What Lies Beneath

"No, really," you ask when considering whether or not to plunk down hard-earned cash to watch Robert Zemeckis direct Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfieffer, "what lies beneath?" Well, the story teases us with twists and turns of the mysterious spirit world and malicious reality. Michelle Pfeiffer spends most of her time looking pale and horrified. We've also got a fairly effective book of witchcraft. And, of course, the score is full of creepy string glissandi punctuated by brass raspings. "What Lies Beneath" all the hype is a film directed with surety, acted with some amount of finesse, and presented with a refreshingly straight-up desire to pin an audience to its seats for two hours. In this, it succeeds.

So why are Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford in this movie? Aren't horror films the province of the up-and-coming and the never-came? The answer (at least the part not named Robert Zemeckis) lies in the plot, which is an odd hybrid of John Updike and Shirley Jackson. Like so many Updike couples, Norman and Claire Spencer are rich WASPy New England academics who possess everything anyone could want except happiness. In an attempt to achieve this elusive emotion, Norman Spencer makes a Serious Mistake. As in Updike, the mistake comes back to haunt them both. As in Jackson, the word "haunt" is taken literally. It takes serious star weight to pull a combination of essentially unrelated fictional milieus like this off, and Zemeckis has brought it in.

Our man Ford, headlining, delivers a convincing performance as the stolid, studious husband.with a Dark Secret, slipping almost imperceptibly from perfectly supportive to increasingly agitated until you realize that he's a much different man than he was at the start of the film. His leonine growl, used to such romantic and heroic effect in so many films, is here infused with an edge of menace that is as unexpected to a veteran Ford-watcher as it is refreshing.

Pfeiffer, however, has the bulk of the work in this film, as Zemeckis' camera spends much of its time watching her facial architecture for almost imperceptible yet telling brightenings and droopings. Neither Zemeckis nor Pfeiffer quite reach a rhythm at doing this for the first half-hour or so of the film, resulting in a halting, halfhearted exposition. Once director and star settle down, however, Pfeiffer shows why she's in the movie. She acts primarily through her face in this film, lightening and fading and smudging and drawing pale, and does a darn good job at it. Furthermore, Pfeiffer really can project the hollow, ominous feeling of someone trying to maintain public amiability while struggling with private fear, which pretty much drives the movie. Finally, it would be remiss not to note that if your camera is going to stay on someone's face through an entire film, you could do a lot worse than to select Michelle Pfeiffer as your subject; her essential grace makes her an extremely appropriate subject for the horror wringer Zemeckis puts her through.

You might not think of Zemeckis, whose credits include "Forrest Gump" and "Back to the Future," as an exceptionally good choice to direct a horror film. You would be wrong. Apart from a few dumb little directorial punctuations, Zemeckis directs with the art that conceals art, as much as you can in a horror film. Zemeckis' essential confidence in the story and his ability leads to a film that, after the previously mentioned rough patch, feels as sure of itself as any horror flick in recent memory. The camerawork leads us along straightforwardly, to make the events that unfold even more jarring. Zemeckis uses music sparingly, and his sound effects are as understated as they are important. By these methods, Zemeckis creates a sense of space around his characters, a sort of suspended reality in which anything can happen. There can be no better atmosphere in which to be brutally scared.

It is true that Pfeiffer makes some decisions, as many horror-movie heroines do, which could be described as "lacking in the self-preservation instinct," as they provide fictionally necessary but Pfeifferically unnecessary chances for danger to creep up on her once more. These lapses into stupidity grate, although they are not as egregious as those of many other horror films. It could also be argued that the Spencers are a little more annoyingly Updikey than anyone needs or wants them to be. Yet these are minor errors in what is, after the first thirty minutes, a good, good work. (Refreshingly, it's almost gore-free as well.) If you want a fright fest this summer, the course you must follow is clear: peer deep into the dark heart of your wallet, slowly pull out seven bucks, and give them to a theater to get a glimpse of "What Lies Beneath."

WHAT LIES BENEATH'S LIES, BENEATH!

After the effects of "What Lies Beneath" wore off, I wrote Susan Abbott, a Vermonter and famous artist who nevertheless receives the Spam-O-Matic for some reason, with a coupla questions about whether anything in that movie could actually have geographically happened. Now, the truth can be told, as it is below in unedited e-mail form!

ALM: Is there an "artsy village off 7 (?)" called Adamant? Does it contain a store called "The Sleeping Dog"?

SA: Adamant is a microscopic village off of the County Road, 1 hour south central from Route 7. Artsy? It contains the Adamant Food Coop, a modest country store that sells local eggs, milk, packaged goods, etc.; an illegally zoned Toyota dealership; a summer music school, which attracts students and teachers from around the country; but Adamant has no movie stars, visible artists or psychopathic killers. It does have a lovely pond and fishing hole, one of Colin's favorites. That's it. I don't think tiny Adamant could support another store, even one called "The Sleeping Dog."

ALM: Are there any lakes you know of that look like Lake Elmore but have a semi-rotted white-painted steel bridge traversing them?

SA: Lakes (modestly called "ponds" with typical Vermonter understatement) are generally too wide to support a bridge. Elmore Pond, where you went sailing, is way too wide to have a bridge. A semi-rotted bridge would be replaced by the practical Vermonter, though an old steel bridge in good repair but with character would probably be retained (as are the Montpelier steel bridges).

ALM: Does U-Vt have something called the DuPont Chair in biochemistry? Does it pay the approximately $120,000 Harrison Ford would need to maintain his extensive holdings in this film?

SA: You'll have to call U of VT about that chair. I can't imagine a chair funded for that amount of money at a state college, though U of VT is one of the more expensive state colleges. If Ford came up as a hippie in the 60's he could have bought 200 acres and a farmhouse cheap; maybe he's slowly fixed it up with the help of Martha Stewart over the years.

ALM: Finally, [the always-estimable] Robert [Kahn] and I were having a little discussion as we exited the theater about whether Michelle Pfeiffer is stressed or just stupid in the final scene. So we decided the best course of action was to ask the person we knew who was closest to Pfeiffer's situation, i.e., a friend's mom living in Vermont. If you were fleeing a killer in a pickup truck and your cell phone suddenly activated itself halfway across a bridge, would you stop the pickup truck to call 911, knowing that someone who wanted to kill you was in, to say the least, hot pursuit?

SA: Last time I was in a similar situation, I tried to use my plug-in car phone, which I got for possible help if I break down while on solitary trips to New York or DC, rather than for driving around Vermont at night (could walk this state safely border to border without a cell phone). You don't see many cell phones up here; only in anomalous hot spots of wealth like Stowe would you see an ascot-sporting denizen talking into his chin. It still is a rarity to see a rude person here having a private conversation in a public place.

But I digress; the last time I tried to use my car phone while being chased by a homicidal maniac, I too was in the middle of a metal bridge, though in good repair (see above), and as usual I couldn't remember my roving number. I accelerated and ended up crashing into the Adamant Food Coop, where the helpful sales person and I fended off the pursuing maniac by hurling our Birkenstocks through his windshield. He woke up all the sleeping dogs in the village as he speeded back to the New Hampshire border.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what having an e-mail list on which you send out movie reviews is all about. Stuff like that didn't happen all that often, but man was it fun when it did.

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