After the widely panned Southland Tales (which still had its moments), The Box marks director Richard Kelly’s return to Donnie Darko territory. The results are decidedly mixed. It’s both obvious and infuriatingly obtuse: a Richard Matheson short story (“Button, Button”, which was previously made into one of the better episodes of the 80s Twilight Zone rehash) padded out with Kelly’s extravagant indulgences. The two simply don’t mix, and the result can be summed up in one word: unsatisfying.
But Kelly is an excellent director, and he just may fool you into thinking otherwise. The problem is he’s not as good a writer, and you’ll either figure it all out and discover the wizard behind the curtain, or you’ll get lost along the way and feel angry about being jerked around. There’s a thin line – one that David Lynch walks so well – between keeping us in the dark and still attracted to the material. Kelly simultaneously provides too much and too little information.
In the middle of the night, a mysterious package is dropped off at the door of Arthur (James Marsden) and Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz). Inside the package there’s a box, and inside the box there’s a button. The next day, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) – a burn victim with a portion of his face missing – shows up while Arthur is away.
He presents Norma with a key to the box, which will unlock the top and allow the button to be pressed. If the button is pressed, Arlington tells her, two things will happen. One: someone, somewhere, who they don’t know, will die. Two: they’ll be given a million dollars, “tax free” (a quote from the original story that indicates Arlington is working for the government; here, it doesn’t make much sense). Talk it over with your husband, he tells her, and he’ll be back tomorrow to retrieve the box.
This is the basic premise of the film, and it’s a pretty good one. Would you press the button? I think most would: not because they want someone to die, or they believe that would happen, or they really think they’ll get the money. It boils down to human curiosity. Given a button and no indication of what would happen if we pressed it, we’d probably press it; if we knew something bad would happen, we probably wouldn’t. A mysterious man with vague instructions would heighten our curiosity. In The Box, the question should be: how much do we trust this Arlington guy?
But that isn’t really the question at all. No, Kelly dives for deeper pretensions than what existed in Matheson’s script, and he doesn’t have a grasp on his own internal logic to back those up. By the end, the original story has played itself out, and while we ‘get it’, it doesn’t make much sense this time around.
The original ends with one of those great Twilight Zone lines that can send shivers down your spine; here, it’s used as a throwaway line halfway through, and then literalized to the point of meaninglessness throughout the rest of the film.
But, ah, you’re thinking, that Twilight Zone episode was only 20 minutes long, what has been added to the script for this 2-hour movie? Answer: indulgence after indulgence.
Norma’s foot was left under an x-ray machine when she was younger; now she’s missing her toes and walks with a limp. Arthur works for NASA. So did Arlington Steward, until he was struck by lightning and declared dead. People around the Lewises start to act strangely, and noses begin to bleed. A woman is murdered, her husband goes missing. The weird water portals in Kelly’s previous films make an appearance.
You might think this all leads to something; it doesn’t, not really, it only pretends to. The only thing left in the movie is Matheson’s 20-minute TV script, made nonsensical with all the distractions. But Kelly manages to keep our interest anyway, for a good deal longer than he should have.
