The Box - Directed  by Richard Kelly - US - 2009
An Education - Directed by Lone Scherfig - UK - 2009

I saw three movies on Sunday, November 8, getting all around inner Portland, hopping from theater to theater, my favorite thing to do. The first was a British drama rolling at the Fox Tower, where occasionally very good movies play but where the screens are generally reserved for movies with a certain high-class, message-oriented, Oscar-type reputations, and audiences by and large expect to feel smart for having gone to see them. The British drama, An Education, was a lot of excellent period photography (movies set in a certain period are almost always shot as if to look like they were actually produced in that period) and dramatic acting, enough of each to carry the superficial story along for two hours as if it were very important, which it turned out not to be as soon as I left the theater.

The second movie was Gimme Shelter at the 5th Avenue Cinema, where PSU students choose the stuff they want to show and where generally their tastes shouldn’t be argued with. The infamous Maysles documentary about The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels and the deadly Altamont concert of 1969 is a treasure, a time in history everybody should be glad someone was there with a camera and some talent to record: it’s the end of the ’60s from an inside perspective and scary, fascinating up-close stuff.

The third movie was at the Lloyd Center (Multnomah), where more often than not movies are worth the high price of admission on an entertainment basis alone, but are usually fairly mindless big-budget flicks. This one was Richard Kelly’s The Box, which very much has a mind. I think it proves that Kelly, who made Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, two ridiculous but unbelievably watchable movies, is a real American auteur: like his two previous movies, The Box is a highly flawed, highly imaginative, skillfully made and occasionally pretentious sci-fi mindbender with an aim for a human heart that is mostly on target.
   
Gimme Shelter aside, which is another time and place in movies and which I’m glad I was able to see projected on film, An Education and The Box are very interesting movies to see on the same day because they can be viewed as the inverse of one another. Both are period pieces (1961 and 1976 respectively) with strong family themes at their core, and both aim to wrench a great deal of pathos out of the audience by the slow reveal of plot and intrigue. But The Box is a movie which wears its ambition and absurdity on its sleeve, never attempting to trick the audience into believing that it is more than a thoughtful sci-fi mystery. An Education is exactly the opposite: it spends the entirety of its running time unsure exactly what kind of story it wants to tell and consequently tries to hide its indecision with a lot of elegant cinematography, high-class acting and finally, when all else fails, a neat closing narration. Essentially, The Box is honest and therefore makes up for many of its flaws, and An Education is spurious, which makes all of its crisp tradition-of-quality attributes seem frivolous.
   
I won’t go far into the plot of either new movie because you can watch the trailer for either one at many, many different web sites. I will say that what I appreciate about The Box is Richard Kelly’s absolute dedication to the story. It's an age-old morality tale which spins indefatigably into an epic science-fiction thriller. It's unwavering, sure of itself, all of a piece. Every element is cleverly designed to fit into an overall vision. That vision is most definitely unwieldy and less grand than Kelly probably intended, but its put forth with totality and crazy passion, and it’s never boring.
 

An Education is less ambitious, in a lot of ways an easier story to swallow, but it is a case of nothing risked, nothing gained. Its story of a high school age British girl seduced by an older con artist never risks the safety, emotional or otherwise, of any of its characters. It wants pretty badly to show the consequences an impressionable girl faces when she’s under the sway of a smooth operator, but it hasn’t got the depth or willpower to probe the reasons behind any of the character’s actions. No one ever experiences the consequences of all of the portentous dangers the story stirs up - they mostly just talk about how they might have.  Thus the actors in An Education look like they're acting out a script. In The Box the actors frequently look ridiculous playing out the all-or-nothing scenes that Kelly has written, but they go to the hilt for a story that is unapologetically complex and epic.

The Box is one of the best and certainly the most ambitious Hollywood films of 2009; An Education, smaller and foreign, offers a tantalizing premise that is ultimately empty.