THE WICKER MAN

By: Rachel Reitsleff
Date: Tuesday, September 05, 2006

To be fair to writer/director Neil LaBute, he had nothing to do with PULSE. However, between that poor remake of a decent Japanese horror film and now LaBute's notably inferior reimagining of 1973's classic THE WICKER MAN, genre fans may understandably feel a little pummeled right about now.

What made the first WICKER MAN, written by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Robin Hardy, so memorable beyond some startling plot twists was that it really had a sense of wonder that kept pace with the tension the filmmakers felt a fascination with the pagan world they depicted and shared it with the viewer. In the remake, screenwriter/director Neil LaBute has tweaked these elements into something that feels like, er, a lot of hooey, to put it politely. Apart from a vague feeling of outrage (if you try, you can think of a real-world situation that LaBute might be using as a basis for analogy, but it's a real stretch), here we get the feeling that the filmmaker doesn't believe a word of it and isn't much interested, either, apart from giving all of it a good look. He succeeds in this, but appearances only count for so much.

Transplanted to the U.S. for this edition, THE WICKER MAN follows California police officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage), who takes an extended sabbatical after failing to save people involved in a horrific accident. When Edward's old flame Willow Woodward (Kate Beahan) sends a letter pleading for help in locating her missing daughter, who Willow fears has been kidnapped, Edward goes to Willow's home town of Summersisle, an isolated community on an island in Puget Sound. The townsfolk are decidedly odd and certainly hiding something ...

Anybody who saw and understood what made the original WICKER MAN rock will wince as soon as Edward brings up his relationship with Willow, but this is simply the first of many ill-conceived twists that serve to turn the new WICKER MAN into '70s-style tripe that would be camp if it rose to the occasion. However, the center of the film is so repetitious that it's not even funny when it's trying to be there's a sameness to Edward's encounter with the Summersisle women that gets rote swiftly.

There's also the issue of Cage's interpretation and LaBute's direction of him. For a long stretch, Edward is so grim as to be stylized. Then, when he starts interacting with the peculiar Summersisle residents, the character switches to a jovial quasi-naturalism. It appears as though perhaps Cage and/or LaBute are putting forth the notion that Edward's normalcy surfaces when challenged by his surroundings, but since all of the other actors are now stylized, it seems artificial rather than illuminating.

There are some genuine efforts to pay homage to the original WICKER MAN Edward's first name and Willow Woodward's last name, for example, are a clear tip of the hat to original leading man Edward Woodward but there's also a sense of playing 52 pick-up with the story's foundations. It's emblematic of what's wrong here that the figure played by Christopher Lee the first time around is now portrayed by Ellen Burstyn; gender issues aside (and the new version is full of them in a way the old was not), Burstyn is a fine and authoritative actress, but she's a little too thoughtful for the visceral purposes of the role.

Knowing LaBute's work and the major plot twist of WICKER MAN, it's understandable why it was felt that he was right for the material, but the new movie doesn't believe in its own universe. The ending packs some reflexive punch, but here the destination most assuredly does not justify the journey.