**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Thora Birch, Desmond Harrington, Daniel Brocklebank, Laurence Fox
screenplay by Ben Cort & Caroline Ip, based on the novel After the Hole by Guy Burt
directed by Nick Hamm
BUY @ AMAZON CANADA
by Bill Chambers Sam Mendes, her American Beauty director, has called her the next Marlon Brando; indeed, I wrote in my list of the Top 10 Films of 2001 that I find Thora Birch the most captivating actress working, and I meant it. Her Ghost World performance struck me as a modern parallel to Brando in roles as disparate as Terry Malloy or Don Corleone, not for any more explicit reason than the way the film becomes a living, breathing animal when she's on screen and the fact that she looms large over scenes from which she's absent. The same is true for the British production The Hole, in which she is again the very convincing centre of gravity. She's dynamite, though the movie itself wants for an artist of Mendes's or Terry Zwigoff's calibre to pull it all together.
In The Hole, Birch plays Liz, a private-school student so "in love" with abrasive but exotic American exchange student Mike (Desmond Harrington) that there is something superficial, if not artificial, about it. Her single-minded devotion to winning his heart seems to have less to do with him as a person than it does with her conquering some personal Everest. People tell Liz to give up on Mike, but they're only fuelling her spite, i.e., feeding the monster. With pillowy features that offset a cool yet hypnotic gaze, Birch can suggest an incongruously voluptuous spider-woman; you'd best be on her good side, those green eyes warn us on occasion, and according to The Hole, you might be doomed regardless.
Birch's performance is more poignant than that, however. Somehow, long after our sympathies have shrivelled up, she is able, as Liz, to squeeze another drop of compassion out of the tube: Liz's obsession may be that of a budding sociopath, but it's also a touch primal; we see our weakest moments in it, our insecurities over our own perceived inadequacies. (Birch is again cast opposite someone conventionally beautiful in young Keira Knightley.) The movie stumbles whenever it acts for Birch, as in the overemphatic closing shots, during which we pine for the subtlety of, say, The Omen. Based on a book by Guy Burt, The Hole is an occasionally riveting (and commendably meanspirited–one can almost hear rumoured upcoming U.S. distributor Dimension sharpening their scissors to tone it down) piece of filmmaking, but it isn't an ingenious one: Helmer Nick Hamm telegraphs most developments, and his flashback structure fails to achieve much more than a delay of the inevitable. You wonder if it wouldn't work better in a linear format.
Liz's thing for the American jerk moves her to fix destiny. Although he's besotted with Liz (and cruelly dismissed as too "gay" for her), confidante Martin (Daniel Brocklebank) agrees to arrange a party for Liz, Mike, and their friends Frankie (Knightley) and Geoff (Laurence Fox), respectively, that neither teachers nor parents could disrupt. It is to take place in an abandoned bomb shelter, whose claustrophobic environs Liz believes will force intimacy between her and the captive Mike; Martin will shut them all inside and return to open the door a few days later. And that he does–albeit a lot later than anyone anticipated, Liz tells a police psychologist (Embeth Davidtz). End of act one.
But why is Liz the only one to have emerged from the titular hole and come forward? How to explain her utter dishevelment upon arriving back at school? Hamm sets up a promising multiple-storyteller device–Rashomon hasn't been copped in a while–he's all too quick to abandon: Martin's testimony refutes that of Liz, natch, and The Hole is too eager to set the record straight. The bomb-shelter scenes are extraordinary in their tension and believability but artlessly placed, muffling their impact–there's no sense of revelation to the crosscutting of this "Lord of the Flies" intrigue with the Davidtz character's passive interrogations. There's a hole here, all right, left by the absence of ambiguity, and it's almost too great for the gifted Birch alone to fill.
THE DVD
The Hole is available on DVD in North America as a Region 1 Canadian import under the Séville label. It's a great disc, this "Deluxe Special Edition," with one drawback (two, if you count the slow response time of the menus): The sound, 5.1 in theatres, has been downmixed to 2.0 stereo. While the audio is outstandingly clear and rich in bass, there's a certain atmosphere that's compromised by the elimination of the surround channels. The video is a happier story, as the film's 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer (which can also be cropped on the fly, drastically reducing the width of the letterbox bands for 4:3 TVs, although why anyone would want to butcher the arresting compositions of cinematographer Denis Crossan is beyond me) is glorious, with pinprick-precise detail (shadow and overall) sans edge-enhancement and colours that practically leap off the screen. No captions or subtitle options, alas.
Bonus material includes a nine-minute block of nine deleted/extended scenes (of much poorer picture quality), a few of which flesh out the police-procedural subplot. One omission takes the cake: an epilogue straight out of countless straight-to-tape thrillers, with Thora Birch doing her best Shannon Tweed-cum-Veronica Lake. In addition to a 1-minute animated stills gallery, cast and crew profiles, and trailers for The Hole, The Fourth Angel (Jeremy Irons), Eye of the Beholder, and Mexico City, Hamm provides an excellent feature-length commentary track for the movie proper. If nothing else, he shows his utter preparation in going into the production–nearly every shot is broken down into how it was achieved and its intended effect. Hamm also says that he was gunning for "an American-movie feel," and both the strengths and weaknesses of The Hole lie in the fact that he succeeded.
102 minutes; NR; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo), French DD 2.0 (Stereo); DVD-9; Region One; Séville
