The apocalyptic two-hander RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR (2006) marks the directorial debut of Chris Gorak, who has worked his way up through the industry over the past decade or so as a miniature effects designer (THE HUDSUCKER PROXY), production illustrator (TANK GIRL), assistant art director (THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS), art director (FIGHT CLUB) and supervising art director (MINORITY REPORT). While someone with such estimable artistic chops might be tempted in the making of his first film to blow out all the stops, design-wise, RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR is refreshingly spare and unplugged, and all the more powerful for its focus on human texture instead of expensive pyrotechnics.
When three terrorist "dirty" bombs go off in strategic points throughout Los Angeles, out-of-work rock musician Brad (Rory Cochrane) jumps into his car to try and stop wife Lexi (Mary McCormack) from reaching her place of work downtown, ground zero for one of the bombs. Turned back by gas masked cops (whom he sees gun down a citizen fleeing their approach), Brad returns to his newly purchased Echo Park bungalow. Although radio broadcasts are intermittent, a fragment of a news report warns Angelenos to seal their houses against the imminent fall of radioactive dust. With the help of the neighbor's handyman (Tony Perez), Brad seals the house from within, reluctantly giving Lexi up for dead.
And then of course...
RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR could very easily have been a radio play, an installment of "Lights Out!" or even a TWILIGHT ZONE episode. There's a Serlingesque cant to the neighborhood drama, as Brad must choose between maintaining the germ-free integrity of the home he and Lexi have just bought (with her money, quite obviously) as a down payment on their future and opening the door for her, even though she is clearly contaminated, red-eyed and spitting up blood. The screenplay (also the work of Chris Gorak) feels informed less by 9/11 than by the Katrina debacle and the inability of the federal government to even begin to deal with the catastrophe. The arbitrariness of the government response, the useless radio broadcasts (most of them feel-good reassurances calculated to keep the populace off the streets) and the mounting feeling that no one can be saved contribute to a palpable sense of real despair. It would come as little surprise if Peter Watkins' THE WAR GAME (1965) were an influence but RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR feels closer kin to Watkins' PUNISHMENT PARK (1971) in the wet wool blanket of its overwhelming pessimism.
Midway through, RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR seems to bog down a bit in the particulars of the strained (and now tested) relationship of Brad and Lexi. At a point in the film that felt a little too early for my taste, Lexi reaches a level of abject paranoia, accusing Brad of not wanting her to survive, of being secretly glad this thing has happened, giving him a reason to lock her out... but maybe there's something truthful there, a sobering statement about the way so many people hook up these days and how those kinds of mercenary unions will shatter when faced with adversity writ large. Gorak has chosen his location well. Seen recently in the indie favorite QUINCEANERA (2006), the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park is one of those eclectic, racially mixed conclaves whose close-knit community of Latin families continues to yield to encroaching gentrification, leading to a higher police presence that, while once being a source of comfort for the upwardly mobile, instead becomes a lethal complication. Happily, Gorak doesn't lean too hard on these ironies (or try to make a mouthpiece or a saintly savant of Tony Perez's softspoken Chicano), preferring to offer up the evidence on hand with nuance and subtlety and let his audience form their own opinions and conclusions.
The introduction of Timmy, (Scotty Noyd, Jr.) a black toddler separated from his family and adopted (after a fashion) by Lexi probably isn't a coy reference to that apocalyptic three-hander THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959) but it's hard not to flash back on that earlier film. It's tempting to cast Timmy as RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR's answer to Harry Belafonte, substituting a romantic rival for the white characters with the specter of the child they never did have... and frankly never would have had. Gorak stages a number of suspense scenes well, using darkness and Brad's limited visibility through his plastic shroud to torque up the tension as shadowy figures appear suddenly at the front and back doors.
Critics and audiences were roundly unkind to RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR, with The Boston Globe's Ty Burr stamping it "a 96 minute whimper" (hey, I get it!) and Variety's Todd McCarthy (apparently leaning heavily on his computer's hyphen key) declaring the film "a wannabe heart-stopper (whose) ironic ending is a shoulder-shrugger." On the other hand, The New York Times' Neil Genzlinger allowed "the acting's pretty good" while Entertainment Weekly proclaimed it (with characteristic hyperbole) "one of the scariest movies you're likely to see all year." Posters to the Internet Movie Database's RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR message boards have chimed in with the expected illiterate indignation, the usual "I saw it coming a mile off" remarks from anonymous gadflys whose Kreskin-like prescience hasn't pushed them (apparently) to anything like gainful employment, making them surprisingly like the "unlikeable characters" they so vehemently denounce here. These are the same nitpickers who get into protracted online fights about whether the battery in CLOVERFIELD's video camera would last that long or if anyone could survive the climactic helicopter crash. May they all die horribly.
But I digress. I think ultimately end-of-the-world movies are less important to us as satisfying pieces of art than they are for the arguments they inspire. (I can't imagine a harder job than to try to get the whole of the world in agreement on the worth of a drama about the end of it.) The drawn-out, niggling and increasingly nasty squabbles that movies like RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR engender are the real show, giving us some insight into how we'll all act when the chips are down. The future isn't bright.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
"I'm still alive!"
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5 Arbogasps:
I've been really curious about this film so thanks for sharing your thought on it! Hopefully I find I'll get a chance to check it out soon. The premise sounded really interesting me.
Dear Arbo,
I can wholeheartedly blame Kimberley Lindbergs for my following your blog, but I'm glad she pointed me in your direction.
"Right at your door" has been out here in the UK for ages and I feel a kinship with your review (I think). I liked it, but the end was a bit daft. Then again, I am a scientist by profession, so tend to look at movies with my physicist hat on.
Given the festival buzz about the movie, and comparing it to other festival buzzes, I reckon it fulfills it's obligation. I think you Yanks ought to get a bit more relaxed over your obsession with terrorist attacks though. After all, more Americans have been killed by Americans in the past ten years than by terrorists.
P.S. even though I think Kimberley's Cinebeats blog is possibly the best thought-out blog in the blogosphere, I have not written to her as she is so knowledgeable on every subject she discusses.
So count yourself lucky that I wrote to you, Mr Man
Keep it up, cos you aree one of the first pages I go to for well thunked-out stuffination.
Thanks
Mick
As I get older, I'm less inclined to interpret movies literally but rather to appreciate their metaphoric qualities. You could certainly argue the end of RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR is unlikely and I would agree with you but the point isn't to depict literal truth so much as to give a voice to the helplessness many of us felt during the Katrina disaster. And again, my feeling RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR is more of a response to that home-grown act of God than to 9/11. Even though the film kicks off with a terrorist attack, it's our fear of the desperation of our own municipal and federal authorities that plagues the drama. And thank you for all of your kind words. You should write to Kimberly; she's a sweetheart in a million.
I've been meaning to write something up on this film at the MOBIUS HOME VIDEO FORUM (where your review is promoted, along with this response) since something like two Saturdays ago. Alas, the mysterious Arbogast on Film got there first:
My wife, who had to visit her mother to take care of some business, nevertheless found herself unable to pull away from the drama unfolding on the screen. Indeed, we began to discuss the wisdom of immediately stocking as many items as possible, canned goods, batteries, matches, bottled water, candles, etc., in the event that the ficition we were watching someday became fact.
Next came the potential minefield of conversation about whether we would let one another in the house under similar circumstances. My take was that we could die together or die alone. If I'm in the house, of course I'd let my wife or mother or son in and hope for the best. Were an infant present, that might lead me to keep my distance. Pretty heady stuff for a pretty peaceful Saturday afternoon.
One intriguing aspect of the film dealt with the profoundly flawed information being conveyed over the only source of consistent communication: the radio. Should one trust the media, or civil authorities to accurately convey the facts as they exist, or should we do what so many in the World Trade Centers, in hindsight, should have done: ignore the official line and try to evacuate posthaste.
Putting aside the unforeseen reactions to the film and looking at the drama itself, the relationship between the husband and wife was slightly off from the start. It was clear that he was an out-of-work musician and she was rather uneasily carrying the financial burdens. A morning moment lounging in bed suggested by way of the wife shrugging him off that potential lovemaking would not be appreciated. To compensate, apparently, for his lack of contributing, he offered to get her coffee, cook, etc. Something certainly seemed amiss, however subtly, in their interactions with each other.
By the time the wife has returned home in the aftermath of the terrorist attack, she's incredulous that he wouldn't let her in. As Arbogast pointed out, and my wife and I hadn't considered, it's ironic that he's holed up "safe" inside with a stranger, the local handyman, and she, the home's owner, can't get the love of an opened door. At this point, the emotions, which I can understand would be getting hot and raw, remain somewhat stilted and lukewarm, as if the actors were either unwilling or unable to quite take things where they needed to go in their portrayals; kind of like Brad Pitt in SEVEN, only elongated.
I remember a few years back when we had a blackout here in the city. People were driving like mad down places like Sunrise highway in the vicinity of the Green Acres shopping mall to get home. There's no doubt that in times of crisis, the hat of reason gets tossed into the ring of everyone for themselves for a good number of people. Keeping a cool head allowed me to drive me vehicle home without too much drama, but the stitches in the side of civilization got streched that day.
So, accuracy of emotions aside, the film does settle into a mode where the psychological creep factor inexorably pushes the narrative forward. Every shadowy figure, every foray around the grounds of the house seems pregnant with the possibility of sudden tragedy. To the film's credit, we mostly get scenes like the one in which the wife, sitting outside because it's cooler, talks to her husband about how she had doubts about marrying him. He responds that he never had any doubts. This is a fascinating exchange because at the point where Lexi, the wife, arrived home, became frustrated about not being let in and throws a cell phone through a window, clearly, in my view, was drawing on the hidden well of those doubts in that moment, making her actions even more understandable, in a way.
There's also a scene later on when a co-worker of Lexi comes by the house and offers to take her and the little boy somewhere to receive medical attention. The husband is clearly threatened by him, even trying to remind her that she said she couldn't stand him. Whether true or not, there's the implication that the husband believes his wife may have had an affair at some point. It could be this guy, or maybe someone else, but more than plastic and duct tape separates these two, even if on an unconscious level. In a sense, the crisis these two face together unearths a great many things unsaid and could lead to some reconciliation and deeper understanding, if they can survive it.
As with Arbogast on Film, I was quite suprised to read various reviews of the film that did not seem to appreciate what the film tried to accomplish. Personally, I think films of this sort sometimes hit too close to home emtionally (my wife, for example, a social worker, is not to eager to see GONE BABY GONE). Asking the question of what one might do opens a Pandora's Box that, as Argogast says, may reveal the faultlines inherent in many contemporary relationships that are about as deep as a puddle of fly piss and about as refreshing.
For everyone else, this is low-budget, little-film-that-could that will inspire healthy conversation and, yes, even thought in one's quite moments.
By the way, you have a brilliant website.
Lenny Moore
The Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream?
Thanks, Lenny, for your thoughtful response and kind words about my most 'umble efforts here. I'm glad you liked the film; while I can understand negative reactions to the execution of the film, I think there's more value to be had in discussing what it does right rather than what it does wrong. It's a good movie for married couples; watching it, I was of a mind that I most certainly would have let my wife in but in hindsight I would have been condemning her to certain death. In the film, Brad winds up doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, sealing his own doom but ultimately saving the wife he couldn't keep. It's a neat little irony that I think went over the heads of most of the people complaining about handheld camerawork.
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