It’s a pity Kayla Alpert’s script and Deborah Chow’s direction don’t do their collaborators justice. (Burstyn’s tearful shrieks of “Help!” as Olivia is locked away in darkness are so powerful that I almost wish I could un-see and un-hear them.) But all the actors are spot-on, even ones who have just a few scenes. Best in show would probably go to Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka, who as Cathy Dollanganger is equally convincing as a budding young girl who trusts too easily and a wise-beyond-her-years abuse survivor who’s all resentment and coiled rage Heather Graham as her mother, Corinne, whose porcelain doll face and Marilyn Monroe body at first seem too blankly typical, until her performance blossoms in increasingly complex and affecting ways and Ellen Burstyn, whose empathetic performance turns what could have been a cardboard tormentor, grandma Olivia, into another wounded soul, a heap of brokenness who’s easy to fear but ultimately impossible to hate. Mario Grigorov’s score is a resigned lament, mourning the cruelty and suffering you’ve seen and are about to see then in tense moments it rises in pitch and intensity, until it sounds like music you’d hear at the end of a Brian DePalma picture that ends in voluptuous doom. The photography, by Miroslav Baszak ( Land of the Dead), has an almost tactile richness, with light shafts cutting through the gloom of the cryptlike attic where the Dollanganger children are held captive by their grandmother. The fifties set design and costumes are handsome and persuasive, but never so distractingly perfect that the movie turns into a vintage warehouse with actors. This is maddening because it’s a rare project that, at a production level, has everything going for it. Andrews’s incesterrific novel Flowers in the Attic is a slight improvement over the 1987 version, yet still unsatisfying. Can we assume that an adaptation of a book that sold 40 million copies does not require a spoiler-sensitive review? We can? Good.
0 kommentar(er)
