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Cameron Diaz faces a big dilemma in The Box |
Diaz forced to think outside box
THE BOX
Directed by Richard Kelly
Certificate 12a
IF a stranger turned up in your house with a briefcase holding a million in cash and a seemingly empty wooden box with a big red button on top, and told you that if you press the button the cash is yours, your ears would, of course, prick up – and your thumb would no doubt slam down.
But what if you were then told that by pressing the button, you would be responsible for the death of a stranger, someone you have never met, anywhere in the world? Would you still press?
This Cameron Diaz film starts with this interesting question. We meet Norma and Arthur Lewis (Diaz and James Marsden), a seemingly normal couple. Arthur works at Nasa, an optics specialist whose camera lens is on the Viking Mars voyager. Norma is a teacher. We learn that Norma has a deformed foot following a medical accident and (how sweet!) Arthur has designed her a prosthetic foot for her Christmas present.
But then a stranger appears on their doorstep with the box and the offer, and things begin to take a decidedly weird turn for the worse.
The moral dilemma carries a message about altruism, instant gratification, and the thirst for money, and could be a powerful basis for a film. But instead it throws away any weight it had at the beginning by seeping gently into a morass of nonsense. And the sci-fi element of the movie is never explained in any way. Who is controlling this box? We know that it is some kind of superior being, trying to test human kind, but the nuts and bolts are consciously left out. This can often work as a storytelling trick – don’t bother explaining too much about the ghosts and ghouls from beyond (be it the afterlife or outer space), let the viewers’ imagination do it – but here there is simply no explanation at all, just some freaked out-looking side characters whose presence is never explained.
Throw in some suspense-bustingly bad lines, and sadly what starts out with a potentially interesting thriller descends into a dumb-dumb-dumb comment on how it is bad to be selfish and good to be altruistic. |
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