A Cure for Wellness
I always forget that “The Color of Despair” is called “A Cure for Wellness”. This mistake is so accurate.
Directed by Gore Verbinski, the same man who made “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” and “The Lone Ranger”, this film could be described as a sickly, dreamy horror epic. It wants to be a sickly-dreamy horror epic. This movie is black-and-white also done in color. Bojan Bazelli photographs it starkly creating a lot of blackness that stands next to negative space.
Jenny Beavan’s costuming and Eve Stewart’s production design both have kind of a retro gothic thing going on with lots of ash, bone, off-white, curdled cream, and green (ranging from bile to moss). If you could nick a David Fincher film’s throat, hang it upside down, and bleed it for two days this is what would come out. It’s an impressive fetish object.
But as a feature length drama? Or even just as a fully satisfying feature-length narrative? Bust. And then some. A visionary spectacle? Too long. Too big. Over scaled. And its control of tone/subject doesn’t match the care lavished upon its production design (a bad sign).
Which is all too bad because there’s so much here to love in “A Cure for Wellness.”
Dane DeHaan has very specific features as an actor sinister circles around his eyes; milky angularity; cold stares which make him perfect to play corrupt young East Coast WASPs like Lockhart: That character archetype that looks like he could be Dylan Baker’s son in real life (or maybe just Harry Osborne); or Nazi youth; or any number of prep school jerks we’ve encountered over the course our lives whose parents paid too much money for them not to care about anything.
His performance in this movie is straightforward and powerful and a little bit baffling: He’s entitled to everything; he wants none of it; he’s terrified of it all; he’s ashamed for himself just existing at all. He’s like some horribly suffering punching-bag hero who eventually achieves enlightenment through comeuppance.
To begin with, Lockhart is unbearable because that’s what he’s supposed to be. He deserves everything he gets: he’s a snotty capitalist pig whose ultimate destiny is to become Ebenezer Scrooge and who represents a system that churns out Scrooges by the million. It sometimes feels as if Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe (“Revolutionary Road,” “The Lone Ranger”) are commenting on the vampire like hold that the European cultural memory still has over many rich Americans when one character notes that Lockhart’s predecessor went to the clinic “to take in the waters” a very 19th century thing to do and all of these white folks are acting like they’ve never seen a handsome gadfly with chiseled movie Gestapo officer looks and the carriage of an ambassador of reason before.
This establishment stands on the site of an identical place that burned down decades ago there’s a backstory involving taboo hideousness and several situations recur involving insularity, hatred of outsiders, and purity of bloodlines. (Mia Goth, playing the doctor’s daughter, is this film’s vision of enervated perfection: she looks starved and haunted but also hot).
This would make a fine starting point for social satire; it’d also work as the flavoring for an abbreviated, dreamy horror movie. There are real ideas here, good ones even, but they’re tantalizingly undercooked.
It’s only in the last half-hour or so a series of over the top set pieces that I loved and other colleagues found trashy and excessive that “A Cure for Wellness” achieves anything like the level of bug-nuts wildness it arguably needed all along. Psychological and atmospheric horror aren’t Verbinski’s strong suits; he tends to be his most original self when he lets it rip in sequences of clockwork suspense or ridiculous action, which is why the slapstick in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies and the chases in “Rango” and the last 45 minutes or so of “The Lone Ranger” are some of Verbinskiest things he’s ever done.
It’s in this maybe narratively unnecessary final half-hour that “A Cure for Wellness” starts to forge (through sheer excess) the kinds of connections that give it a personality e.g., cutting from a decadent, repulsive character spinning in circles after sustaining an injury to a group of clueless rich folk waltzing in a grand ballroom.
And two and a half hours is too much by at least 30 minutes. It’s ironic and unfortunate that so much of “A Cure for Wellness’s” look is modeled on German Expressionist silent movies and ’30s Universal horror films, because those tended to be short and sleek. Very long horror movies often reach a point of diminishing returns no matter how skillfully the filmmakers sustain a mood “The Shining” is one rare exception, though even that one has detractors simply because they give you more time to think about the concept and fixate on plot holes, judgment errors and other types of imperfections.
Verbinski may not be Stanley Kubrick, but he occasionally comes close, like in sequences with eels that are even creepier than they were before and a dentistry as torture scene that makes the one in “Marathon Man” look like a routine cleaning. I could easily imagine an “A Cure for Wellness” that’s all suggestion and understatement and one that’s essentially the madcap finale played out over the length of a feature, climbing to nosebleed heights of bad taste and unfurling a freak flag at the summit. Either would have been better than what we got, which is more like a rag-and-bone shop of notions.
What’s missing most obviously here is Kubrick’s lordly, even naughty sense of humor. “A Cure for Wellness” tries for black comedy frequently but rarely achieves anything more sophisticated than the sick joke comic rhythm of, “What’s the worst thing that could happen to this character?” followed by, “Here it comes.” Lockhart’s suffering becomes dull through repetition; he keeps bumping up against the same realizations only to be lied to or misdirected and find himself back where he started. Too much of this sort of thing and even patient viewers throw their hands up and moan, “Oh come on.”
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