Nicolas Cage in Longlegs
LONGLEGS
It makes perfect sense that Nicolas Cage would be cast as the titular monster in Longlegs, considering that writer/director Osgood Perkins' horror thriller is like the cinematic equivalent of most Cage performances: deliberately gonzo, weirdly earnest, alternately transfixing and repellent, and, in the end, perhaps trying a bit too hard.
The actor himself, however, is unforgettable in it. You look at his devil-worshiping loon with the frizzy gray hair and Kabuki makeup, his face ravaged by what appears to be decades of botched plastic surgery, and feel as though you've never seen a more upsetting figure in your life. And when he speaks, he shifts between a high-pitched, melodious sing-song and a deafening roar, keeping you forever uncertain about which vocal mode will surface next. Cage isn't in much of Perkins' movie, and doesn't need to be. Even a few seconds spent with this nutjob is the stuff of nightmares.
If Cage is a true original here, the film he's in is more of an amalgam – a pastiche of serial-killer classics (principally The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and Zodiac) augmented by supernatural leanings. For three decades, the Longlegs murders under investigation have taken place in Oregon, and have involved suburban fathers who butchered their families before taking their own lives. What mark these tragedies as the work of a single psychopath are the notes left at the crime scenes, missives featuring coded, possibly Satanic messaging and the signature “Longlegs.” Yet there's no evidence of forced entry into any of the homes. So how did the notes get there, and who is Longlegs? To find out, the FBI assigns the mystery to new agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), as testing indicates that she may have paranormal powers of clairvoyance. (As Harker is told by her supervisor, played with tough-love warmth by Blair Underwood, “Half-psychic is better than not psychic at all.”) Clearly, Harker has her work cut out for her. But she would've found the case much easier to crack if she had seen her movie's opening credits, given that one of its title cards reads “Nicolas Cage as Longlegs.”
It's important to note that, by the time that information is delivered, we've already seen Cage in character – kinda. Before the action shifts to the mid-'90s, a choice seemingly made solely to explain the absence of smart phones, a 1970s prelude finds a young girl encountering a stranger outside her Oregon house. As the man is framed from the neck down, we don't get to see his face while, in that unnerving sing-song, he makes awkward chit chat and references the child's impending birthday. But then he quickly crouches down to meet the girl's eye level, his eyes blazing and his mouth agape, and the scene cuts dramatically to black title cards against a blood-red background. The shock cut of Cage-to-credits lasts maybe half a second and, like the rest of that introductory sequence, is powerfully scary. (Adding to my personal anxiety was Longlegs' vehicle being an exact replica of the wood-paneled station wagon my mom drove when I was that girl's age in the '70s.) But why would Perkins “ruin” the surprise of Cage's character identity in those credits when, on a first viewing, you'd need freeze-frame to properly identity him? My guess is that it's something of a dare, or perhaps a promise – Perkins' way of announcing, “Yeah, cinema's reigning eccentric, that guy you've seen play crazy in countless other films, is the villain here – and as familiar as you are with him, he's still gonna freak you out.”
He does, but because it's Cage, he's also out to amuse you. Maybe not since Ted Levine's Jame Gumb in Silence of the Lambs has a performer in serial-killer mode so fully embraced outré comedy in service of creeping us out. In one scene, Longlegs goes shopping at a small-town hardware store, and makes a baroque spectacle of himself in front of the cashier, uttering unfathomable comments and covering his eyes with spider fingers. The deadpan girl behind the counter (Bea Perkins, the director's daughter) is hilariously unfazed by his antics, and this sequence is by no means essential to the narrative. It's vital, though, in understanding – and, in a perverse way, enjoying – the depths of Longlegs' insanity, as well as his startling brazenness. This creep isn't trying to hide or stay out of public view. He doesn't particularly care if he gets caught. Longlegs is so in service to his Satanic mission that he's made himself an untouchable – as with Kevin Spacey's John Doe in Se7en, the murderous plan's grand design will be (potentially) fully realized even if, maybe only if, the instrument behind the chaos perishes. Now that's frightening.
I wish the rest of Longlegs were as destabilizing as the effect Cage has on the movie, but all told, Perkins' latest chiller is pretty decent, and the performances are admirable. Despite her presence as the de facto Clarice Starling, Harker's stiff, almost stricken posture, haunted eyes, and hesitancy to speak signify someone reining in immense, unexamined trauma, and Monroe manages to make this unknowable figure empathetic, and even, at times, endearing. (No one has ever looked so uncomfortable making small talk with a child.) Unrecognizable under a gray fright wig, that blazing talent Alicia Witt suffuses the role of Harker's damaged mother with trademark expressiveness and hints of buried horror, while Kiernan Shipka slays her intense, one-scene cameo as the only apparent survivor of the Longlegs massacres. Just about everyone and everything works in Longlegs until the film reaches the end of part two in its three-part structure. Granted, that's the place where most works of this type tend to fall off the rails. But the downturn is particularly disappointing because after more than an hour of the writer/director appearing deliciously determined to explain nothing, Perkins starts to explain everything, and little of what's explained proves satisfying.
Obviously, I won't indulge in spoilers. I will, however, suggest that if you're making a serial-killer flick and adding paranormal elements to boot, you maybe don't need to stack the deck by also including nods to the demonic-possession, homicidal-nun, and devil-doll sub-genres. Worse still, an extended flashback that lasts roughly 10 minutes attempts to make lucid sense of this bizarro conglomeration of tropes, and only succeeds in making you say “Wait, what?” far more often than you should.
Yet even when the plotting seems borderline-rational, niggling inconsistencies keep pulling you out of the moment. Relatively early on, we learn that all of the murdered families had a daughter who was born on the 14th day of a given month, and through a lot of business involving coded symbols and the calendar, that proves to be a significant clue in determining whom Longlegs might come after next. Fair enough. But why doesn't Harker reveal to anyone that she was also born on the 14th of a month? Why doesn't Harker's supervisor mention that his own daughter was born on a 14th? (Wouldn't he be immediately fearful over his family's safety?) Why, when Harker is feebly trying to converse with that little girl and is invited to her birthday party, does the FBI agent not take a moment to say, “Hey – that's my birthday, too!” The stuff we want explained isn't (including the meaning behind the titular moniker) and the stuff we don't want explained is, and despite its considerable strengths, Longlegs climaxes on a long bum note. At least Perkins was wise enough to give Cage the parting shot. He's endlessly unsettling. I still left my screening smiling.
FLY ME TO THE MOON
When pitching their space-race rom-com Fly Me to the Moon to potential cast members, did director Greg Berlanti and screenwriter Rose Gilroy, for whatever reason, pitch completely different movies? Because I'd argue that no one here is on the same page. Scarlett Johansson, playing a media-savvy marketing whiz who's also a practiced con artist, is working in the fast-talking, hyper-articulate realm of screwball comedies from the '30s and '40s. Channing Tatum, as a goal-oriented NASA director with a mournful backstory, seems to think he's in an earnest melodrama about American gumption and can-do spirit. Woody Harrelson, as a cretinous government official, acts as though he's in a bitter satire about our country's dark underbelly. Jim Rash, as a flamboyant director hired to fake the moon landing, appears to be auditioning for a long-delayed sequel to The Birdcage. Even the more minor figures, all of them committed, seem to be in either a jaunty slapstick or a bland docudrama or a misty-eyed period piece – and seem distressingly alone in their choices. It's not that Fly Me to the Moon is bad. It's that it's not-bad … in about a dozen different ways.
Sadly, it's most not-bad as a romantic comedy, because while Johansson and Tatum have charisma and performance chops to spare, the one time these attributes truly register for them as a screen couple is in their introductory scene, when we still have two hours of movie to go. Before Johansson's Kelly Jones (more accurately, “Kelly Jones”) begins micro-managing NASA promotion and Tatum's Cole Davis begins huffing and puffing over her every dimwitted yet successful brainstorm, the actors share a light, sexy, flirtatious chemistry at a Florida diner, and instantly energize you for the fireworks to come. That they never do suggests that either the stars simply don't work well together as a pair, which might be true, or that the grinding mechanics behind their strained arc – she thinks she's helping, he thinks she's just in the way – are killing any chance of rapport. I'd more actively consider this possibility if, for instance, Hepburn and Tracy didn't make quite a nice living out of playing inevitable lovers who initially can't stand one another. So maybe we have to stick with the idea that Johansson and Tatum are merely mismatched – the most likely reality, really, given that precious little in this expensive (and expensive-looking) Apple Studios offering appears to match anything surrounding it.
Beyond the performers not properly aligning, the presentational tones are erratic to the point of senselessness. Sincere tributes to fallen astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee sit beside low comedy involving the robbery of a neighborhood electronics store. Political operations behind the wooing of senators for support exist beside inept attempts to make a faux moon landing look realistic. Johansson's ad whiz suffers a teary crisis of conscience while a tag-team of sweet-faced underlings (Noah Robbins and Donald Elise Watkins) suggests that NASA in the '60s was run largely by bighearted morons. And through it all, a convenient black cat races back and forth across the screen, causing characters to go apoplectic about the bad luck will certainly ensue. Fly Me to the Moon is occasionally a pleasant diversion, and as gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, you can see every penny of its reported $100-million budget on screen. I'm not sure the movie needed that black cat, though. Its confounding blend of incongruous styles and sequences was a bad-luck symbol all on its own.
