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‘The Box’: Some packages are better left unopened
Will director Kelly ever get it right again -- that delicate balance of major cosmic questions and the illustration of the human question through the small things?
It is 1976, in Richmond, Virginia, and a happy upper-middle class family is living in the pleasant suburbs. Scientist father Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) works for the government at NASA while mother Norma (Cameron Diaz) works at a private school as an English teacher. Their son Walter (Sam Oz Stone) is a bright pre-adolescent at the same school. Doesn’t this picture seem ideal? Could they ask for anything more?
Apparently, the Lewis family does have some things to worry about, though it’s hard to empathize -- they spend a lot more than they can afford! Life just seems even more difficult when Arthur does not pass the astronaut test and Norma loses the teacher’s tuition discount for Walter after she reveals her disfigured foot with missing toes to an indignant student who pushes her buttons. She’s giving a lecture on Sartre’s “No Exit” during the act -- surely hell must be other people.
It’s rather convenient and mysterious when the couple receives a strange box from a certain Mr. Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), a charismatic old man who is missing half of his face. Mr. Steward has a very odd proposition; he states solemnly: “If you press the button on the box, you will receive a million dollars tax free, and one person who you do not know will die. If you do not press the button, you won’t get a million dollars, and no one will die. You have 24 hours to decide.” Now Norma and Arthur, being the fine people that they are, discuss this situation, rather logically and ploddingly. Funny, how they “really” do need the money for her foot operation and how it would be nice to take care of their entire family. And funny how they only once debate the possibility of ending someone’s life. Oh well, Norma presses the button!
Of course, trouble is bound to find them, and yes, someone they don’t know dies exactly at the same time as they press the button. Suddenly, strange people start gathering around the couple, dropping bits of incoherent information. Steward seems to know whatever they’re up to; apparently many families are tested through the same experiment, and it turns out that NASA might even have something to do with this whole box business. And who is Steward anyway? How come he has all these godly powers?
These questions will eventually be answered, toward the end of the film’s running time of 115 minutes, though it seems like it is running for 180 minutes with its deliberate pace.
As you might imagine (without trying to give too many spoilers), the film boils down to the intertwining of destinies, the problematic nature of human morality and whether there is any hope for altruism in this world of ours, since it’s implied that there is such altruism in others.
The problem, though, is how this morality is played out through the film -- the simplicity and reductionism of the entire script, which focuses on only one aspect of morality, leaves a feeling of incompleteness in the viewer and thus creates many loopholes that do not convince us to enter the story.
The performances by Diaz and Marsden come out as too restrained, with a lack of screen chemistry, and the emotional explosion at the finale comes as too ostentatious. The cinematography is the film’s strongest element as it succeeds in creating an inauspicious atmosphere in the seemingly safe settings of the suburbs of 1976 and also presents some unforgettable frames of science-fiction/conspiracy theory allure in the hangars of NASA.
But the film fails through its rhythm, which seems to take a deep long breath every 10 minutes, and misses a deep emotional core to its individual characters -- the only thing needed to make this unbelievable story believable. If Sartre is right in writing that hell is other people, the converse should also be true. “The Box” denies us this small verity even though it aims to show us that altruism is not dead. How can we hope for the existence of humanity when the lead characters seem to be people that we can never entirely empathize with?
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