Chronicle

Chronicle – Derivative, and, occasionally, silly, Chronicle (Josh Trank – 2012) connects with impulses so primitive and powerful that the film succeeds in spite of itself. The movie involves teenagers with super-powers, wish fulfillment that rapidly becomes a kind of nightmare. Adolescence is a torment because it is an interregnum – we go from being acted upon, the fate of children, to being actors, the agents of our own lives. From being in need of rescue, we become rescuers. And, yet, adolescents think and fantasize like children – at some level, they remain believers in the omnipotence of thought. And, just, when a young person feels that he or she is emancipated, the demands of sex, and the impenetrable obduracy of other people, fantasy objects that refuse to remain merely objects of fantasy and that assert their own rights, impose new, and more cruel, forms of restraint. The super-hero story is embedded in this seething matrix of emotion – having once been a child and subject to the whims of adults, I am now a man and a hero with secret powers (and crippling secret weaknesses). In Chronicle, three boys acquire telekinesis. At first, they use their powers to play puerile pranks, but, as desire intervenes, their stunts become increasingly malicious. One of the boys is abused by his alcoholic father. His mother is dying of cancer. The kid is considered a nerd and loser by his peers. When he is insulted and injured, like Carrie at the Senior Prom, he takes spectacular revenge. Chronicle is shot like a documentary, using high definition video that originates ostensibly in a camera that the hero carries with him everywhere. In the most effective, and eerie shots in the film, the boy makes his camera hover over the rumpled bed where he is lying in his squalid bedroom – the camera’s slow ascent, rising like a balloon, imparts an uncanny power to these sequences – they remind me of Werner Herzog’s comment that when you move the camera, you have to feel the motion in your “ass” – that is, sense the camera’s motion in your center of gravity, your thighs, and your solar plexus. Many of the camera movements in this film have this quality – you sense the uncanny, enigmatic way that the camera is tilted and whirled skyward by the heroes’ telekinetic powers. Of course, the film is a rip-off of Carrie. There is a sly reference to this in an early scene when one of the boy’s has a mysterious bloody nose – flow of blood is associated with telekinesis – and says “I’m having a nose period”, thus, invoking the menstrual source of Carrie’s deadly powers in the old De Palma film. The picture also features a spectacular duel between two telekinetic heroes waged in the skies and skyscrapers of Seattle – these scenes are milder, and less horrific versions of the head-exploding battles in David Cronenberg’s Scanners. But these sources don’t detract from the film’s primordial power. We’ve all wished to have our thoughts come true. We’ve all longed to fly. And the flying scenes in this film, particularly the first one in which the mental effort of lifting a body into the air raises all sorts of twigs and pebbles, detritus at the boy’s feet, skyward as well are among the most impressive images of this kind that I have ever seen – they are dream-like and, yet, suggest the force required to raise a physical body up off the ground against gravity. The film’s central conceit, that all the images were recorded on video cameras, is developed with impressive skill, although this device has inherent limitations – the climax has to be filmed through multiple surveillance cameras so that it can be cross-cut into an exciting and violent montage. I noticed only one or two shots that were “cheats” – that is, images that couldn’t be attributed to any particular camera. And it is certainly novel and interesting for a film to require the viewer to focus so intensively on the physical nature of the medium, how the images are made and where the camera is positioned. The film’s defects are typical of the genre. The characters are relatively flat and undeveloped, essentially caricatures, although memorable ones. I don’t think that teenage kids attend parties crowded with beautiful, voluptuous girls in expensive garments, everyone dancing to pullulating, throbbing music --- the party scenes in the film are so excessive as to be examples of adolescent fantasy that the film maker doesn’t seem to be able to control or, in the alternative, pander to the youthful audience expected to patronize the picture. (Real parties put on by High school kids are unrelievedly squalid, messy, and repulsive – they bear no resemblance to the disco-fantasies in this film.) The source of the kids’ kinetic powers is never really explained – although that’s a convention of pictures of this kind. We aren’t supposed to worry too much about how the super-hero has acquired his talents. These reservations aside the film is well-scripted, makes reasonably good sense, and isn’t inflated with asinine battles and explosions – there is plenty of spectacle but it’s all, more or less, reasonably motivated by the story. For its kind, this is a superior genre film, in fact, probably the best “super-hero” picture that I have seen.