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He
sees dead holy people: Etel in Millions.
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Christmas
Comes Early
By
Ann Morrow
Millions
Directed
by Danny Boyle
In Millions, his tender, imaginative new film, director
Danny Boyle leaves behind the grim England and vicious people
of his first films, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting,
to alight in a semimagical realm inhabited by a sensitive
young boy, Damien (Alexander Nathan Etel), who is preoccupied
by the lives of the saints the way some boys are with sports
stars. Having recently lost their mother, Damien and his older
brother, Anthony (Lewis Owen McGibbon), are moved to a generic
new subdivision by their floundering father, Ronnie (the appealing
James Nesbitt). Anthony, who is 9 and becoming cynical, milks
their mother’s death to advantage, but Damien retreats into
the company of the saints, whom he sees in visions and communicates
with as matter-of-factly as his new neighbors. These visions
are enacted with down-to-earth charm: St. Clare the mystic
takes a smoke break in Damien’s cardboard fort; later the
boy will come across the Ugandan Martyrs digging for water
by the train tracks, and St. Peter will consult with him in
his bedroom.
When a large gym bag filled with money is thrown from a train,
it drops seemingly from the sky onto Damien’s fort. The hopeful,
openhearted boy assumes it’s a gift from God, and that he
should use it to do good works with. The more practical Anthony—who
estimates their fortune at several hundred thousand pounds—wants
to invest it, convincing Damien to keep the money a secret
from their father so he won’t have to pay taxes on it. But
it’s not easy for Damien to find poor people in his new suburban
neighborhood, and he attracts unwanted attention with his
largesse. Anthony, frustrated in his attempts to buy property
without an adult, spreads some cash, winning friends and influencing
schoolmates. A wonderfully Dickensian element is introduced
when the robber who stole the money shows up to reclaim it.
Other pressures come from the imminent conversion of the British
pound to the euro, which will render the boys’ fortune worthless,
and the intrusion of Dorothy (Daisy Donavan), a bubbly relief
worker for an African charity. It’s also Christmastime, and
the school is preparing for its Nativity performance. The
star of Bethlehem, however, has already entered Damien’s hemisphere.
Visually and narratively, Millions is sheer joy. Primary
colors are punched up, whimsical tableaux are conjured from
ordinary materials like Damien’s cardboard constructions,
and enchantment arises from everyday sights—such as the policemen
in yellow slickers patrolling on bicycles, with their reflector
lights moving through the dusk like a glinting constellation.
The script, by Frank Boyce (who penned the marvelous 24
Hour Party People) not only gives us the dauntless ardor
of Damien (played with radiant innocence by Etel), but other
delightful characters such as the all-too-human Mormons who
live nearby, and the vivacious Dorothy (Donavan is like a
working-class Emma Thompson). When the hapless Ronnie discovers
Anthony’s impressive head for business, he responds with admiration,
“How did I get you?” Damien and Anthony are
so fully realized that audiences won’t notice that the story
is being told from the viewpoint of two children.
Instead of corrupting the characters, the money brings them
together, as they struggle to do what’s right, both individually
and as a family. Not incidentally, the struggle helps Damien
and Anthony to come to terms with the death of their mother.
Cinematically, the hard-boiled Boyle and the fanciful Boyce
are a match made in heaven, and Millions offers a multitude
of pleasures.
Long
Island: Still Not Scary
The
Amityville Horror
Directed
by Andrew Douglas
Where’s Bob Vila when you need him? At one point in the mechanical
new remake of The Amityville Horror, the house puts
the screws to its inhabitants, literally. In the 1979 original—an
improbable hit whose best effect was achieved with two red
penlights that appeared like demonic eyes—the Lutz family
was terrified by nothing more than their own overactive imaginations.
In the remake, practically a play-by-play of the first script
(based on the sensationalized “true story” by Jay Anson),
the power of suggestion is filled out with flashes of onscreen
gore and a bit of back-story malarkey. The uninspired tweaking,
including an eviscerated thorax, make the latest Horror
marginally scarier than the frightless, witless original.
(To its detriment, however, it does not have any comic relief
comparable to Rod Steiger’s bellowing histrionics as Father
Delaney; Steiger was tormented by his efforts to out-ham Richard
Burton’s priest in Exorcist II: The Heretic.)
Amityville
2005 starts with a nearly identical, based-on-real-events
opening, only with more blood and less lightning. Within the
large, Long Island house with top-floor windows that look
like eyes, Ronnie DeFeo slaughters his entire family with
a shotgun. Fast-forward a year, and the Lutz family—George
(Ryan Reynolds), his new wife Kathy (Melissa George), and
her three children from a previous marriage—move into the
bargain-priced house. Within hours, George starts to deteriorate
and Chelsea (Chlöe Grace Moretz), the youngest child, falls
under the influence of her sinister invisible friend, Jodie
(Isabel Conner). Going on Jodie’s cadaverous face and greasy
black hair, she must’ve escaped from an enigmatic Japanese
thriller. Utilizing a detail from the DeFeo murders, George
becomes abusive to his oldest stepchild, Billie (veteran child
actor Jessie James), while Kathy endures everything as passively
as any financially dependent 1970s mom (a wittier bit of ’70s
nostalgia shows the kids playing the board game Operation).
George, apparently, is being undone by jealousy over Kathy’s
deceased first husband, an emotional state that goes nowhere
while the much more timely pressure of paying for a six- bedroom,
waterfront Colonial is ignored—unless those dark shapes that
flit by just out of sight are really unpaid invoices. Shivering
in the basement, George grows more morose, the family dog
disappears, and the local priest (Philip Baker Hall) runs
away in record time. This priest excepted, the story’s Catholic
subplot has been excised, and in another act of political
correction, the Indian “exposure ground” has been changed
to the torture chamber of a sadistic missionary. Instead of
mysterious wraiths, the house now channels a Shinacock on
a meat hook, a sight that’s a slight improvement over the
original’s eyeballing insects.
The leads are wooden but likeable, the director uses old-school
scare tactics competently, and fans of the original will probably
get a kick out of how the wimpy babysitter has been recast
as a hot-bod bad girl. But even those audiences too young
to know who James Brolin is may find that Amityville’s ol’
house of flies has become decidedly moth-eaten.
—Ann
Morrow
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