The 2013 film Prisoners almost escaped my notice, but the casting, which includes Jake
Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman, Viola Davis and Paul Dano, eventually caught my
attention and I bought the DVD.
I didn’t know the previous work of the
director Denis Velleneuve, but Prisoners was shot by the British cinematographer Roger Deakin, who is a long time
favourite of mine.
(Mind you, I went to see Transcendence
mainly because it was directed by Wally Pfister, who has shot Christopher
Nolan’s films so brilliantly. Big
mistake.) I can see why
these gifted actors took their roles in Prisoners, seeing the opportunity to chew plenty of scenery, and not the ‘coarse acting’ type, but the
chance to portray almost
unbearable anguish and rage.
And I imagine they are all pleased with their work. I was more pleased with the acting than
I was with the film as a whole.
Prisoners is
an earnest film. And
an ambitious one. It seems
to want to build on David
Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac, with Gyllenhaal
playing another dedicated pursuer of truth. In Zodiac he was a
journalist. Here he is a cop, Detective Loki. The zodiac appears, as tattoos, alongside
mazes and other mystical symbols.
But these suggest a deeper depth than the film actually delivers. This is not a David Fincher
movie.
Of course we can make connections between
the wickedness of the abductor, who takes two young girls, one from the Dover family (Jackman is the father) and one from their friends, the
Birches (Viola Davis is the mother), and the subsequent behaviour of members of the two
families. There are a number of
prisoners here, some physically captive, some emotionally, some
psychologically, some imprisoned mistakenly. We see that people’s previous evil acts
effect their children’s children.
We can see a savior, the detective who bears a half hidden eight-pointed
star tattoo on his neck, a symbol that connects (in some arcana) with baptism
and the role of Noah saving eight human beings in the ark. But he also seems to wear a
Masonic ring, which has nothing to contribute to his character, or to the
film. He is called Loki,
presumably after the mischievous Nordic God. Detective Loki maybe many things, but he is surely not
a mischief maker. So is this
simply a red herring?
Maybe we are tempted to
become prisoners of our own expectations,
hoping for deep significance, but being ultimately disappointed.
And what are we left with at the end? Maybe simply the banal thought
that murder can make monsters – of the bereaved – and the question; are such
victims responsible for their
subsequent ‘fallen’ criminal actions? Well, yes, of course we are. We are all responsible for our actions and grief is
not a divine madness that excuses criminality. Our subsequent actions are not inevitably
consequent. We really
ought to know by now that torture is always wrong, and vengeance is not, ever, a moral impulse.
