Box, The (2004)

September 21, 2005

by Nathan Shumate

Written and directed by Pete Bauer
Starring
- Samantha Grahn
- John Hill
- Pete Bauer
- Mike Rembis
- Dorothea Bauer
Produced by Kyme Godfrey and Pete Bauer

If you want to look at it honestly, every movie ever made is “contrived” by simple virtue of being a movie. It is a contrivance; it is a thing constructed. Fiction is an artifice, a narrative which maintains a reasonable semblance of reality in order to foster our suspension of disbelief, while simultaneously engineering the pseudo-reality we are observing. Even the idea that a discrete tale can be told in roughly 90-120 minutes offers proof enough that the events to unfold have been tailored and tinkered, fit together by artists and craftsmen.

In a similar vein, every film is “manipulative.” Every filmmaker desires to produce a certain reaction from the audience, and thus bends his skills toward producing that reaction to his movie. Scenes, elements, and subplots are chosen not only because of plot necessity, but because of their expected effect on the audience. They want to make us react a certain way. That’s manipulative.

Those words, “contrived” and “manipulative,” are used as epithets when judging the narrative arts, but in truth what we mean when we say them is that the story isn’t contrived well, or that we have been manipulated poorly. A good filmmaker makes the contrivance appear “organic”, and manipulates without making the audience feel pushed or tugged. A movie that we decry for contrivance or manipulation is one in which those necessary tasks are done so blatantly or bluntly that we see the strings, we feel the incessant nudge, we notice the man behind the curtain.

“We have succeeded in perfecting the world’s most lethal vodka.”

Because that suspension of disbelief and that investment in a fiction requires a level of manipulative subtlety which allows the audience to willingly ignore the conscious knowledge that it IS a fiction, one of the hardest themes to treat in a fictional narrative is that of “fate” — the idea that the events of our lives are not random or self-directed, but instead follow a path determined by an unassailable agency beyond our own. It is precisely our awareness of an author to a fiction (and in a sense, ANY narrative is a fiction, in that a nonfiction author still manipulates and presents an edited revision of real-world events) that prompts us to look at the real world, and wonder if it too is a fiction, contrived and manipulated by an Author (or at least an impersonal Authorness). If one attempts to call attention to Fate in a fictional narrative, one runs the very real risk of pointing not to the putative big-A Author of the audience’s own existence, but merely to the small-a author of the narrative in question. (See also: Shyamalan, M. Night.)

Pete Bauer, in his indie shot-on-video feature The Box, has tried to bring the idea of fate front and center to his narrative. How well he succeeds at that, and how well his attempts to evoke Fate only manage to evince an awareness of contrivance, is probably an individual assessment, like how much garlic is too much or how big breasts can be before they just aren’t attractive.

All of which probably makes it sound as if The Box is some kind of introspective alt-art production, obsessed with its own navel-gazing. Far from it; these philosophical themes are couched in a story of a life-and-death McGuffin, and dotted with scenes which generate good ol’-fashioned tension and suspense.

Can you imagine her being cuddly?
Me either.

The Cytech laboratory is the site of experimentation into altered and enhanced strains of already-lethal bio-agents. (Everyone needs a hobby, I suppose.) As an older scientist (John Snell) explains to the new chemist (Brian Shea) who’s replacing someone on disability for being hit by a pallet of packing peanuts, their latest and greatest creation is EB100349, affectionatly known as “Lucifer”: A strain of ebola so virulent that, once thawed from the lab freezer, it becomes successively more life-threatening over the course of five days, to the point that it can even eat through the seals on its containers and cause explosive death in live hosts in a matter of seconds. (“Explosive” as in, “Wow, was that lab rat supposed to do that?”)

Unfortunately, Cytech has apparently been playing exclusively to their competencies. They’re really great at greating killer viruses; they’re lousy at security. So before the new scientist’s tour of the facilities is even completed, a small team of black-clad toughs, lead by Michael Moore-wanna-be Dante (Dan Doyle), marches on into the lab, shoots up some eggheads, and demands an economy-sized portion of Lucifer. Despite the fact that he’s probably not even on the company health insurance yet, the newbie chemist grabs the case of Lucifer vials and runs, leading Dante on a merry chase through the surrounding woodland and into a public park. There the newbie catches one of Dante’s bullets, but not before hiding the case under a bush.

The only witness to all of this — or, more accurately, the only one of several people present who bothers to pay attention to what’s going on — is little Jenny (Dorothea Bauer), a tot obsessed with pirates and their treasure. You may think that that’s an odd fixation in this day and age, but it sure beats the only other avenue of entertainment open to her from the back seat of the car: Listening to her mother Louise (Samantha Grahn) berate her current husband Dan (director Pete Bauer) for quitting his job. Dan’s a soft and likeable lunk, an ex-military doofus with his heart in the right place but his head a little too light; he’s just quit his job selling magazines because he feels he needs to do something that honestly makes a difference. Louise, meanwhile, is stiff and angular in all the wrong places; she has a face that just screams “Bitch!” before she even opens her mouth and confirms it. Hey, I’m not the world’s best spouse or parent, but I do know that the best place to belittle and berate your significant other at the top of your lungs is NOT in front of your children.

Gee, and Magnum P.I. made the lifestyle look so thrilling…

At present, Dan’s only source of income is some off-job work he gets from JJ (John Hill), his old high-school chum who’s now a marginally-competent private eye working on disability cases. (JJ also likes to take “hits” from fresh 9-volt batteries.) It’s fairly steady income, and good pay for the effort or lack thereof, but it just isn’t that One Thing that Dan’s sure he’s meant to do. But it sure beats calling Stevie, Louise’s hermit-like brother who somehow inherited the family fortune without leaving her any and who now lives on a self-sufficient island. Not that he’s cut Louise off or anything; as she says, “he’s paid for every one of my husband’s funerals.”

With that kind of setup, the elements start to collide. Jenny takes her wagon to the park and picks up what she concludes to be “pirate’s treasure” from the skull-and-crossbones warning on the Lucifer case. Dan and JJ start watching a chemist on disability for having a pallet of packing peanuts fall on him. The mysterious “Mr. Anderson”, who is directing Dante’s efforts to get his hands on Lucifer, shows up in town to hire JJ to help find the missing case (I guess I’ve got to start calling it “the box,” seeing how that’s the title and all). Everyone starts connecting is ways that, in real life, we’d call “amazingly coincidental.”

The contrivance of fate would go down a wee bit easier if it weren’t for a few characterization problems. Louise shows herself to be so vindictive right off the bat that when an attempt is made to soften her and make her more sympathetic a half hour into the movie, it’s pretty much a lost cause, as is attempting to see what Dan saw in her in the first place. At one point, she gives Jenny (whom she has up to that point treated brusquely and dismissively) with a little “character-revealing” speech about how people are put in boxes and expected to act a certain way, and it upsets the world when they don’t act the way their boxes dictate. The irony here (and I don’t believe it was meant to be ironic) is that she’s trying to describe herself and her “box” in life, when all we’ve seen so far shows how hard she tries to keep Dan in his box.

“Hey, I think this says ‘biohazAAAAAARRRHHHd!’”

Dan’s also irritatingly inconsistent. He seems to be an average joe, perhaps unaccustomed to dealing with the deeper, more eschatological thoughts that have been filling his head of late, but certainly not a complete idiot. Yet at one point he spends most of a day on surveillance composing a list of the ten things he wants to accomplish in his life… and the first two are “win the lottery” and “cure something.”

I bring these up because, despite being a suspense movie, it puts a major focus on characterization, and thus false steps in that characterization stand out more than they would in a movie composed entirely of genre stereotypes. Certainly the fact that the effort was made counts a great deal toward the quality of the movie.

Also of positive note is the technical side of the production. Yes, it was shot on video, and makes no attempt to hide that. But it’s also shot as a movie, with honest-to-goodness cinematography and editing. Too many shot-on-video moviemakers think that the lack of a budget for “real” film removes from them the obligation to otherwise pay attention to the visual possibilities and necessities of cinema; The Box demonstrates that video is just as worthy of being treated as a “real” medium for dramatic visual storytelling.

“#1. Finish this damned list.”

It’s not a perfect movie, or even a best-of-the-best SOV feature, but it is definitely worthwhile moviemaking, and at least as deserving of widespread distribution as any of the cheap horror video productions of lesser technical quality that consistently find their ways onto the mass-market new release shelves.