***½/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Judy Greer, Portia Doubleday, Julianne Moore
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
directed by Kimberly Peirce
by Walter Chaw If you were to boil down Brian DePalma's
work, at least his earlier work, into a few ideas, you'd land on the way he took
Hitchcock's subterranean perversions and made them perversion perversions,
transforming pieces and suggestions into themes and declarations. Looking at DePalma's Carrie today, what's
there is a clear attempt–often successful–to elevate B-movie tropes to the status high art, or high pulp: What Godard did to gangster films, DePalma did to Hitchcock, turning the
already formal into formalism. When DePalma was at his best, his movies
evoked in daylight what Hitchcock inspired in shadow. Of its many technical innovations, his Carrie, an
adaptation of Stephen King's not-very-good but vibe-y debut novel, was aided immeasurably by pitch-perfect casting: Sissy
Spacek, P.J. Soles, John Travolta, Amy Irving, and Nancy Allen. Hip then, it's hip
still–and sexy as hell, as befitting a story that's ultimately about a girl's
sexual awakening and, let's face it, really bangin' first orgasm. On prom
night, no less. What could be more American?
Kimberly Peirce's Carrie isn't
sexually perverse like DePalma's. Its sexiness is entirely the dewy kind–the
difference between porn and couple's porn, if you will. Both will get you off,
but there's less guilt attached to the latter. I hated the idea of Peirce for this
remake–I thought Boys Don't Cry was didactic and kitschy, on
the nose if not nearly as on the nose as getting her to do another
abused-teenager movie. Except that Peirce's Carrie does something
DePalma's doesn't do nearly so well: it describes Carrie's headspace, so that her
telekinesis becomes expressionistic. Her power is an extension of her as she
explores it late at night, alone in her bedroom–a way that she becomes, as she
calls it, "a whole person," at last. Peirce even manages to understand
Carrie's chief tormentor Kris (Portia Doubleday), demonstrating a high level of
empathy that allows this new adaptation to be something more than a man's version of a
girl's revenge movie. Take how the two pictures open: DePalma's with a
volleyball game transitioning into a soft-porn push-in to a girl's locker room
(he'd do this same Psycho thing, with more fetish if you can imagine (and you don't have to), in Dressed to Kill). It's naughty, let's face
it. Peirce's volleyball game is played in a pool, and the subsequent locker-room explosion allows a wider tableau for the girls' cruel
reaction to Carrie's first period and, with it, the possibility for balance–and
for multiple identifications, including feminine body horror.
For the uninitiated, Carrie (Chloë Grace Moretz) was raised by religious wackadoo and single mom Margaret (Julianne Moore, in the role she was born to play), who has kept all knowledge of the birds and the bees a secret in hopes
that sin will pass her by. It doesn't. And just as her body blossoms into
womanhood, so too flowers a latent telekinetic ability that finally allows Carrie
to exert some control, some power, in her life. Distressed by her own bullying of
hapless Carrie, basically-good girl Sue Snell (Gabriella "thank God she's 24 because I'd be going to jail" Wilde) rejects her Mean Girl bestie Kris and
asks jock boyfriend Tommy (Ansel Elgort, who wins the film in a brief
getting-ready-for-prom montage) to ask poor Carrie to the prom. Alas, Kris and
bad-boy boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell, who has not one thing on Travolta–especially
that introductory sequence set to Martha Reeves & the Vandellas) hatch a plan to humiliate Carrie at said prom, and by the end of the night poor Carrie
White, painted red with pig's blood, pulls a Samson and tears down the whole
fucking house.
Where Margaret was
essentially an evil, evangelical witch in DePalma's film, she's a more
dangerous sort of nut in Peirce's: a fundamentalist so askew that she gives
birth alone while praying for death. Carrie 2013 resists the instinct
to vilify, to reach for loud, screeching hysteria as a feminine-madness catch-all. Consider
the same moment in both films where Margaret declares to a polite neighbour that
"we live in godless times," how in the DePalma it's as Margaret is
proselytizing and asking for a donation, while in this one she's humiliated, surreptitiously cutting herself. If it's still hysteria, it's of the more
introverted, self-directed kind–the maelstrom is inside this Margaret, and she's
put it into Carrie. Margaret is no longer interloper but shut-in, a
quieter infection. Or how
about the poetry-class sequence that inverts the writer of the verse, making
Tommy the critic, the white knight of a slightly different sort who recognizes
that the teacher, more than a harmless blowhard, is a frustrated old
man teaching a classroom full of nubile girls, right on the verge.
At the centre, though, is Moretz, who, along
with Elle Fanning and Saoirse Ronan, offers a bright, shining hope for the future–and the
present, as it happens. She's heartbreaking in this role. Her fear, her
nervousness, her embarrassment, and that moment where Tommy asks her to the prom
(the second time) and all the world…floats in happy sympathy. There's
more purpose in this Carrie; like the best of King's writing, as it
happens, it's not obvious that the whole thing isn't a metaphor for
trauma. It's not a B-movie at all–not prurient, it's deadly serious, and when
Carrie erupts, as Carrie must, it's archetype, not circus. The irony of
it is that DePalma's film shares the view of Carrie as a freak; Peirce's
sees her as a little girl lost, eaten alive by the burden of fanaticism, class,
beauty, biology. The DePalma is about Sue and Kris, the Peirce is about Carrie herself–and
therein lies all the difference.
“The DePalma is about Sue and Kris, the Peirce is about Carrie herself–and therein lies all the difference.”
That line by itself makes me want to see this version. Even King’s novel, I think, over-emphasizes the freakdom of Carrie and her mom, not their humanity.
Thank you for keeping sexism out of your review. The rest of the bunch are an awful lot.
Well, aside from the jailbait comment.
I’m really of two minds on Carrie’s casting. It’s the third version of the story, wouldn’t it be high times to actually cast a woman that doesn’t look like, well, like Grace-Moretz? Pigs blood for a pig does suggest overweight…
Another remake. God stop already
With all due respect to Walter and Pauline Kael, I never got the theory that the book was second-rate crapola which DePalma turned into art. The book could have used some editing (Sue looks out her window, sees the school burning, and arrives something like an hour later) but the writing was insightful and inventive (even Kris and Billy were well-drawn characters). DePalma cartoonized it (that moment where Tommy and his friends start talking fast-WTF?) not to mention made a cut-rate version, probably due to budget limitations (In the book Carrie didn’t stop with the school) and it wasn’t even scary. It only took two more novels for me to burn out on Stephen King, and I also fail to get the nation’s unending worship of his shtick, but “Carrie” remains a sweet intro.
I remember the book being pretty smarmy and smartass. Things that stick out to me is how the gym teacher got a rush of satisfaction from slapping Carrie and Chris prided herself on never achieving orgasm with her lover. (I’m convinced that it’s a pervasive male fantasy that teenage boys can’t satisfy their teenage girlfriends sexually). And that there was a letter near the end filled with grammatical errors and spelling errors because it was written by a little kid or a backwoods retarded person or something.
Anyway, filled with stuff that shows how much better the author is toward his characters and toward his material. Perhaps part of the reason that DePalma seemed such a good fit for the novel is that he accepts that smarminess and goes full-throttle with it. I think I like CARRIE, but it took me a while to warm up to DePalma in general for that specific reason. I’m not sure how to feel about the build-up to the pail of blood, the locker room scene, or the shock ending. I have pretty mixed feelings about all of them. My feelings toward his outdated editing techniques like the fast motion and the split screen are even more complicated. He really, like, has no interest or compassion for other human beings except as cinematic constructs. Describing the film as being about Sue and Kris sounds pretty accurate to me. Maybe that’s subversive, to make a bullying film about Carrie White. Empathizing with her sort of sounds like the easy way to go.
Nonetheless, I’d definitely say that CARRIE ranks below DRESSED TO KILL and BLOW OUT and I simply prefer Sissy Spacek in 3 WOMEN and BADLANDS though her performance here is equally fantastic. (Mmm, if I ever get to realize that fantasy of mine about opening up my own semi-revival theater like the New Beverly, we gotta have a Sissy Spacek night).
I’m cautious about this movie, but you have me intrigued. De Palma’s CARRIE is my favorite horror movie ever. As far as I’m concerned, it’s full of compassion. I haven’t read King’s novel, but the original film works because it’s strictly and profoundly about injustice. It’s in Carrie White’s headspace insofar as it’s dealing with the futility of being an innocent person in a cruel and nihilistic universe, which was a profound way to register with teenage audiences.
y’know what else is Obama’s fault? your depression.
now delete this comment real quick now before anyone sees…you fucking baby.
Good one. Yeah, I deleted your earlier comments because they actually insulted anybody who might’ve identified with what Walter wrote more than they insulted Walter, and because this is my carpet that I pay for and I decide who gets to shit on it. You’re a real fuckin’ loser, you know that, right?