(EW.com) Remaking a landmark film ought to be a perfectly respectable proposition.
After all we see new versions of Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams all the time (whether on stage or screen). What's wrong with doing an updated version of a beloved Hollywood movie In theory nothing yet in practice it seldom works out well. There's something about how movies with their singularity of mood and density of detail imprint themselves on our imaginations that places the prospect of a remake somewhere between a rock and a hard place. Think about it If you follow the original too closely duplicating signature shots or lines of dialogue or acting flourishes then you're stuck in a mode of mindless imitation and what's the point of that People might as well just watch the great version they already know (or for new generations have yet to discover). But if you seriously update the movie in question making a lot of eyebrow raising changes then you risk violating the essence of the original or leaving out too much of what everyone loved about it in the first place. When you get down to it a ''new'' version of a classic is a contradiction in terms.
Carrie the rapturous and terrifying 1976 Brian De Palma thriller based on Stephen King's first novel is a movie that has earned its place as a quirky horror milestone without perhaps ever having quite attained the status of a masterpiece. Yet I personally think it's a great film. There's nothing that compares to its glittery fusion of dreaminess and dread of Cinderella at the prom fantasy and blood bucket horror all mixed up with elements of '70s teensploitation comedy and primally entangled mother daughter tragedy. And what acting Sissy Spacek as the squashed nerd telekinetic high school wallflower Carrie and Piper Laurie as her ragingly repressed Evangelical mom achieved a tremulous power together. And De Palma a prankish virtuoso perched the whole thing on the knife's edge between sincerity and satire. Carrie is a timeless movie because it's both one of the most passionate and most scandalously funny horror films ever made.
So what does one do for a remake encore Kimberly Peirce the gifted director of the new Carrie has gone down what seems on the surface to be a savvy road. She follows De Palma's version quite faithfully evoking everything from his camera angles to his lighting to his flying object F/X to his gleeful staging of mean girl antics. At the same time she offers just enough tweaks and updated details to present the material in a new way.
The fabled shower room scene in which the na ve sheltered Carrie White (Chlo Grace Moretz) gets her first period and is shocked into thinking that she's dying now has an added fillip of cruelty Chris the most hateful of the girls doesn't just pelt Carrie with tampons and shout ''Plug it up '' She records the whole ordeal on her smartphone and then posts the video. In a neat reversal Chris and her best friend the popular but far more empathetic Sue (who feels so guilty about what happened that she gets her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom) are both portrayed against type Nice girl Sue is played by Gabriella Wilde who looks like a vintage snooty princess whereas the awful Chris is made into a pensive bohemian punk by Portia Doubleday. And Carrie's mother (Julianne Moore) a fundamentalist fanatic who tries to cut Carrie off from the world is now herself a cutter who pinpricks her own flesh in secret. Moore makes her fierce guilt tripping and scary but not in the way that Laurie did almost religiously possessed.
Despite being 40 years old now the Carrie story lives quite comfortably in the 21st century. Here's the problem though. The original film had King's ingenious plot with its fusion of innocence and cruelty and that subliminal wink of demonic takeover but it also had De Palma's voluptuous operatic style which gave the story the quality of a daydream turned nightmare. When you take away that style and serve up the plot fairly straight as Peirce does here we seem to be watching a Carrie that's been flattened robbed of its over the top emotional extravagance.
Given the challenge of revamping Spacek's brilliant shivery nerd turned avenger performance Chlo Grace Moretz does a creditable job. In stiff hair and lumpish clothing she's very much the geek outsider (though today there's a much greater context for geeks as heroines) and the emotions seem to bleed through her ghostly lunar pale skin. Yet the way Peirce has updated Carrie White without making any overt changes to the character is to portray her as a little less clueless a little less pathetic a little more defiant. She's now a cute bright painfully shy girl who sees herself (wrongly) as a loser. Before she was a total walking blob of misery and dysfunction. That slight tonal shift robs the story of its masochistic edge.
Of course Carrie isn't merely a fable of adolescent agony. It's all about Carrie's revenge once she's subjected to the most diabolical practical ''joke'' in movie history. Carrie's telekinetic powers driven by the rage she represses allowed De Palma to orchestrate a senior prom apocalypse that was pure filmmaking mastery. Peirce stages the prom as a prosaic rerun without a lot of gaudy inspiration. And it's here that the real problem with redoing a classic reveals itself. Sure a lot of famous movies are timeless yet they're also rooted in their time. In the original Carrie Spacek's character seemed to be channeling something creepy and larger than life maybe it was even the underworld. But now we're a lot more accustomed to seeing movie characters mold their destiny through special effects and since Peirce films the climax in a rather depersonalized shoot the works way Carrie comes close to seeming like an especially alienated member of the X Men team. She blows stuff up real good in a way that would make the devil or Bruce Willis proud. Grade B
See the original story at EW.com.
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