Worse remakes have been made — that shot-by-shot soul-reaping of Psycho comes to mind — but the Carrie remake might be the most
audaciously oblivious. It just doesn’t get it.
Never before has a movie missed so many opportunities to actually
say something profound within the confines of pop culture. The movie involves
bullying and violence in a high school setting, yet it comically plugs its ears
to the world around it and la la las
all the way back to 1976, when the only teens who were bullied, raped, killed
and tortured were in movies about telekinetic girls with mommy issues.
Of course, that’s not true. Teens and young adults from the ’70s
were doing bad things, but none as high profile as Columbine, Sandy Hook, Steubenville or this rash
of bullying that has led to a number of tragic suicides. This is the world we
live in, yet Carrie sticks its head
in the sand to avoid anything that strays far from its source material, Brian De
Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 horror novel Carrie.
I’m not suggesting that this be a message movie — like some
big-budget PSA, cue the "More You Know" graphic — but the fact that it avoids anything of substance is suspect,
especially coming from its director, Kimberly Peirce, who gave us a much more
terrifying exercise in bullying and murder when she made the transgender
funeral march Boys Don’t Cry, about a
woman who identified as a man and was killed for it.
What this all boils down to, though, is how you like your remakes.
If you prefer them to be modern-day clones of the originals, then you’ll
appreciate this Carrie. I prefer them
to be something different, but with hints of the original folded in. Michael
Mann’s Miami Vice comes to mind: it
invoked the spirit of the TV show, but was something entirely different. The
ultra-gore terror-fest of Evil Dead
from earlier this year is another great example.
This new Carrie stars
Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) as
Carrie White, the outcast who becomes a woman at the most unfortunate time
imaginable. Carrie cries out from the gym shower, “Help, I’m dying. It hurts.”
Her classmates throw tampons at her and film it, uploading it later to a social
network under a fake identity ("Favorite movie: Blood Sport. Favorite Drink: Bloody Mary."). Although mad at her classmates, Carrie mostly blames her mother,
Margaret (Julianne Moore), who is so close-minded in her religious zealotry
that she forgot to teach her daughter about the birds and the bees.
Carrie’s mother is a maddening case study in religious fervor.
She calls her daughter “my sin,” because Carrie was born out of wedlock. When
Carrie shows interest in boys, books or other things “of this world” — OTW if
you’re into window decals — Margaret locks her in a closet under the stairs.
Inside are the most gruesome depictions of Christ’s crucifixion, proof that
Margaret’s religion is based on suffering and cruelty, not love and compassion.
Grace Moretz and Moore are fine actresses, but they really don't go far enough in this movie. I wanted bigger performances, especially from Moore, who plays her motherly whackadoo at half the capacity. It could have, and should have, been much louder and more bombastic. Also, I'm not entirely sold on Grace Moretz, the girl who says the C-word and kills people in Kick-Ass. She doesn't have the chops for acting quite yet; although she may soon learn them. For context, remember that Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both were Oscar nominees for the original film, a rare thing for a horror movie. I doubt we'll see a similar feat here with this bland and effortless remake of a classic.
Another victim in Carrie is the dialogue. Some of it is weird. One character says something like, "One of my boys, Travis, did this thing …" Somehow I doubt teens still say "my boys." In the pig gutting scene, a teen hams it up to his barnyard victim: "Don't worry little piggy, Uncle Jacky is going to bash your head right in." In another scene, the school principal — the great character actor Barry Shabaka Henley — seems to have a seizure every time he tries to say period or tampon. All of this smacks of Stephen King's trying-too-hard-to-be-hip dialogue, which is ironic because this movie is twice removed from King's book. In any case, the dialogue is as socially awkward as the actors spewing it out.
The film builds and builds to its point of nuclear fission:
Carrie is lured to the prom so a bucket of pig’s blood can be dumped on her
head. The wait for this scene, a scene we all know is coming — a scene that the
whole movie was built around — takes forever. And when it finally happens, and
Carrie turns into a raging telekinetic monster, the movie seems to slump
forward on auto-pilot.
Carrie’s classmates, some of them monsters themselves, have
ambiguous motives that cloud the plot the same way they fogged up De Palma’s
version. The movie doesn’t make it clear which students were cheering for the
blood and which ones were horrified at the callousness of the pranksters. I
still think, as I did with the original, if someone had just stepped forward
with a towel and showed Carrie kindness that her prom massacre would have not
likely taken place. But instead, Carrie stands there drenched in blood as
students gawk, their only sins before they’re all murdered.
Let me circle back to my original point: this new Carrie exists in a vacuum. It is so out
of touch with the modern world that it’s paralyzed by its own nostalgia. It
wants to be a revenge fantasy set in a school, but it doesn’t want to remind
you of Columbine, Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech.
It wants to be a movie about cyber bullying, but it doesn’t want implicate the
way teens use Facebook or Twitter. It wants to depict a cruel sexual assault,
but it doesn’t want to invoke the Steubenville
rape. These real-life stories aren’t appropriate for a popcorny movie like Carrie, but their messages — revenge
fantasies, bullying and teen violence — run parallel to the plot, so why not
include them in the drama?
The movie had a chance to say something that wasn’t already said
by Brian De Palma in 1976. Instead it said only this: “Ditto.”
