Take Shelter

Take Shelter – Actor Michael Shannon specializes in haunted intensity. He is the kind of guy who would look morose and doom-ridden while eating a Blizzard in a Dairy Queen. It’s hard to imagine him smiling. Accordingly, he’s ideal for the role of Curtis, a hapless worker in an Ohio quarry, succumbing to paranoid schizophrenia in Jeff Nichols Take Shelter (2011). Curtis sees apocalyptic visions, some of them (black birds raining out of the sky) similar to those besieging Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The vast cloud-speckled skies over the Ohio prairie where Curtis lives disgorge cyclones, strange vortices of birds, and display – at least to Curtis – grisly-looking wall-clouds vaguely shaped like human faces. Curtis gets no relief from his visions when he sleeps – he is afflicted by hideous nightmares. And so he mortgages his house and builds a big storm-shelter into which he retires with his wife and deaf daughter at the exceedingly disturbing climax of the film. Locking himself in the storm shelter, a kind of grave equipped for premature burial, it seems that he is planning to hunker down until Judgment Day. The film maker understands that, to make Curtis’ misery palpable, his madness must be embedded in a realism of the most specific and quotidian nature – it is rare to encounter a film that is so uncannily precise and accurate about the appearance and rhythms of small-town life in the Midwest; Nichols shows a Lions Club benefit for Curtis’ deaf daughter (it’s a fundraiser for a cochlear implant) that is so pitch-perfect that I am reminded, inescapably, of dozens of similar events that I have attended or heard about in rural southeastern Minnesota. The film’s actors are uniformly brilliant – the only exception, perhaps, is a slight miscalculation in casting: Curtis’ wife (played by Jessica Chastain) seems rather too glamorous and starlet-pretty for her surroundings. A particularly poignant scene shows Curtis talking to his mother, also paranoid schizophrenic, and residing in some kind of Group Home or Assisted Living facility. Nichols parallels Curtis’ increasing isolation with his daughter’s deafness – Curtis seems to have a special bond with sad little girl; they are both outsiders to the warm communal life of the little town. The film’s situation is slender – there’s not much to the picture and it’s plot is predictable: Curtis’ obsessions threaten his family’s well-being and become increasingly frightening. But as a lyrical exploration of small town life, the picture is memorable and its underground climax is genuinely terrifying.