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hollywood hues
Nicholas
Cage may have begun his career as a charming lover of Cher in Moonstruck
but since then he hasn’t been as successful. That celestial affair
with Meg Ryan was too weepy and the one in Captain Correlli’s
Mandolin was as mushy and prolonged. In The Wicker Man he
tries to rekindle love with an ex-flame and this takes him to
Summersile, a quaint rustic isle dominated by women in a secret
society where anything is possible. As Edward Malus, Cage is a
motorbike cop who feels responsible for the deaths of two people
(mother and daughter) trapped in a burning car hit by a runaway truck
on the California highway. The incident haunts him and he has to pop
pills to put it behind him. In this "amnesiac" state he
receives a letter from a former girl friend Willow (Kate Beham) asking
him to look for her missing daughter Rowan. But nothing is what it
seems to be in that desolate isle. Ellen Burstyn enters halfway
through the film as Sister Summersile. "We love our men but are
not subservient to them," she says and that is an understatement.
"The Mother Goddess rules this isle and I am her earthly
representative," she goes on. There’s also Sister Honey (Leelee
Sobreski) and Sister Rose (Molly Parker) and a whole lot of other
women, ranging from the beautiful and angelic to the plain and
aged. Nature is in its pristine beauty and bee keeping is one of
their pastimes. The bees expectedly add to the horror and Malus’
path is fraught with danger at every turn. In between he hallucinates
and this heightens the suspense and horror. It is a remake of the 1973
(early days of womenlib) film and has an excellent screenplay by
director Neil LaBute, not surprisingly because it is based on a play
by Anthony Shaeffer, who also wrote that classic Sleuth with
Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine in it. Shades of The Crucible
which also dealt with the occult, The Wicker Man is wrapped in
a mystery and with Kate Beham as enigmatic as ever, it is a virtual
journey into ever land. Anything is possible. Paul Sarosky’s
camerawork is caressing and the isle offers enough scope. The little
girls in the school have weird teachers and are learning about phallic
symbols. Mum’s the word when Malus probes Rowan’s
whereabouts. LaBute does an excellent job, moving on a number of
fronts, and events build up to a chilling climax. The final twist is
as dramatic as ever. May be credibility suffers a wee bit, but that’s
understandable in the light of the denouement. All in all, an
excellent thriller in the best tradition of that 1960s classic The
Innocents. It’s ever, ever eerie. Don’t miss it.
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