****/****
starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Sarah Levy
written by Osgood Perkins, based on the short story by Stephen King
directed by Osgood Perkins
by Walter Chaw Oz Perkins’s The Monkey plays like WWI frontlines poetry. Like something by Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen documenting the birth of irony as a literary device–the only appropriate response to mechanized, impersonal, mass and random death. The house poet for the DAILY MAIL, publishing under the pseudonym “Touchstone” in 1916, wrote about doomed British Captain Nevill’s decision upon his last, suicidal charge to have each of the four battalions under his command kick a soccer ball towards the German lines:
On through the hail of slaughter
Where gallant comrades fall,
Where blood is poured like water,
They drive the trickling ball.
The fear of death before them
Is but an empty name;
True to the land that bore them
The Surreys play the game.
Eighteen years after the end of the War, Edmund Blunden wrote of his experiences at the charnel house that was the Battle of the Somme, “By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.” WWI was fought over the gaining and squandering of a few dozen yards of earth; the loss of life was so obviously senseless and extreme that some literary philosophers, like the great Paul Fussell in his The Great War and Modern Memory, believe the only way for its survivors to deal with the irrationality of it all was to develop a sense of pitch-black irony. Everybody dies, and there’s no reason to it. It’s the ethos driving Apocalypse Now–mad Col. Kilgore’s approach to survival, striding through artillery fire to gauge the surfability of Vietnamese tides.
Everybody dies is also the mantra of The Monkey, which ranks among the finest adaptations of a Stephen King work and is the first to really nail King’s particular variety of dad humour. His is the “gotcher nose” school of gag, punctuated with a spurt of ketchup, maybe, or a chunk of lunchmeat to amplify the horror of it. I read and reread King’s short-story collection Skeleton Crew throughout June of 1985, at 12 years old. Paul Young’s cover of Daryl Hall’s “Everytime You Go Away” was every other song on Top-40 radio and is inextricably intertwined in my sense memory with the short story “The Raft.” There’s a scene in “The Monkey,” one of the collection’s shorter, lighter entries, involving a beloved family dog that has lodged in my brain for 40 years now–almost more so than the terrible mistake I made that summer that disappointed my father enough that I still use it to mark the point he started loving me less. The toy monkey of the story plays the cymbals, like the surveillance monkey of Toy Story 3–like the monkey at the Organ Grinder restaurant that used to be in Denver, who would get a bat to the face if it interrupted the organist mid-performance. I remember the kids in the story tried to stop their monkey from clashing its cymbals with a pillow, resulting in the pillow flying across the room with burn marks branding its sides. It was mildly scary but mostly a funny lark in the vein of “Talking Tina”–the palate-cleanser between heavy-duty stuff like “The Mist” and “Survivor Type.” I didn’t think it was a good candidate for adaptation–and, indeed, it’s one of the last “Skelton Crew” stories to receive one. But it was worth the wait.
I should’ve known that Osgood “Oz” Perkins, the son of movie star Anthony Perkins and model Berry Berenson, would figure it out. Perkins and his brother, Elvis, were essentially orphaned by cruel, historically consequential and dramatic circumstances when their father died from AIDS and, less than 10 years later, their mother was on one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers. It must have felt like the foulest caprice and chaotic misadventure–a family rent by the malignancy of the Reagan era and that same administration’s poisonous birds come home to roost. Oz Perkins’s films have been, to a one, excavations of the uncanniness of that moment when your life is different, and everyone else is pretending to be okay even though your parents aren’t there anymore. He’s the boy Sofia Coppola, in that regard, crafting a body of work along a single theme–a symphony in multiple movements composed around little boys and girls lost, marooned in hazardous waters at too tender an age by mothers and fathers distracted or lost themselves. The Monkey is tone-perfect, aware of the essential silliness of its premise and, contrariwise, aware of the philosophical/theological sophistication of its premise. Christians are fond of crediting God with a benevolent plan in the face of horrifying suffering and cruel atrocity, so why not blame a toy monkey for randomly causing the same? What’s the difference, after all, between a clockmaker with a plan and one that is itself a clockwork? Whatever face you put on it, horrible shit happens and everyone dies.
For the uninitiated, The Monkey is an artifact story: a genie’s-lamp or monkey’s-paw yarn in which a mysterious tchotchke is found, usually in a stall at a foreign bazaar, that, through the new owner’s mishandling (or avarice), proceeds to wreak profound and poetic havoc. There’s typically an accompanying Old Testament message along the lines of the Eleventh Commandment (“Thou Shalt Not Fuck With Shit”), but in The Monkey‘s nihilistic view, there is no justice, there are no rules, and the only unifying principle is that blood has poured like water since the beginning of time. We have no choice but to play the game until it’s our blood watering the cosmic lawn. A “gift” from the absent father (Adam Scott) to twin boys Bill and Hal (both played by Christian Convery as children and Theo James as adults), the Monkey is a drum-playing little simian motherfucker with a detachable brass key in the middle of its back that causes it to rat-a-tat once cranked until someone within its radius of a few square acres dies. Not politely of a heart attack or in their sleep, but explosively and creatively, like someone who’s gotten on the wrong side of Rube Goldberg, or an unfortunate collateral bystander from the Final Destination franchise. The gore, it should be said, is lawless and plentiful, gleeful but not mean: buckets of guts and gallons of blood spilled with good humour and a certain fleet fatalism. Human suffering as desensitized spectacle; the Three Stooges with practical effects, n’est-ce pas? Theatre of grand guignol in the age of Gaza. We can’t seem to stop it. We may even be responsible for it. If you don’t scream-laugh, you’ll kill yourself. That’s the game.
The Monkey is the type of movie you make when you know there’s no recourse to any Lord, either terrestrial or on His gold throne. Bad people live forever in unimaginable wealth and comfort and good people live in fear and die in agony. Tatiana Maslany is phenomenal here as the twins’ long-suffering mother, Lois. She’s sardonic, wry, given to telling her kids that their absentee dad is a piece of shit and that, yes, everyone dies. When their babysitter, Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer), who maybe has just returned from keeping her favourite author tied to a bed in the Colorado Rockies, dies creatively at a Benihana, Lois and the boys respond by having a mad dance party Hal remembers years later as the happiest they ever were as a family. Nothing will un-kill Annie, anyway–why not share a moment with the people you love? Decades pass, and Hal (Theo James), estranged on purpose from his wife and tween son Petey (Colin O’Brien), realizes the Monkey may have returned to his tiny hometown, given a recent rash of creatively repulsive deaths, including that of his aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), who badly misuses a tacklebox before… No, I won’t spoil it. I will simply say that my fave Friday the 13th franchise kill–one presaged in John Frankenheimer’s notorious Prophecy–receives its finest iteration yet, leading to an autopsy-table sequence that didn’t bother me at the time but I’m now finding to be unshakeable.
Did I mention how funny The Monkey is? Its crackerjack timing? How it absolutely nails King’s gift for creating the worst bullies there ever were? Not to mention the coolest mothers, the meanest brothers, the effortless way King evokes details of different periods through not only needle-drops but also brands and patterns of speech. During an especially desperate moment, Hal screams, “We gotta make like eggs and SCRAMBLE,” and it’s so fucking stupid, and also so deadly on point for the character and how he responds to stress, that I wondered if this was something Anthony Perkins used to say when Oz and Elvis were growing up. I don’t know how you make it up, is what I’m saying. I pulled out my battered hardcover of Skeleton Crew and reread “The Monkey” to see if it originated there, and lo, it did not, though it’s quintessential King. What I did discover, though, was a story that seemed less disposable to me as a 51-year-old father of two. As with so much of King’s work, “The Monkey” is a clear metaphor for a parent’s fear that he can’t protect his children from the world, nor from the trauma we inevitably impart upon them like a family heirloom. A toy monkey in a Ralston-Purina box, perhaps, left for your bereaved offspring to find in a forgotten corner of an attic. Today, the original short story reads as sober and a little despairing: Hal is afraid he’s losing his adolescent son, Dennis, and unable to preserve the sweet innocence of his youngest, Petey. It is silly–and the conclusion is ridiculous–but as a grim fable for the devouring of innocence, well, I cried.
Upon rereading the short story for the first time in decades, I am even more amazed at what Perkins has done to preserve its spirit. The Monkey features a brilliant prologue in a curiosity shoppe, a hilarious use of the expression “hot dog!”, and an all-timer of a music cue in Shirley & Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll” after Hal says in a “Wonder Years” voiceover, “I don’t know if every father passes some secret horror onto his kids, but mine sure did.” The sharp-eyed will notice a theatre marquee in the background showing the latest horror film: The Streaming. It’s that kind of movie. The kind that has a “Welcome to” sign for a township called “Casco” that proudly proclaims “Birthplace of Its Locals!” Most of Casco will perish during the course of the film. The Monkey is extremely smart, extremely silly, and, above all, mordantly self-aware of its single, driving theme: shit happens. All the time. You can try to control or redirect it, but shit goes where it wants to go. You can try to protect your loved ones, but they will die eventually. And so will you. Lois says that to her boys one drunken evening before she expires. There’s no dog in the film, thank God, although there is a bus full of cheerleaders. There’s even a Chekhov’s Pistol with a wasp’s nest that functions as a callout to King’s The Shining novel and a set-up for the stupidest/awesomest kill in a movie looking to set some sort of record. It is the perfect movie for our time, the jocular, elbow-to-the-ribs version of the more aggressively mean Terrifier films in which our near-complete loss of humanity in the face of a relentless onslaught of consequence-free abominations is funnelled into a toy monkey two assholes fight over for the right to murder anonymous mobs of innocent strangers and satisfy their personal grievances. As far as why the world sucks, it’s as good an explanation as any.
