"Take Shelter' (2nd review)

In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon plays Curtis, an Ohio construction worker who begins having disturbing dreams. Many of the dreams involve a huge storm that overtakes him, his home, his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). Concerned about the significance of these dreams, Curtis builds a storm shelter, as the dreams continue with increasing vividness and specificity.

Most of what I want to say about this excellent film concerns the experience of watching it, so please— if you haven't seen it yet, stop reading. Bookmark this page, go watch the movie, and come back later. You owe it to yourself to encounter it directly, without my— or anyone else's— commentary in your head. Even if you're not generally concerned about spoilers, this is one movie where you're better off letting the story unfold for you as its creator intended.

That creator, writer-director Jeff Nichols, has crafted a film far more accomplished than one might expect of someone so young: at 33, this is only his second feature film. He succeeds in immediately pulling us into Curtis's experience. Like Curtis, we must figure out what the dreams mean, what they are.

Nichols plays fair with the viewer: we learn early on that Curtis's mother (Kathy Baker) is a schizophrenic whose disease manifested itself when she was the age that he is now. The film offers is no direct suggestion that the dreams are anything but dreams, or that Curtis's hallucinations (like the wheeling megaflock of black birds) are anything but hallucinations.

A reasonable man?

At the same time, we're rooting for Curtis. He's a nice guy who loves his family, who plays by the rules, who reacts responsibly by seeking medical/psychological advice. (That sense of responsibility, of course, also leads him to go into debt to build and stock the storm shelter, against the advice of his friendly neighborhood banker.) Because we like Curtis, we want him not to be crazy, not to be making bad decisions.

For his decisions to be reasonable, though, Curtis would need to live in a world where something could happen that would prove that his dreams were premonitions. It's easy to slide into a mindset where that's possible—experienced movie-watchers are willing to suspend disbelief, since at the movies anything is possible. Nichols successfully uses that willingness to draw us into sharing Curtis's feeling of dread as well as his expectation— or is it just a hope?— that something will happen to justify his behavior.

The thing is, though, that Curtis isn't living in a world where something like that can happen: He lives in our world, a world where what he's doing— what he's experiencing— is crazy.

Awakened by sirens

We're jarred into this realization by the scene at the community supper, where Curtis is confronted by his friend Russell, who got in trouble for helping him. When Curtis responds to Russell's attack with his "You'll see, you'll all see" harangue, we share the townspeople's discomfort, their "This dude is nuts" reaction.

Nichols bats us back and forth from then until the end of the film. Curtis and Samantha are awakened by sirens and take Hannah to the shelter. It turns out that it's a storm, but not the storm. The penultimate scene takes place in the office of the new, more experienced psychologist, who delivers Curtis's diagnosis.

In the final scene, the family is at the beach, and first Hannah, then Curtis and Samantha see a storm brewing over the ocean and moving toward them. This event throws the resolution we think we've experienced back into question: Is a storm really coming? Or is this, as the cliché goes, only a dream?

I didn't care for this ending— I found its ambiguity cheesy rather than intriguing— but I'm not sure what ending would work better. I'll forgive Nichols for that slight misstep, though. Take Shelter is an amazingly effective film. I look forward to seeing what Nichols does next. ♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
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