Americanism Through Foreign Eyes

Rating: 7/10 (15 October 2013)

Writing about James Fennimore Cooper, D.H. Lawrence said, "the essential American soul is hard, stoic, isolate and a killer. It has never yet melted." Prisoners is a Canadian director's meditation on this passage.
Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans opened with Hawkeye shooting a deer and then praying over the dead animal. Prisoners opens with Keller Dover (Jackman) saying the Lord's Prayer as his teenaged son sights in and shoots the deer that will be Thanksgiving dinner. The parallel is no accident. Dover thinks of himself as the Deerslayer. He's a self-employed, self-reliant workman with a basement full of canned goods and ammunition stored against the breakdown of society, which he expects at any time. He's a survivalist and a handloader. He lives in a nondescript former industrial town somewhere in the part of Pennsylvania that James Carville described as Alabama. His suburban house is the smallest in the neighborhood, with the siding stained dark brown, looking like a log cabin. His only vehicle is the pickup truck from his contracting business. He seems to have come down in the world from his late father, whom he revered, and he's just barely keeping up with the mortgage. Though not a political word is spoken, he's prime Tea Party material. His belief in himself and his disdain for institutions are going to be tested to the extreme when his five year old daughter and her neighborhood playmate disappear, victims of an apparent abduction, on Thanksgiving afternoon.
This is a foreigner's take on the United States. The director, Denis Villeneuve, is a French-Canadian whose last movie, 2010s Incindies, was a perceptive look at the Lebanon civil war of the 70s and 80s. Villeneuve is looking at a society whose individualism, distrust of authority, and general availability of firearms are very different from Canada, and he does not take those things for granted in the same way an American director would. Prisoners makes an interesting companion to this summer's Still Mine, a Canadian story about an old fashioned self-employed individualist who falls foul of local authority in rural New Brunswick. I've long thought that the Canadians are King George's dutiful children while Americans are his rebellious ones, and the two pictures set off the contrast nicely. This is an anthropological look by a Canadian at what a very American man like Keller Dover might do when his child is kidnapped.
Villeneuve uses one of the more annoying tropes in American movies to humanize Dover – the Validating Black Guy. Cousin to the Magic Negro, who puts the white protagonist in touch with deeper values, the VBG's function is simpler – to show that this white man, regardless of his other faults, is actually all right because he likes black people and they like him. Dover's neighbor, friend and one-time high school buddy Franklin Birch (Howard) and wife Nancy (Davis) are cast as black because otherwise Keller Dover would come across as a complete redneck.
But the essence of the Birches is class, not race. They live in a nicer house and are much more securely in the middle class than the Dovers. Nancy's a veterinarian and Franklin looks like he has some kind of office job. Their function is to react as decent, normal middle class folks would when their daughter is abducted and when Dover goes off the rails looking for the kidnapper. The parallel with our reactions to 9/11 is pretty obvious, but that's not where the movie ultimately goes.
The spousal relations break pretty clearly along class and historical lines. Nancy and Franklin Birch are a contemporary married couple of the upper middle class. They pull each other through. He confides in her, she's probably the stronger of the pair, and her moral judgments are the last word between them. The Dovers are almost 19th century. Grace Dover (an under-used Maria Bello) is passive; a pure housewife who looks to Keller as her protector and hero. She breaks completely under the strain, spending all of her time in bed under sedation. Her husband is content to have it so, keeping his activities secret and warning his son not to let his mother know what is going on.
Dover's opposite number and antagonist is Detective Loki, the star of this small town police force, and apparently the only detective on the case. (I find this improbable. For a crime like the abduction of two five year old girls, a one horse police department would get overwhelming support from State Police detectives). Loki is zealous, smart, though not as smart as he thinks, and willing to fall back on shouting and violence when nothing else seems to work. He's cracked every case he ever worked on, and he expects to crack this one. He's also got the official mindset that regards Keller Dover's insistent involvement as a clear nuisance if not something worse. But he's got far more energy and drive than his police chief, a mediocre man who has learned to rationalize mediocrity with philosophical resignation.
The plot is full of trap doors and red herrings, and you have to pay very close attention to the dialog to pick up what you need to know. Even if you do, I think that one key element is left unexplained. You will be completely involved in what comes next for two and one-half hours, and there will be a lot to chew on when it's over. Definitely worth it.