How about a little tolerance, Hollywood?

Rating: 8/10 (25 March 2008)

THE MIST is really, really scary, and overall the best Stephen King adaptation since THE SHINING - though it works for opposite reasons. Where Stanley Kubrick bends the story to the medium, Frank Darabont stays remarkably faithful to the novella, which has as its primary strength a nice lack of explanation. This movie is mostly uncomplicated, creepy all the time and shocking when it needs to be.
But man, am I sick of seeing every Christian portrayed as a goddamn psychopath in every goddamn movie. I have Christian friends, Buddhist friends, Muslim friends, Jewish friends, Hindu friends, you name it - and none of my friends is one trauma away from claiming divine authority. In fact, though I was raised in a very small town, I don't think I've ever met anyone so irrationally fundamentalist as to fly a plane into a building, or call for human sacrifice to appease the tentacles. Do extremists exist? We know that they do. They have TV shows, and sometimes they get to be president. But why is it so rare for Hollywood to reflect the majority of observant Christians who are tolerant, intelligent, humanist, and compassionate? For these personal peeves, and although Marcia Gay Harden is a fine actress, I tired of the religious mania angle well before that part of the movie was over.
However, it must be said that the movie moves, and anything you don't like - except horror - is replaced by a new dynamic within a few minutes. The outstanding cast, including Andre Braugher and Frances Sternhagen, roots us in a reality all too awful, and it's hard not to care about characters this well-drawn, in scenes this well-directed. When Bill Sadler started screaming at those giant spiders, well, I forgot my issues with the movie's politics and started screaming too. Actually I started jumping up and down in my living room. I don't know what I would have done if I'd been in a movie theater. Too bad the Weinstein company didn't advertise this thing strongly enough to let me see what that would have been like.
I do have an issue with the end of the movie. Please note spoiler alert above.
The novella ends with the Land Rover headed out into the misty unknown, without resolution, with hardly any hope... but some. I think this would have been a fine ending for a movie. The DVD version I watched ends with Tom Jane's mercy killing of his own son, just before the cavalry arrives. This strikes me as a rather perverse and cynical ending for what is otherwise not much of a morality tale. Looking back, though, there is a strong thread of misanthropy throughout the film: one of the most sympathetic characters declares that he has no faith whatever in human nature, and we aren't given a lot of contrary evidence. Okay. But why? Are we so depraved as a species? Are there so few of us capable of moral judgment? It is a telling joke that Darabont's hero, his most gallant and clear-headed character, is... an artist. This smacks of holier-than-thouism. But if that's the agenda, why make the artist commit an error as terrible as those of the fire-and-brimstone crowd? Is this incoherence, or simply a vicious new worldview from a formerly unrepentant sentimentalist?