Bringing to mind vintage David Fincher (Seven, Zodiac), Denis Villeneuve tampers wit the formula of the police procedural, elevating it to the highly original. Dense enough to favor complexity over simple solutions, Prisoners will keep you guessing while invoking a character-driven sense of gloom and foreboding.
Two young girls disappear while their families are sharing Thanksgiving together. Earlier, their older brother. while out on a walk with them, had spotted an RV camper parked on one of the otherwise empty streets of their unnamed Pennsylvania town. The driver of the vehicle, a hapless Paul Dano, is soon apprehended but then let go due to insufficient grounds for arrest. Incidentally, he “has the I.Q. of a ten-year-old.” This will not stop one of the girls’ fathers, a surefooted Hugh Jackman, from pursuing both lead investigating cop Jake Gyllenhaal, and eventually Dano himself, in a fit of revenge-seeking. Terence Howard and Viola Davis are the other set of parents, who eventually face moral decisions that no parent will ever want to face. Oscar-winner Melissa Leo plays Dano’s mom, and Maria Bello as Jackman’s wife, round out this cast made in heaven.
Gyllenhaal, fresh off a fine performance in the crazed, very good End of Watch, seems to have a knack for playing cops who portray a depth of emotion while still coming across as genuine cops. Jackman may be the bigger story here, though. In a role that could have easily been overplayed, he displays a fierceness that somehow still seems grounded in, paradoxically, a solid if skewed sense of judgement. (Incidentally, there’s almost a temptation here to equate the movie’s core underlying theme of a moral ambivalence regarding the use of force with a sociopolitical symbolism regarding ends justifying the means that would imitate such Zero Dark Thirty discussions.)
Villeneuve directed the epic-sized yet scaled to razor-precision Incendies, one of the very best films of 2011, while the Canadian director was still working in his native French. Here he has taken on the Hollywood studio multiplex form. He shows no lessening of his indie skills, focusing on intensely personal and realistic scenes between basically good people at odds both with their vexing situations, and themselves. As a thriller, Prisoners is basically airtight. Every moment rings plausible–which isn’t to say it’s always easy to figure out. Villeneuve knows when to avoid the big Hollywood payoff scene. His dissolves and fadeouts often come, refreshingly, a step before overkill. The film conveys a dark sense of malice yet its violence–at times intense–remains miles away from feeling exploitative. When characters consistently behave in a fashion that feels believable and never made up out of whole cloth, the result earns its own authenticity–no matter how zany the plot seems on the surface. It’s always refreshing to see a major director unveil himself before our eyes.
4 Revenge Not Sweet (out of 5 stars)