Movie review: The Mist

by John P. Meyer

The Twilight Zone meets Cthulhu in Frank Darabont's pitch dark rendering of a Stephen King study in mob psychology.

I was excited to hear that The Mist was being made into a movie, because it has long been one of my personal favorite Stephen King stories; it's basically a monster tale in which the monsters - rather than hanging around on the thematic periphery - get to come out and play, both early and often. When I then learned that Frank Darabont was going to be directing I was even more thrilled, because I consider Mr. Darabont the single best interpreter of Stephen King material for the screen. Having first latched onto King's novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" back in '94 and turned it into cinema gold (under a title that drops the "Rita Hayworth" clause), he followed up in '99 with the Oscar nominated The Green Mile. Both of these written works offer loads of raw material for character development, which aspect Mr. Darabont exploited by leaving the stories pretty much alone and casting great and charismatic actors in lead roles: Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in Shawshank; Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan in Mile. Following behind the Darabont duo of directorial efforts, my next favorite adaptation of King's fiction for the screen is The Dead Zone (1983), which - if you refrained from reading the credits - you'd have a tough time recognizing as the handiwork of one D. Cronenberg.

[No, I haven't forgotten about Stanley K.'s The Shining. It's certainly a good film, but it has more to do with Kubrick than with King; it's a case study in how one great artist (or perhaps two, if you count Nicholson's immersion in the Jack Torrance role) can take the work of another and change it into something with an entirely different cachet than its source material.]

The Mist can be said to represent a new dimension in horror films: specifically, an alternate one. The story is very '50's sci-fi: scientists working in a secret military facility are tampering with the dang space-time continuum, and dag nabbit if they haven't gone and created a rift in it, allowing all sorts of denizens of some other, crueler dimension (if such can be imagined) into ours. What gives this thing added punch, both in terms of creepiness and cinematic plausibility, is the fact that the inter-dimensional entities enter our little corner of the dimensional universe shrouded in a heavy fog-like mist. (You'll recall John Carpenter's The Fog, which featured bloodthirsty undead pirates scuttling about within a shroud of mist; trust me when I tell you that the entities occupying this meteorological inversion layer make those guys look like meddlesome girl scout cookie salesfolk: "Sorry, I don't need any abdominal sword piercings today, try next door.")

Our story begins as an epic thunderstorm rolls in off the lake of an isolated Maine community and sends a tree smashing into the studio window of a paperback book cover artist named David Drayton (Thomas Jane), who lives there with his wife Stephanie and young son Billy (Kelly Collins Lintz, who has only a small part in the events to come; and Nathan Gamble, who has a rather large one). But the smashed studio and the ruined commissioned artwork turns out to be the least of David Drayton's worries...

The morning after the storm, Drayton makes up a list of supplies he'll need in town and then kisses the wife goodbye and loads up Billy (along with neighbor Brent Norton, played by the superlative and under-utilized Andre Braugher) into the vintage Toyota Land Cruiser; on the way out, they notice an ominous fog bank descending the slopes of the far lakeshore but pay it little heed - probably just some unusual weather phenomenon, they decide; but how odd that it's coming off he property occupied by the secret Army headquarters of Project Arrowhead, which everyone in town knows about but no one has a clue as to what goes on there behind the front gates.

Pulling up to the grocery store ("The Food House"), Drayton and Billy and Norton make it inside just in advance of the fog bank - and a crazed individual who's sprinting as if for his life right behind them. It's Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn), and he keeps hollering about "something in the mist" that grabbed his friend right before his eyes and spirited that luckless individual away to parts unknown. Everyone in the store just assumes his imagination is working overtime, as the formula for these sorts of tales dictates - but when a convoy of Army vehicles with emergency lights blazing and sirens blaring screams by, they decide to stay put for a while - just in case. And then the power goes out.

All Hell breaks loose (or a recognizable part of it, anyway) when a testosterone-addled crew of local yokels decides to raise the back door loading gate and send out a volunteer to clear the plugged exhaust vent for the store's diesel generator. This turns out to be a bad idea whose outcome can be summed up with "screw the generator - just for God's sake keep the door closed."

Speaking of God, one of the shoppers stranded in the store is local eccentric Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), whose fundamentalist Biblical ramblings the townsfolk have come to accept as simply a part of her personality: off-kilter, but fundamentally harmless. When she declares that the evil forces surrounding their refuge represent Satan's minions, and that what we have here are the gen-you-wine New Testament Revelationist end times, no one actually takes her very seriously. Yet.

At this point the forted-up shoppers divide into two camps: those who believe there is something malevolent waiting for them outside the store (which group consists primarily of the half-dozen guys who saw what happened in the back room), and those who think this whole thing can be reasonably explained by natural events (read: "dead men walking"). Norton, a rational New York lawyer, soon convinces a few blustery souls that their best bet for ending this ridiculousness would be to amble out into the fog, hop into a car and drive away, sending back help for those remaining in the store. And so he (and his followers) do just that.

One of this group volunteers to have a rope tied around his waist so those remaining in the store can play it out and gauge his progress, hopefully getting a tug from him when he successfully reaches his truck. Unfortunately for this worthy, the event soon turns into an episode of "Sportfishing for Body Parts."

I'm not going to tell you exactly what kinds of monsters gradually make their appearance as The Food House quickly becomes a last-ditch bastion against... well... everything out there, but I will say that the SFX realizations of the various beasties are exceedingly well done. The fate awaiting those who are... um... "touched" by these creatures are excruciatingly grim. (And diabolically inventive.)

Those who have read the novella will recall that it has one of those inconsequential endings that leaves the reader wondering whether anyone will make it out alive; in terms of the movie (for which Mr. Darabont wrote an entirely original ending) this will not be an issue.

The final scenes of the film are truly otherworldly, as the battered Land Cruiser creeps slowly forward down abandoned highways, piercing the mist with its roof-mounted fog lamps, its stunned occupants glimpsing Lovecraftian beings whose cyclopean vastness renders them oblivious to the ant-like humanity passing below. Credit Mark Isham for the most effective marriage of music to imagery I've experienced in a film this year; he channels Dead Can Dance to transport you to a sonic realm both strangely familiar and utterly alien.

In terms of the players, Mr. Jane (of The Punisher fame) performs ably as a steadfast father and generally brave individual who adapts as well as possible to an inconceivably desperate situation; Marcia Gay Harden appalls as the idiot savant evangelist who knows how to milk the circumstances for all they're worth; Toby Jones (as Ollie) steals a good part of the show as a mild-mannered store clerk who literally comes to the rescue in a time of crisis; and Frances Sternhagen (as Irene) reminds us what courage and resolve in the face of insanity really look like. Laurie Holden serves as eye candy distraction for Drayton and surrogate mother to Billy; there's a poignant melancholy to the mutual attraction she shares with Drayton, since both of them understand that nothing can possibly come of it.

Just a couple of words about the ending: don't you dare give it away, or Stephen King will hang you by the neck until you are dead - and he can use my rope.

GOOD QUESTION: "What the hell were those tentacles even attached to?" - loading dock incident participant

NOT THE OLD TESTAMENT ONE, THEN: "I just don't think he's the bloodthirsty asshole you make him out to be." - Irene to Mrs. Carmody re. God

GIMME THAT OLD TIME RELIGION: "Stoning people who piss you off is perfectly O.K. Don't they do it in the Bible?" - Irene to Mrs. Carmody, after beaning her with a can of soda