Beautiful, Well Acted, and Dumb (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (4 August 2004)

An Amish-styled village has an uneasy truce with "creatures" who live in the woods surrounding them They run into trouble when Joaquin Phoenix is stabbed -- the girl he loves braves the woods to bring back medicine for him.

Beautifully shot, beautifully directed -- Joaquin's stabbing sequence is very well done for instance -- and wonderfully acted. Ron Howard's daughter is good, but I especially liked William Hurt, who underplays his role very nicely as the morally conflicted leader of the village. And absolutely stick-stone stupid.
Harsh words, but I'll stick with them. This is the paradigmatic example of how a bad script, by itself, can kill a movie. All of the rest of the pieces are in place, but the story makes no sense the moment you press on it. Structured something like a "Scooby Doo" episode, it presupposes, among other things:
1. That citizens can leave modern life and talk in an absurdly stilted dialect for 24/7, with no references to anything in the outside world.
2. That these unnamed citizens can get away with *all* government agencies ignoring them. No sheriffs? Social workers? Taxmen? Nobody?

3. That these unnamed citizens can actually bribe the government to reroute planes overhead, soley to keep the illusion intact.
4. That no one complains when somebody dies needlessly in the village, because "that's the deal".
5. That a modern park ranger wouldn't have more questions when a girl comes stumbling out of the woods other than "you live in there"?

Etc.
Add to that how manipulative it is, and necessarily so to maintain the illusion. That's what really bothers me about the movie: MNS has to conspire against his audience to keep things going. So, just like a Scooby Doo episode, we have "sheds that can not open" and "mystery boxes" that are only opened to reveal the truth of what's going on. This information is unnecessarily kept from the audience -- there's no reason in plot terms to be so coy. Unless your whole raison détre is to mess with the audience's head.
The final battle with the blind girl and Noah is meaningless: it's shot like a horror movie sequence, but there's nothing scary about it. How could there be? We already know it's a guy in a suit. What's scary about that?

Scooby Doo wraps it all up in a half-hour and never takes it too seriously. This is taken incredibly serious, which only makes it worse. Ranks with VAN HELSING as the worst movie I've seen this year.