One of the most remarkable aspects of Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special is just how far it gets
without needing to explain itself. In fact, by the time the end credits roll
there hasn’t been extended meaningful exposition. Instead we’ve seen a sci-fi
tinged on-the-run thriller about a boy and his father fleeing shadowy
government forces and heavies from their church’s compound, a chase across the
South that charges forward with simmering tension and intimate, methodical
strategy. It’s a thriller with respect for the majesty of the unexplainable. With
casual magic and mystery, it weaves into suspense tiny grace notes, finding
large wonderment in small details, implying more than it says outright. The
film saves big reveals for so long, and answers them in sideways intuitive
ways. We’re left with more questions than answers in a most satisfying result.
It’s tantalizing and evocative, grand filmmaking on a small scale, huge
implications left dangling with an ethereal, almost spiritual mystique.
As the story begins we hear the muffled sounds of an Amber
Alert on an old TV in a shabby motel room. A boy (Jaeden Lieberher) has been
kidnapped. He’s in this room with his captors, a situation diffused of
immediate danger to him as it’s slowly revealed he has been taken from a
fundamentalist cult and its pastor (Sam Shepard) by his biological father
(Michael Shannon) and a friend (Joel Edgerton) determined to take him to
freedom. They travel under the cover of darkness, move quickly, and meet up
with collaborators (including Kirsten Dunst) for daylight respites. They’re
under a tight deadline involving coordinates and secret messages. They’re
moving him to a better life, following mystery directives we slowly come to
understand. Nichols maintains impeccable tension in this cloud of ambiguity by
keeping close attention on the specificities, the small details in the process
of fleeing across state lines.
The film works through a confident and relaxed focus on the
hows, not the whys, allowing its later leaps to feel more intuitive and excusable. Steady shots take in precise steps taken to avoid
detection, lingering on the clack of a gun being loaded, the stretch of
swimming goggles perpetually protecting the boy’s eyes, the engine noises in
various makes and models of vehicles, the snap of headlights disappearing on a
dark Texan road in the middle of the night. The danger sits in the risks the
boy’s father is willing to take to keep him from agents (like Adam Driver) and
other governmental forces who seek to claim the boy for further study (echoes
of Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T. and Carpenter’s Starman), and the church’s flunkies (Bill
Camp and Scott Haze) who are out to capture him for the purposes of exploiting
his gifts. Science and religion both attach grand meanings to massive unknowns.
Fear and tension is in the doubt about what’ll happen if his father fails. The
stakes are clear.
Nichols, whose work including the powerful mental illness nightmare
Take Shelter, laconic family tragedy Shotgun Stories, and boyhood crime-fable
Mud shows a gift for patient,
empathetic, and self-assuredly paced stories, approaches Midnight Special with his typical good judgment. It’s not a loud or
flashy sci-fi adventure; we don’t get genre efforts this confidently
circumspect, beautifully restrained everyday, certainly not bankrolled by a major
studio. He trusts silence, stillness, while still ramping up the thrills when
called for. He reveals what we need to know through action, tells us about
character through behaviors. This is a beautifully photographed (by Nichols’
usual cinematographer Adam Stone) and contained movie – set in stolen cars,
cheap motels, tiny command centers – gathering suspense and sweep off the back
of small emotional exchanges and intimate interpersonal investments.
It helps that the cast does fine work across the board,
performers who can sketch in pain and determination with a glance, or a few well-chosen
lines. It approaches Cormac McCarthy territory in some of its terse dialogue in
dusty landscapes, sharp and expressive for their brevity, people who can’t risk
feeling too much lest the crushing weight of their actions’ enormity – embodied
in the wide open spaces around them – stops them cold. Shannon looks at his boy
with such tenderness and caring, while charging forward with single-minded
drive to protect him at all costs. Edgerton’s blind loyalty is quiet competence.
Dunst’s maternal energy manifests itself as submerged worry pushed into protective
energy, while young Lieberher has a serene otherworldliness that makes
incredibly clear the uneasy extrasensory gifts will lead this road-trip to an
ending no one understands. They just know it must be done.
What, exactly, are the powers of this boy at the center of
so much drama? They remain beautifully vague. He can hear radio and satellite
signals, is affected by sunlight – hence another good reason for night travel
beyond hiding from authorities – and occasionally his eyes glow with eerie blue
light. We’re told that to look into this illuminated stare is to see glimpses
of a better world. Could there be a more lovely, forceful, intuitive metaphor
for the lengths a parent will go to protect a child? They see overwhelming hope
in his eyes. It’s a movie about parents protecting a child from the world and
helping manifest his gifts, even if they don’t understand them. It’s about support
for the boy’s future, wherever it may take him. It’s about the pain and
profound contentment of caring for a child – a key moment finds Shannon telling
his boy, “I like worrying about you” – and the difficulty of letting that child
make his own path. The film’s powerful conclusion brings this metaphor to
stirring heights, conjuring Amblin awe and blending it with an unearthly
melancholy.
The result is a movie that plays out as a plaintive
old-fashioned country flavor in a hair-raising low-key sci-fi mode, an usual combination
that’s nonetheless comforting in its throwback appeals. It is involving and
compelling for what is not said and what is left to the imagination, giving the
Big Moments that much more room to excite and entrance. Nichols’ interest in
human-scale stories brings great sensitivity to Midnight Special’s thrills and astonishments. The film crackles
with intrigue and personality without overly insisting on it. Here he injects
genre elements into a patient thriller, widening the scope of its implications only
in its final moments, executed with aplomb. He trusts an audience to groove on
a delicate metaphor and move with trembling echoes of extrasensory wavelengths
without needing it all spelled out. Another fine entry in our recent cycle of
vintage sci-fi throwbacks, it, like Super
8 and Tomorrowland, looks
backwards and forwards, a timeless reinvention of a sturdy genre storytelling
mode.
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