Limes with Orange

I'll confess, the title of this post should just be "Cellar" which is the name of the midnight movie I saw on Saturday night, part of the Calgary International Film Festival. But when I started writing the word cellar, I remembered the part in Donnie Darko when the English teacher (Drew Barrymore) says that a famous linguist once described "cellar door" as the most beautiful phrase in the English language (actually, it was Tolkien and he never said that it was the most beautiful... just beautiful). So my fingers just took over and wrote the whole phrase. Now on to the actual point of this post...

As I already mentioned, I went to see "Cellar" this weekend: "Two men awake in a locked cellar. There's canned food, a trickle of water and a gun with a single bullet."

Not a bad premise, not a bad movie (pretty low budget, but nothing wrong with that). There are a couple of plot points that I would definitely want to discuss were I having a chat with writer/director Ben Hickernell, but they didn't really impact on my enjoyment of the movie. I did, however, find it a little predictable and realized that audiences in this day and age are pretty hard to sneak up on. It doesn't take a genius IQ to be a sophisticated viewer; just watch a couple of M. Night Shyamalan movies and you'll get the hang of it. So I had a pretty good idea where we were going with this movie and what we were going to "discover" about the characters. I didn't even mind that, because the film actually did the reveals well, even if they weren't surprises. My major issue was with the last few minutes of the movie.

I tried to figure out why the ending didn't sit well with me. At first, I thought it was because my macabre mind had come up with about three other, much darker endings that I would have found far more thought provoking. But I don't think that was it. Then, in a completely unrelated conversation, I was talking to someone about this old English teacher of mine who insisted on hammering home religious imagery in books that were actually bereft of any intentional religious imagery. It drove me nuts (I dropped his class). But I had an insight, a slightly uncomfortable insight, one that I'm not sure Hickernell intended. But I felt like I saw the ending clearly now: the main character had finally confessed his sins and been absolved. That instant gratification offered by the Catholic church... doesn't matter what you've done, just confess it, ask forgiveness, and you're off the hook. That's what the ending felt like to me.

And now I'm left trying to decide whether I should hope that Hickernell intended that metaphor, in which case my opinion of the movie sinks lower. Or whether I should hope that it's just my brain imposing an interpretation on the film, in which case I have become that English teacher that I hated. Hmm... I'm gonna hope it was intentional and I'm just damned insightful.

Labels: film, pop culture