STEPHEN KING'S THE MIST
Reviewed by Sam Hatch
As much as I enjoy many of the entertaining fruits of Stephen King's numerous pop culture labors, I remain befuddled at times as to how people are so completely awestruck by his supposed inhuman inventiveness. Time and again I hear people wondering out loud how he can come up with such outlandish concepts, while the fact of the matter is that King's writing is generally pretty down to earth – and at times pedestrian. A writer to which that question would be infinitely more applicable would be Clive Barker, who can really push the envelope and conjure up main characters who in no way resemble his own persona (or species).
King routinely writes about himself as the protagonist, who is usually a writer, painter or some sort of modern artist (Cell, Kingdom Hospital, The Shining etc.). Said artist generally has some sort of important relationship with their young child, more often than not a boy whom he references with some sort of cute nickname. He also revels in character-heavy drama, and whatever supernatural elements are at play are primarily there as a device to create some sort of societal microcosm in which its inhabitants go crazy and form a rift within the group.
Not that I have anything against this type of writing – in the film world M. Night Shamalyan has also taken a cue from King in order to use the trappings of horror and fantasy to create potential for what are ultimately very human stories. It's one way to approach the horror genre, and King's knack for compelling characters makes up for any lack of tried and true flights of fancy. However, I never find myself completely stymied while trying to suss out how he comes up with his concepts. And if I hear another person marveling over the fact that ‘the people are the monsters' in this movie as if that concept hasn't been mined a million times over by now – well, I just might slap them.
With The Mist (and as is probably the case with most of his writing), the events that happen in the first fifteen minutes of this film adaptation also happened to him in real life. Add a little bit of mystery and a few strange creatures, and voila! There you have it. This silver screen version of the story has been a long time coming, and writer/director Frank Darabont had originally intended to shoot it before making his one-two punch of Oscar gold with The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.
You still may find yourself familiar with the story even if you hadn't read the original novella published in the compilation Skeleton Crew. There was a 3-D sound radio play available during the 80s, and the blockbuster videogame Half-Life was clearly inspired by it. Even King's original concept bears a striking resemblance to John Carpenter's classic horror film The Fog. In fact, every character in this film resists referring to the mysterious gray blanket as a 'fog' – it's always a 'mist'. In this case, creepy creatures win out against pirate ghosts, for as fun as The Fog is, The Mist is made up of stronger stuff in the long run.
The film begins with a random violent storm, as fantasy painter David Drayton (look for a Dark Tower painting accompanying the poster art for Carpenter's remake of The Thing and Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth) frantically hurries his wife and child into their basement for shelter before an uprooted tree makes tinder of their house. The following morning his boy Billy (Nathan Gamble) delights in pointing out that their neighbor's tree has also fallen and crushed their boathouse.
Andre Braugher continues a string of portrayals of arrogant fools (The Rise of the Silver Surfer) as Brent Norton, the Draytons' angry, foul-mouthed bigwig neighbor who has a short but bitter property conflict with his next-door nemeses. He's not a 'townie' (neither is this film, since the Maine of the story has been shot in Louisiana), and continually feels as if he's being made to suffer for his outsider status.
He's also the first of many assholes populating the picture, but in this case David takes the higher ground after finding that his foe's cherry vintage bimmer was also a casualty of the heavy weather. He offers the man a ride into town to supply up, at which point everyone notices a strange bank of roiling white mist (not fog, damn it!) spilling off of a nearby mountain. On the way into town we learn other important elements to the story, mainly that there's been some weird stuff going on at a nearby Area 51 stand-in, the military base that houses the mystery-shrouded Arrowhead Project.
Once David, Billy and Brent arrive at the local supermarket, Darabont wastes no time setting up the ensuing clusterfuck, and quickly traps them within. Darabont's been doing King adaptations since the very start of his career, and it's fun to see him finally move away from the more 'serious' stories to helm one of the creature features – most of which have previously landed in the lap of director Mick Garris among others. You'll find a variety of King film regulars amongst the cast, including Jeffrey DeMunn (The Green Mile, The Storm of the Century) and Frances Sternhagen (Misery). It's DeMunn's character Dan Miller who announces the murderous intent of the mist, and inspires the market lockdown.
The ambiguity of the mystery force makes for great story fodder, since nobody knows if it's plain old fog (I mean mist!), poisonous gas or something weirder. (It's also a great way to one-up the overused horror concept of fear of the dark – it's a great substitute for darkness that is almost creepier because you can't even see what's going on in full daylight.) Brent Norton has a rational explanation to counter all of the more outlandish speculation, and it's this clash of beliefs that once again severs the bond between his character and the Draytons. David unfortunately knows better, since he and a select group found themselves witnesses to a creepy tentacle attack inside the facility's loading dock.
Which is where you find another pile of assholes – from the cocky stock boy to the dumb and dumberer pair of Jim and Myron (William Sadler and David Jensen respectively), all of whom talk copious amounts of trash about David and his fears until one of them ends up becoming a tasty octo-snack. Thankfully, painful retribution is routinely administered to the more annoying members of the cast, momentarily releasing the audience of pent up frustrations.
Annoying doesn't even begin to cover the town's resident religious zealot Mrs. Carmody. And while Marcia Gay Harden is simply fantastic at bringing her fervent, hateful rhetoric to life, she's so damned irritating that my first thought was that I wished someone would quickly put her head against a sack of dog food and pump four or five caps into it. Again, Darabont seems to have his finger on the pulse of the audience, and sates our needs with a series of vindictive retributions against Carmody's unsolicited fire-and-brimstone end-times warnings. My favorite such moment comes from the hands of Sternhagen's Irene, who hurls a can of peas at the righteous blowhard's noggin'!
The “Lord of the Flies” chaos that erupts from the numerous differing viewpoints of those penned inside is again an element King has utilized numerous times (even as recently as The Storm of the Century, and this really is a redux of Maximum Overdrive with strange creatures in place of sentient trucks). As the spiritual divide amongst these people widens, this human drama is offset by a series of very effective encounters with the unknown. From the shocking deaths of those who decide to wander out in search of help, to the strange insects that flock to the plate glass windows in the middle of the night. As the offending entities grow more frequent and larger, they serve as more fuel for Mrs. Carmody's intolerant sermons.
Following an in-store encounter with some freaky looking pterodactyl-like winged beasts, the decision is made by an ever-dwindling group of sane people (David, Irene, Dan as well as Laurie Holden's Amanda Dumfries and the excellent Toby Jones as the surprisingly cool, sharp shooting grocery clerk Ollie) decide that in order to save the lives of injured parties, they must make a foray into the neighboring drug store. Those familiar with the video game Silent Hill can probably guess how this plan goes, and once again another pulse-quickening encounter with the very imaginative beasties (courtesy of the fine people of KNB EFX and CafeFX) ensues.
Perhaps the most striking element of this film is just how damned good an actor Thomas Jane is. Prior to this, he was primarily known for being a Christopher Lambert doppelganger in the second film attempt at realizing Marvel Comics' The Punisher. He's the heart of this story, and must do all that he can to make the increasing madness and horror tolerable for his sensitive young son. He brings an incredible sense of realism to the spectacular events onscreen, and responds to these negative stimuli with a brutally gripping, visceral performance that clearly elevates this film above its B-movie brethren.
Darabont also merits much of the credit for this film, and if it weren't for his serious-minded tackling of King's oeuvre, we'd probably still be wary of going to see any movie with the qualification “Stephen King's Insert Title Here” on the poster. His camera style here has changed from the more traditional framing seen in Shawshank and Mile, and he uses a handheld shakicam tactic often, probably to heighten the sense of reality regarding what these people are experiencing.
He also earns praise for his controversially dark rewriting of the ending – which was a smart move that elevated the film to a level where it sticks with you when you exit the theater. It was a ballsy move that pays dividends, and I also can't complain that he staged it all to the music of Dead Can Dance. Their song “The Host of Seraphim” (which was also used to great effect in the film Baraka) accompanies the elegiac finale of The Mist, a finale that will wriggle inside your brain like one of the film's many creatures and nest in there for good.