Burnt Offering

The Wicker Man

National Review Online, September  18, 2006

A remake, yup, another remake: first Miami Vice, now this. To the jeers, hoots, catcalls and snickers of critics across the country, the latest hashed rehash, The Wicker Man, writer-director Neil LaBute’s reworking of a cult British movie from 1973, limped into cinemas over that Hollywood graveyard better known as Labor Day weekend. Clumsy, poorly plotted, and scarred by performances closer to catalepsy than acting, this unintentionally funny film is more Scary Movie than horror pic. The story, such as it is, revolves around Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage), a California highway patrolman left traumatized and tranquilizer-dependent after witnessing a hideous traffic accident. Adding to his gloom, and ours, he’s summoned by Willow (Kate Beahan), his former fiancée, to help find her missing, and equally rustically named, daughter, Rowan. Dutifully enough, Malus shows up at Willow’s home, a beautiful, creepy and very private island somewhere in the Puget Sound. Unfortunately for our haggard hero, this is run by goddess-worshippers with a thing for retro fashion, bee keeping, sinister glances and (it’s hinted) nasty eugenic practices. Poor Malus, things turn out very badly for him indeed, but save your sympathy: It’s even worse for the audience.

It needn’t have been this way. That dismal spot in contemporary culture where feminism, ignorance and superstition collide can always use a little more mockery. In theory, spooky, sanctimonious Summersisle, a place where the likes of Sisters Violet, Thorn, Rose, Beech, Willow, Honey, and Moss preside over mute helot males, might have been the perfect place to do it, and Neil LaBute its ideal chronicler. There’s a bracing streak of misanthropy running through much of his work. As his In The Company of Men did for misogyny what McDonalds does for cattle, his take on matriarchy could have made for an evening of brutal, disturbing fun.

It could have, but it didn’t. Despite an encouragingly irate review in a Seattle (where else?) alternative newspaper describing the movie as “obscene anti-feminist propaganda [in which] the women are mysterious and tricky and beguiling, like evil vaginas [and] Malus is strong and thrusty and straightforward, like a hero-penis,” Mr. LaBute fails, and fails miserably. The script is too crude, and its parable too labored (O.K., Neil, we get the queen bee/drone thing, we really do) to be effective, and with the notable exceptions of Molly Parker (as twin sisters Rose and Thorn) and Diane Delano (Sister Beech), the cast fails to rise to what little challenge there is.

Let’s face it. Neil LaBute doesn’t know how to make a horror movie; the film neither shocks nor thrills nor chills. When the storyline is not chaotic it is cockamamie. Perhaps this was inevitable. An allegory of matriarchal oppression has no place within anything resembling the original The Wicker Man, a film in which the relations between the sexes are, to say the least, amicable. Mr. LaBute would have done better to start afresh, saying what he wanted to say on his own terms rather than trying to squeeze his theme into a new, and unconvincing, reinterpretation of someone else’s idea. What’s more, by taking the remake route, LaBute ensures comparison with what has gone before. When that’s a film good enough to be described by one overexcited critic as “the Citizen Kane of horror”, that’s asking for trouble. If the recent Miami Vice was stalked by the ghost of Crockett past, so LaBute’s Wicker Man is menaced by memories of the original, and its extraordinarily compelling tale of an ardently Christian policeman (Edward Woodward, best known in America as the Equalizer) and his search for a missing girl on a remote Scottish island swept up in pagan enchantment.

It’s true that the troubled circumstances of the first The Wicker Man’s release (there are three different cuts out there) by a cash-strapped, owner-swapping British film company that not only seemed ashamed of what had been shot, but managed to lose much of the original footage (buried, it’s claimed, like some celluloid Hoffa, but under a highway), have added to the mystique of a masterpiece that, if not exactly lost, was certainly abused, neglected and mislaid. However, Robin Hardy’s original (in all senses) The Wicker Man needs neither hype nor its “missing minutes” to be judged a significant work. It comfortably stands on its own merits and deserves a far wider audience (the “long” version has just had its U.S. release on DVD).

Helped by the remarkable performances of Woodward as the agonized Sergeant Howie and Christopher Lee (he continues to believe that it was the finest performance of his long, long career) as the suavely menacing Lord Summerisle (“A heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.”), possibly the greatest naked dancing sequence ever seen in British cinema (thank you, Britt Ekland, thank you) and, critically, a musical score that brilliantly conjured up that Arcadian idyll of a vanished Albion that is among the most persistent of English myths, The Wicker Man is a dream-like evocation of one man’s destruction and a thought-provoking meditation on the nature, purpose and consequences of religious belief.

The script itself operates at two levels (warning: spoilers ahead). The basic plot is conventional enough. The hunter, Howie, becomes the hunted as he descends deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of deception designed to lure him to the savage rendezvous that earns this (difficult to categorize) film its label as horror. More profoundly, however, The Wicker Man contrasts and compares two very different religious traditions. The first, Christianity, is the very essence of Howie: central both to how he sees himself, and how he believes the world should be. He’s devout, and he’s devout in a killjoy, finger wagging, all too Scottish way. Ordinarily, this could have been expected to pave the way for a clichéd contest between dreary old Christianity and bucolic fun-loving free-loving music-loving pagans (the film was shot, after all, at the tail-end of the hippy era). That it doesn’t is a tribute to the subtlety of this movie’s creators.

For all his narrow-mindedness, the censorious and rather whiny Howie is portrayed as a good man, romantic in his inhibited way (in a test that would have tried St. Anthony, he puts fidelity to his fiancée above succumbing to lovely Britt’s naughty advances), and brave too, as he risks his life to, he thinks, save Rowan. For all his charisma and charm Lord Summerisle, the pagan-in-chief, is altogether different and, ultimately, much less likeable. His ‘love’ for his islanders is, at best, the cold affection of a benevolent despot for his dullard but devoted subjects. The paganism he peddles is, he knows, nonsense, nothing more than an expedient mishmash of old traditions revived by his grandfather as a way to manipulate his workforce. As opiates of the people go, it appears benign on the surface and it’s certainly effective, but from fairly early on in the film, there are hints of a darker undertow.

Before we discover quite how dark it can get (very), director Robin Hardy, and his scriptwriter, Anthony Shaffer, men presumably well-schooled in The Golden Bough, take care to emphasize the strong underlying similarities between Howie’s Christianity and Summerisle’s paganism, as well as the obvious distinctions between them. That’s smart. Mankind appears to have evolved with a need to believe in, and worship, some form of supernatural authority, a need that has found expression in almost every culture. The key question that remains is not as much what we worship, as how. The devil, or God, take your pick, is in the details. Contrary to the claims of ecumenical parsons, all religions are not the same.

The Wicker Man makes it clear that Sergeant Howie’s Christianity is, despite its fervor, house-trained, reasonably civilized and adequately compatible with a modern, humane society. For all its easygoing appeal, Summerisle’s alternative is not. While we see (particularly in the movie’s ‘long’ version) that ritual has a vital role to play in both religions, it is a ritual (specifically a sacrificial ritual) that ultimately exposes the crucial difference between them. Holy Communion (a ceremony pointedly included in the movie) may make some anthropologists shudder, but for practical purposes (I’ll leave the theology to others), it’s a symbolic, life-affirming ceremony, designed to commemorate a single sacrifice intended to suffice for all time. By contrast, Summerisle’s rites reduce a human life to a bribe to be paid to greedy and temperamental gods. Such gods need feeding, and usually more than once (just ask the Aztecs). As Sergeant Howie is dragged off to be sacrificed, he warns Lord Summerisle that, if the crops fail again, it’s he, the laird, who will be the next offering. And we know that he’s right.

The worst of the horrors of this film’s famous final scenes is that none of this will make any difference. A giant wicker effigy has been set ablaze, with Howie imprisoned high up inside it. As the smoke and flames rise, the desperate policeman, pious to the end, shouts out prayers and a psalm, but to no avail. His God is nowhere to be seen. Imprisoned, meanwhile, in the prison that is their creed, the islanders counter the dying man’s cries with an ancient song they dedicate to their sun god. As they sway, and as they sing and as they smile with a joy that looks a lot like desperation, fire consumes the wicker man, and the film ends with a long shot of the setting sun, gorgeous, magnificent, and utterly indifferent to all that has gone on below.