John Krasinski

A QUIET PLACE: satisfyingly scary

by
Emily Blunt (left) in A QUIET PLACE

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a more satisfyingly scary movie than A Quiet Place.  Director John Krasinski proves an economical story-teller – with essentially no dialogue, he helps us learn the set-up in  few minutes.  The earth has been overrun by man-eating monsters, who are blind but have a super-acute sense of hearing.  Anyone who makes noise is immediately eaten by a monster.  There aren’t many human survivors, but one family is holding out on their remote farm – a dad (Krasinski), a mom (Krasinski’s real life wife Emily Blunt), a daughter who is eleven or twelve and a son who is a year younger.

They walk only barefoot, speak only in sign language, and have devised ways to do every possible task silently.  However, the mom is pregnant; childbirth and babies tend to be noisy, so there’s a ticking time bomb element to the story.

In fact, the characters (and we) are in a state of intensely heightened alertness during the entire movie – except for when a monster shows up and plunges us into outright terror.  Mercifully, the gore and splatter happen off-screen, but the monster is plenty scary, and it hunts the family members at the closest of quarters and when they are at their most vulnerable.  I saw A Quiet Place in a theater, and the audience stayed in a state of tense silence – like we were all afraid to make any noise by gasping or shrieking.

Each family member blames himself or herself for the loss of the third and youngest child, so there’s also an element of family drama in A Quiet Place.  Krasinski and Blunt are excellent, and the kid actors (Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) are, too.

I’m not a big horror movie fan, but I enjoyed and admired A Quiet Place.

John Krasinski (right) in A QUIET PLACE

Promised Land: so good until the corny ending

by

Promised Land is an engaging drama about the exploitation of natural gas in rural America –  until the corny ending.  Matt Damon and Frances McDormand play a team of corporate road warriors who persuade farmers to lease their land for the fracking.  Based on the experience of his own hometown, the Damon character believes that the American rural way of life has become an unsustainable myth, that small farming communities are doomed without the cash from natural gas.  He believes that he is suckering them into their own salvation.

It’s an “issue movie”of the kind that I often dislike. My day job is in   public policy, and I see more nuance and tradeoffs than usually make it into these movies, which are often too “black hat/white hat” for my taste.  Promised Land doesn’t fall into that trap because Damon’s character and because the locals are not uniformly saintly.  Most of the struggling farmers can’t sign their leases fast enough.  Ken Strunk plays an elected official right out of Mark Twain’s Hadleyburg.  Lucas Black plays a guy who is a puddle of bad choices waiting to be made.  Scoot McNairy (Argo) plays an inarticulate man of firm principles; he’s right, but he doesn’t know why.

Director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Elephant, Paranoid Park, Milk) creates a rural community that is completely authentic without using clichés.   Damon is outstanding.  McDormand, John Krasinski, a frisky Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married, Your Sister’s Sister) and Hal Holbrook are all reliably excellent.

Unfortunately, after navigating through the conflicting values, difficult tradeoffs and shades of gray that are found in real life, the movie takes the easy way out – an improbable ending that is happy for all.  Too bad – a little cynicism would have gone a long way here.