and good when the evil is present and visible.  Someone in the parish lost a spouse?  People will come out in droves.  Someone is massacred in another state or another country?  Let those people sort it out themselves.  Franklin and Nancy are good at dealing with problems that they can seem, but actively choose not to see what Keller is doing to Alex so they can't engage with it head on.

I love all of that.  If that was the movie alone?  Fantastic.  I wouldn't shut up about that movie.  You'd hear me talking about it all the time.  Instead, we get a movie that also is incredibly plot heavy.  The problem with the plot is two fold (or two related points):  It needs Keller to torture Alex for the story to make sense, thus undermining the purpose of the film.  See, Alex did have something to do with the girls' deaths.  He's just too scarred to vocalize that issue.  Keller's first assault on Alex isn't the kidnapping.  Alex is released from prison when the police have a hard time tying the missing girls to Alex with the exception of being in the area and the fact that he tried to flee.  (Also, didn't the forensics find that the RV was completely clean of the girls being in the RV?  Did Mom do a really good clean, leaving only Alex's DNA behind?)  When Keller assaults Alex at the police station, that's what galvanizes him to connect Alex to the crime.  Alex says something really cryptic that makes Keller believe that Alex did it (despite being simply tangentially involved.) But if that moment never happened,  Keller would never have kidnapped Alex and that kidnapping would not have led Keller to helping Loki find Alex's aunt, who was the actual serial killer.  

It's very convoluted, but the movie not only makes the argument that one should take the law into one's own hands, but even more, it says that innocents should suffer if a good ending comes of it.  One of the most frustrating things about the Harry Potter franchise is that Harry uses one of the unforgivable curses for the greater good without punishment.  While Keller is, through karma, punished for his treatment of Alex, the result is that his daughter is found safe.  Keller, from moment one, is aware that his freedom is forfeit for what he does to Alex.  Even if his initial assessment of Alex was true, there were all kinds of crimes committed that Keller would have to answer for in some form or another.   But considering all of the religious and mythological imagery and motifs throughout the film, this is really a man reckoning with God.  And from Keller's perspective, he ends the movie among the just.  God answered his prayers.  Because Keller took a man's life into his own hands, God responded in kind by giving his daughter another shot at life.  It's almost miraculous how things unspooled.  But realize that both Alex and Bob not only weren't morally responsible for Keller's daughter getting kidnapped; they were victims of Alex's aunt.  She's not even Alex's aunt.  He's just a victim who has been a prisoner for so long that he thinks that he's related to her.

What a weird takeaway.  I don't like that at all.  I do believe that Villeneuve and the screenwriter want us to condemn Keller for all of his moral grey area.  It seems like that was the point of the movie.  But in an attempt to present a clever story, there's a lot of gross things that end up watering down the message of the film.   On top of that, there's also a cleverness factor that I wish worked a little bit better.  I like the idea of the labyrinth imagery all through the story.  Loki keeps on calling the labyrinth images "maps" and he feels vindicated when he sees the photo of Mr. Jones in front of the RV with the pendant around his neck.  That's not a map.  That's just confirmation of where Bob saw the image before.  But even more so, I don't think I like the name "Loki".  I straight up went down the Google rabbit hole trying to unpack the choice for the name being "Loki" and I got nothing good.  Part of it comes from the mythology element of the story.  There's borderline a minotaur in the center of the labyrinth, so we have that idea.  Keller's religion plays a big part in the story.  It feels like Loki is named "Loki" out of an attempt to have every corner of the world somehow colored by the notion of belief.  But we all know Loki now, thanks to Marvel!  Is Loki really a duplicitous character?  Heck, I know the Loki of Norse mythology is a bit more nuanced than the Marvel counterpart, but still, there is little there in the story that makes Gyllenhaal's character a "Loki".  It's just muddy.

So here's what I want.  I want either a Dark Night of the Soul version of Prisoners where society is damned for its Christian justification for violence OR I want a Prisoners that is all about twists and turns with misleads when it comes to solving this case.  What I don't want is both.  They're at odds with each other and I don't care for that.