Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode (Macall Polay/Fox Searchlight)Let me tell you a tale about two Uncle Charlies. One Uncle Charlie has a deep, even telepathic connection with his niece in Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock’s study of the unexpected violence that can mark even the most ordinary small town. Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie was played by Joseph Cotton, who had a naturally avuncular charm that makes his transgressions all the more unsettling.
The new film Stoker, which borrows characters and major plot points from Hitchcock, casts the banal Matthew Goode as its Uncle Charlie. AFI patrons may recognize him as one of the talking heads plugging the theater in a promotional short, and I always wondered, who is this guy and what is he doing here? I apparently saw him in two other movies (Watchmen and Match Point) and completely forgot him. If Stoker is a more memorable movie, it’s not because of Goode.
The film opens on a roadside. In a voice over, India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) talks about her hypersensitivity, and the outstanding sound design that supports her big ears recalls the exquisite sounds devised around the deaf-mute in Park’s much superior Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. It’s unclear what’s going on in the highly composed shots that open the film, and this visual strategy would have been better served by a good script. Sadly, the script by Wentworth Miller (Prison Break) is not just derivative — of Hitchcock and Halloween, for starters — but full of more holes than a Lifetime Channel thriller.
You see, at the beginning of the movie India’s father Richard Stoker (Dermot Mulroney) has unexpectedly died, around the same time that Charlie Stoker shows up. Charlie is the brother nobody ever talked about, and it would be a spoiler to explain why, but it’s hard to believe that this uncle who nobody knew about knew all about his niece.
Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska (Macall Polay/Fox Searchlight)Better casting might have redeemed the logic-challenged script. Wasikowska’s unusual looks work for her character, but it’s hard to imagine her springing from the union of Mulroney and Nicole Kidman, who plays her mother. The movie needed a compelling, charming Uncle Charlie. A younger Rupert Everett would have been perfect, but Goode is flat and uninvolving, and doesn’t have enough chemistry with Wasikowska to pull off the cat and mouse game at the center of the film.
It’s a shame about the writing, because the movie is visually stunning. Fans of Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s will recognize recurring themes from his work, and should be glad to know his exacting visual style is intact in his first American film. But even here the director lets things slide, as if he didn’t think the script was worth his signature thoroughness. There are shots as impressive as anything he’s done, but there is also a tenuous circling camerawork around the dinner table, executed in a way that seems like an incomplete thought. He also resorts to hand held camera, as if a concession to what American audiences are used to. If you think production values alone make a movie worth seeing, go see Stoker on the big screen. Others may want to wait until Park gets a better script.
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Directed by Park Chan-Wook.
Written by Wentworth Miller and Erin Cressida Wilson
With Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman, Dermot Mulroney.
Rated R for disturbing violent and sexual content
Running time 99 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema
