What Lies Beneath (2000)

               Robert Zemeckis directed ‘What Lies Beneath’ while he was waiting for Tom Hanks to lose fifty pounds for the time-skipping edit in ‘Cast Away.’ This movie was made to essentially kill time while he starved himself. It’s hard to overstate the insane run of films Zemeckis had been on for a decade and a half which functionally ended shortly after this movie. Starting in 1984 the list goes: ‘Romancing the Stone,’ ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ BttF 2 and 3, ‘Death Becomes Her,’ ‘Forrest Gump,’ ‘Contact,’ this, then ‘Cast Away,’ also released in 2000. People talk about Coppola’s 70’s output or the masterpieces Carpenter turned out in the 80’s, but from a box office and technological standpoint it’s hard to beat that sixteen years of great to near-great movies. Then the fascination with pushing the boundaries of film technology you could see creeping into his films ever since ‘Back to the Future 2’ kind of took over. He spent the next twelve years turning out creepy motion capture CGI movies, and when he went back to normal filmmaking with ‘Flight’ it wasn’t quite the same. He still had a few good movies in him, like ‘The Walk’ and ‘Allied,’ but nobody really paid attention to them. His last film was a direct-to-streaming remake of ‘Pinocchio’ which was universally ignored.

              Documentarian Sarah Kernochan, who’s won a couple of Oscars, wrote up a script treatment based on some personal spooky experiences that she then submitted to Dreamworks. The treatment was assigned to actor Clark Gregg to turn into a screenplay. Yes, the guy from ‘The Avengers.’ This script was in turn given to Zemeckis at the direction of Steven Spielberg, who was no doubt familiar with the fact that Zemeckis had been wanting to make an homage to Alfred Hitchcock for some time. The combination of the script and the opportunity to work with Zemeckis drew in Harrison Ford, and Michelle Pfeiffer was cast soon after. Apparently they were both the first choices for Zemeckis, because when you’re at that level of commercial success I guess you just get to pick and choose your actors from anyone in the world. Considering that the movie made an inflation-adjusted $534 million off of a $183 million budget, I find it hard to disagree with this amount of deference.

              Ford and Pfieffer play a married couple, Norman and Claire Spencer. She’s a widow with a daughter that only appears at the very beginning of the movie. The rest of the cast is made up of mostly character actors, none of whom have much to do in the movie as it really is a two-hander between Ford and Pfeiffer. About the only one who gets a decent amount of screentime is Diana Scarwid as Jody, Claire’s best friend and thus the person she can talk to for the audience’s benefit. The only other actor in the cast I’m familiar with is James Remar as their neighbor Warren Feur, but he has such a heavy beard in this movie I didn’t recognize him at all.

              Robert Zemeckis is a very technical filmmaker in at least two distinct ways. The first and more obvious way is how he really did push filmmaking technology forward. ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ is still unmatched with its blend of cartoon and live action. It’s still astonishing today from a production standpoint. Movies have tried to ape its look with CGI and other gimmicks but nobody’s been willing to put in the sheer grinding effort that it took. I would suggest watching at least one of the making-off specials for that movie because they’re almost as entertaining as the film itself. Then with the ‘Back to the Future’ movies he demonstrated the use of motion-controlled cameras as developed by Industrial Light and Magic, allowing an actor to be in the same frame multiple times while still allowing for camera movement. In ‘Death Becomes Her’ he started developing better ways to incorporate CGI effects into movies (that film holds up way better than a lot of its contemporaries), and even a relatively straightforward movie like ‘Contact’ has that famous sequence of the young Ellie running towards the camera only to have it revealed to be the reflection in a mirror. There are even a couple of sequences near the end of this movie that are more technically proficient than is strictly necessary.

              The other way he’s a technical filmmaker is his insistence on proper film construction, especially planting and paying off. His scripts have been compared to clockwork devices. This is to say that anything important in one of his movies was for sure set up beforehand, which is why the climaxes of so many of his movies feel so satisfying. Take the opening of the first ‘Back to the Future,’ where the camera manages to establish most of the story elements in one continuous movement: it dollies from clocks to pictures of scientists to some of Doc’s contraptions, past a newsreader reading out a story on some stolen nuclear materials, on to the dog’s overflowing food bowl indicating he and Doc have been gone for some time, then we see Marty enter and we establish his skateboard, and it ends with the reveal of the box of plutonium. When you realize that Zemeckis loves to set up his pieces early on you can keep a list of things that are going to be important later in the film by what seemingly unnecessary details are focused on by the camera or the characters. Here’s some of my notes from the first fifteen minutes or so: “set ups – mirror, blow drier, electrical socket, argument outside, … regrets @ what she gave up … Ford very dismissive of legitimate concerns / of the time or plot point?” Those do all in fact come up again. I also noted a dog and her daughter going off to college, neither of which have much to do with the plot but get mentioned near the end.

              At two hours and ten minutes, it’s the longest movie I’ve watched so far for this series and unfortunately it feels like it. You could easily tighten up this movie by at least fifteen minutes and the last twenty-five minutes especially seem like they go on for at least twice that long. Almost the entire first hour is a colossal misdirect from what’s actually going on. This movie is an overt Hitchcock homage, with some direct visual lifts and a lot of attempts at the kind of suspense he specialized in, and while a lot of it is effective there ends up being so much movie that it all kind of mixes together. I don’t want to talk too much trash about the movie, it’s well-constructed and the acting is solid, it just wears out its welcome by the end.

              We’re also back in the territory of ‘ghost as metaphor,’ somewhat. The underlying theme of the movie is the abuse of women by the men around them. The ghost in the film spends her time seeking revenge, sure, but at least part of it is warning Pfeiffer’s character about what kind of man she married. Spoilers, turns out Harrison Ford is a sociopathic killer, and he plays a pretty good one. That’s why I included my notes, because as early as the fifteen-minute mark I was getting asshole vibes from him and they just compound over the course of the movie. Twenty-four years both is and is not a long time ago from a cultural standpoint, I wonder how many people at the original time of release flagged him as a bad husband and a bad guy before the big ending reveal? Kids these days would have put him down as borderline-abusive by the half hour mark.

              Ford and Pfieffer star as married couple Norman and Claire Spencer. He’s a scientist doing genetic research of some kind at a local university, she’s a former professional cellist who gave it up after they got married. She has a daughter from a previous marriage who gets packed off to school at the beginning of the film. For the first several scenes everything is portrayed as fairly harmonious, if a little sad as Claire’s missing her daughter. This gets disrupted a little by their new neighbors, who have a habit of holding screaming arguments out on their front lawn. One day Claire overhears the wife, Mary Feur, crying on the other side of their dividing fence. She asks if she’s all right and gets a jumble of words in response. When she tells Norman he blows off her concerns, saying people fight all the time and more importantly it’s none of their business. This is when I raised a little question mark above his character’s head that never did go away.

              Spookums officially start at the twenty-one minute mark when the ghost starts repeated openining the front door. It’s never really established what triggers the start of the ghostly visitations, they’ve been living in the house for about a year at this point and the ghost’s been dead for six months. Maybe it was being polite and waiting for the daughter to go away to college? The property is right next to a big ol’ lake and they have their own little dock jutting out onto it. After she fails to get their dog to fetch a ball she threw into the water (she wanted wet dog?), she starts fishing it out and glimpses a spooky face in the water! She later sees the face again in her bathtub. She tells all of this to Norman and the scene cuts with comedic timing to a therapy session. She clarifies she’s there are Norman’s insistence.

              While all of this is going on we get more setups for later payoffs: she visits Norman at work and some inserted dialogue and camera angles informs the audience that Norman has access to a short-term dissociative drug, their house is remote enough that there’s no cell phone reception until the middle of a bridge over the lake, and Claire was in a car accident about a year ago that caused her some memory loss. This all plays into the climax.

              During these spooky shenanigans Zemeckis is doing his best ‘Rear Window’ impression. The wife next door doesn’t show for a few days and Claire becomes convinced that her husband murdered her and it’s her ghost trying to make contact. Her friend comes over and they hold a little séance in the bathroom, after which the ghost writes the words ‘you know’ in the steam condensation on a mirror and types the initial MEF over and over again on her computer. The lady next door is named Mary Feur, and I’d like to take this opportunity to call bullshit on this coincidence. The murdered girl ends up being named Madison Elizabeth Frank and she typed out her initials at least fifteen times. Is it a rule that ghosts only get to use three of the letters on a keyboard when they’re reaching out from beyond the grave? Why not type “your husband killed me, check the lake?” Anyway Claire confronts the husband publicly and accuses him of killing his wife, whereupon he instantly produces her safe and sound.

              Pretty soon Claire is back obsessing over the ghost, much to Norman’s annoyance. It is to the movie’s credit that at no point did I get the sense that it was on Norman’s side. This film is very much from Claire’s perspective with Norman as a supporting character who eventually turns into the antagonist. Except for the very beginning, her husband is not portrayed as a particularly nice guy. It’s still Harrison Ford so he coasts on charm for a little while, but it soon becomes hard to ignore how much he undermines Claire just a little bit every time they have a conversation. There’s a nice understated runner where almost everyone mistakes Norman for his far more famous father. We even hear his side of phone conversations where he pauses then wearily corrects the person with, “No, that was my father.” It’s never directly addressed, but his need to feel important and special and his increasing annoyance at how Claire has needs and desires of her own, always taking his attention away from his important scientific work, makes his eventual reveal as a murderer click neatly into place. In a lot of ways his entire arc in the movie is grinding away at your nice-guy expectations of Ford until his turn to deadly sociopathy feels like it was inevitable.

              Other than some dated special effects there’s not a whole lot of specific criticisms I can give of the set pieces that make up the climax. Each one considered independently of the others is well-constructed and very effective. There are just so many of them. At a certain point I was sure we were moments from the credits, instead we had a good thirteen minutes to go. After possibly the scariest scene of someone checking call history ever, Norman doses Claire with that dissociative drug from early. That inserted dialogue was very careful to establish that 1: effects only last about five minutes and 2: the patient is fully awake the entire time. This allows Norman to monologue at her without any fear of interruption. It’s a good speech as he starts unburdening himself to her, finally dropping the act and casually justifying the murder he’s currently committing. Near the end he even implies he’s going to pursue her daughter romantically by using Claire’s death to get close to her. What I thought was the climax of the film is a very gripping sequence where Norman plops Claire down into the empty bathtub and starts filling it with water. He idly chats to her while it fills up and even leaves briefly to let the dog out. Pfeiffer does a lot of eye acting in this scene. When Norman leans down over her to remove a piece of evidence the ghost makes Claire’s face look all dead and zombie-like and he stumbles back in shock. He trips and nearly breaks his neck on the sink, leaving him bloody and unconscious on the floor. The next couple of minutes is spent watching Claire slowly getting her movement back while the water creeps ever upwards. We see Norman’s hand twitching every once in a while. It’s a very suspenseful scene and the closest the movie gets to coming close to Hitchcock.

              But apparently all ghosts movies need to end with the ghost taking direct revenge. Claire drains the tub and finally gets enough feeling back to crawl out of the tub, whereupon it’s revealed that Norman is gone! There’s this long sequence of a very wet Claire sneaking around the house. She manages to grab the wrong set of car keys and thus has to flee in a pickup truck with a boat attached on a trailer. There’s this sequence where Norman climbs over the boat to the back window of the truck and tries to get at her through the glass. Then we have all of these long, impossible single-take shots that were clearly stitched together digitally but which I’m sure were still a pain in the ass to shoot. The camera circles the truck, going in and out of the smashed windows, it’s very distracting and pulls you out of the scene as you wonder technically how they did that. The effect draws attention to itself in a way that deflates the tension. There’s a sudden stop that causes a board to jump forward and smash through the windscreen from behind, then they’re driving over that bridge and Claire manages to hit 911 moments before the whole thing goes into the lake. Norman starts to drown Claire but then the corpse of the woman he killed comes to life and gets him! Final shot of Claire at a grave in winter, the end.

              I don’t want to give the wrong impression, this is very much a three out of four stars movie. It’s too long with too many misdirects and it lacks a solid supporting cast, but Ford and Pfeiffer are very good in it. I’m not sure if this is the first time I’ve seen him play a bad guy, but by the end I bought it. Pfeiffer gets put through the ringer, and she’s soaked often enough in scenes that there were times when I was really hoping they kept the set warm for her. It’s hard to say how much my knowledge of the movies he was about to make colors my impression that Zemeckis was starting to lose that human touch that had added an extra spark to so many of his previous movies. I can’t fault the film on a technical level, every frame is pretty much immaculate with some amazing blocking and shot composition in the second half. Genuinely got me a couple of times with the whole ‘you close the door and there’s a person behind it’ bit. Not as much CGI as I feared and at least a couple of decent scares, almost none of which involved the ghost. I disagree with those contemporary reviewers who castigated Zemeckis for including the supernatural in his Hitchcock homage, Alfred would never, but I must admit I really would have liked seeing what kind of thriller he would have made at his peak.