Ghost stories are, for the most part, stories about the past. Someone lived here and though they are long gone, something of them remains. Or, something very bad happened here long ago and the restless spirits of those caught up in it are unable to move on. Every now and then you’ll get one that puts a bit of a different spin on it, but ghost stories usually come down to solving the mystery of what happened long ago that keeps the presence or presences haunting a particular place from moving on.
And in that sense, The Changeling is, for most of its duration, a classic ghost story. It’s very much about the past, not just in its story, but also how it tells its story, and in the signifiers of the time period in which it was made. When it’s in classic ghost story mode, it works quite well, but when the focus shifts elsewhere, it stumbles in the home stretch.
John Russell is a pianist and composer on vacation with his wife and daughter in snowy upstate New York. Their car has broken down and they’re pushing it off to the side of the road so John can find a phone and call for a tow. But spirits seem high and everyone seems to be making the best of it. John spots a phone booth, and his wife and daughter occupy themselves with a snowball fight on the shoulder of the highway. But what this means is that they don’t see another car swerve to avoid a semi truck and plow right through them. All John can do is watch from the phone booth, horrified.
Some months later, John’s relocated to Seattle to take a position on the music faculty at a local university. He’s still adjusting, still breaks down into tears sometimes. Everyone is sympathetic. He’s looking for a house to rent until he puts something more permanent together, and an acquaintance puts him in touch with the local historical society, who have a property they can lease to him. Someone from the society shows him around what is referred to as the Carmichael estate. It’s huge, palatial and sprawling, with a wonderful music room. It hasn’t been occupied in about twelve years, and the previous occupants left some things behind. Books, mostly. Truth be told, it’s probably too much for one person, and so John finds himself rattling around in this gigantic house. Just him and his grief.
Him, his grief, and mysterious noises in the middle of the night. Doors that open and close by themselves.
And for at least the first two-thirds of the film, does a pretty good job of being a ghost story in the gothic tradition. A lot of little things do the work here - doors opening and closing by themselves, mysterious banging noises, closed-up rooms thick with cobwebs, all set in this enormous old house, dark wood, a vertiginous central staircase, stained glass, a seemingly endless warren of rooms and hallways. Performances are a little mannered as befits when it was made, but not so as to be distracting. It’s more just a rhythm and pace to the dialogue that you really don’t hear much anymore, and it’s tempting to say that the house is the real star of the film. That might be going a bit far, but this is one of those films where the long, dark silence of a big old house is interrupted by small, strange things, like jabs at your calm.
And so the house does a lot to sell it. It sits in the middle of a bunch of bare, leafless trees, skeletal in the middle of Washington state’s lush evergreens, it’s all big empty rooms and long stretches of corridor that the film uses very much to its advantage with continuous pans and long Steadicam shots, the camera gliding through the mansion like the ghost itself. The soundtrack is all classical music, quivering strings and dissonant piano - it’s not subtle at all but it’s also rarely overbearing. The tendency toward long shots of the mansion’s interior is offset by a clipped, almost brusque editing style where one scene will crash right into another. It’s jarring, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not - it creates at sense of uneasiness and temporal dislocation at times, but other times it feels sloppy, like a scene crudely edited out.
And this does, to a degree, extend into the narrative - relationships between characters develop quickly, events move really fast (sometimes defying plausibility) and some characters are whisked out of the story immediately after being introduced. It’s a little on the longer side, but doesn’t really feel like it until the third act when the focus shifts. And it’s this shift that I think represents the biggest problem the film has. John devotes himself to uncovering whatever happened in this house so long ago to leave a restless spirit inhabiting it, and it ultimately abandons the moody, tense ghost story of the first two acts to spend too much time focusing on a cover-up and conspiracy driving the mysterious events of the rest of the movie. Ghosts are typically restless spirits that are the result of some past tragedy or injustice a spirit that can’t rest, and that’s fine, but what should be a final revelation, a coming together of all of the pieces and the discovery of actual proof of this horrible secret ends up getting tangled up in something closer to a political thriller, and it kills the momentum and the atmosphere pretty quickly just when it should be tightening up. It almost feels like what should have been the whole movie got compressed into the first two acts. What’s more, the exposition starts getting pretty clumsy in the third act -there are more than a few instances throughout where people tell instead of (or worse, in addition to) showing, but there’s a lot of it at the end, and things start getting muddled, happening just for the sake of happening without really fitting into a cohesive narrative as well
Had it stayed the course, I think it would have been very good, but as it is it does feel like it sort of sputters to an ending. It feels very much of its time and so it does threaten to feel quaint, but when it works, it works very well in a mode that still has a lot of life left in it, even if it has been left behind for more bombastic efforts. I think it’s a good argument for old-fashioned ghost stories still having some life left in them. Well, at least it is when it's focusing on the ghost story.
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
No comments:
Post a Comment