Movie Review! The Stand
So this week, for reasons that still escape me, I decided to watch the 1994 miniseries The Stand, based on the Stephen King doorstopper. I've never read the book, and I have no particular interest in reading the book (especially after seeing the movie). As I said, I'm not quite sure what made me want to watch the movie, but I am sure that it wasn't a deep and abiding love either for this particular story or for Stephen King in general. It may have been a result of watching both The West Wing and Parks and Recreation at the same time and wanting to see more of what Rob Lowe has done as a grownup, but that's all I can figure.
I guess the best place to start this is to say right up front that I'm not a massive Stephen King fan. I don't necessarily dislike his work -- in fact, I think Carrie is absolutely brilliant. I've just never been particularly inclined to pick a Stephen King novel over any other. In fact, my experience with Stephen King has been as much through the movies made from his works as from the books themselves. One thing you gotta say about Stephen King, the guy sure knows how to write a filmable novel. Brian de Palma's version of Carrie was amazing, for instance, and The Shawshank Redemption is a classic. What with the current vogue for dark fantasy, I'd think that The Eyes of the Dragon might also be another good choice for a King film.
But I digress. The Stand. I didn't know all that much about it when I started the film, other than that it was based on a gigantic brick of a Stephen King novel. I've subsequently discovered that the novel was King's attempt to write a sort of American answer to The Lord of the Rings. I can sort of see the resemblance, I guess. They're both very long stories that deal with a Band of Protagonists meeting and kind of dealing with the Force of Evil, and a long walk is involved. This setup works in The Lord of the Rings better than it works in The Stand, because LOTR is drawing from the plot-based tradition of epic poetry, while The Stand draws from the more character-based tradition of the novel. However, from the sketchy understanding I have of King as a novelist, I think he might have pulled it off in the book. The movie version? Um. No.
So what's it all about? The Stand is basically two separate plots. It comes with its own sequel, if you will. The A plot, which takes up nearly a third of the movie's runtime, is the more interesting of the two. The Army has been developing a super-flu with no cure, a plague that kills people instantly and horribly, and whaddaya know, it gets loose. The vast majority of Americans are killed, save for a couple of motley crews of survivors who are left to wander alone in a deserted world, find each other, and attempt to rebuild some sort of society.
This is a great story. It's timely and yet timeless -- a futuristic threat in 1978 when The Stand was first published as a book, a more realistic menace in 1994, when the movie appeared, and definitely something to think about in 2014. It's a quiet, existential kind of horror. You get to see the loneliness of the survivors, their shock at seeing everyone they love die, the apocalyptic collapse of civilization, the triumph of the human spirit as they rebuild. If King had stopped right there, I would be totally on board with The Stand, at least in cinematic form.
The problem here is the B plot, which takes over with a vengeance just as the A plot is revving into full, interesting, after-the-fall gear. The B plot involves a recurring King character called Randall Flagg, who is a demon. No, really. He's an actual, force-of-evil, cackling, supernatural Demon, and his presence in (of course!) Las Vegas causes the Spokesperson of God, Mother Abagail (and we'll be talking about her, let me tell you) to wrench the story from the A plot into the B plot by sending a selection of characters out to Las Vegas to . . . well, it's not entirely clear. Make a Stand (ooo, title drop!) against Flagg, which consists mostly of failing to actually do anything about him while hanging around long enough to witness the absolutely literal deus ex machina squash the story to bits.
Much like the two opposing camps of the story, The Stand is riven in two by the opposing forces of its production values. On the side of the angels, it has its cast. Gary Sinise stands out as Stu Redman, a plainspoken East Texas man who I think is supposed to represent all that is great and good about America, kind of like the Marlboro Man without the actual cigarettes. Adam Storke is subtly fantastic as Larry Underwood, a secondary hero who's much more nuanced and interesting than Stu Redman. These are good characters played well by good actors. Following them is a long list of other good actors doing a phenomenal job of bringing life and humanity to characters that would otherwise be unredeemably silly cartoon cut-outs. These are the folks stuck with the thankless task of making caricatured stereotypes into real, interesting people, and they do yeoman's work here. In no particular order, we have:
1. Rob Lowe as Nick Andros, the Saintly Deaf-Mute. The character is both one-note and wildly inconsistent; he's sweet and saintly enough to make Sam Seaborn look like Dick Cheney, but someone on the production staff doesn't appear to have gotten the memo that "deaf" means "the character can't hear." He sometimes seems to respond to sound, and for a character who, we are told, relies on lip-reading, he spends an awful lot of conversations staring dramatically into the distance, looking away from the speaker. Still, he's nice. You can't really not like him.
2. Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail, the Magical Negro. No, I'm not kidding. Mother Abagail is the Prophet, the Voice of God, the 106-year-old salt-of-the-earth black mammy who guides the rest of the Good Characters with her soulful reliance on the Lord, speaks in the weathered cadences of 1930s melodramas, sings hymns, and (really!) watches over adorable white children. Mother Abagail is the Magicalest Magical Negro character ever to Magical her way across my screen. She's an awful, awful, one-note, racist caricature, and it is only Ruby Dee's magnificent performance that humanizes her enough to make her watchable.
3. Similarly, Bill Fagerbakke as Tom Cullen, the Magical Developmentally Disabled Man. Fagerbakke's acting problem is sort of the combo version of the challenges that Lowe and Dee faced. Like Lowe, he's playing a caricature of a disability. Like Dee, he's playing a mockingly saintly and servile version of a type of person usually cast out of mainstream society. He takes on this . . . well, role -- Tom Cullen isn't so much a character as a collection of tics, which include an over-reliance on bad 1930s catchphrases -- with grace and dignity, and he has a charming and wonderful simpatico going with Rob Lowe. Lowe and Fagerbakke just work really well together, and their scenes are a testament to the power of good acting over bad . . . everything else.
4. Finally, special mention must be made of Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg. Sheridan is playing a wholly unrealistic, medieval dumb-show demonic character, and he dives right in feet-first, whooping with glee all the way. Flagg is an endlessly entertaining character to watch just because Sheridan is so clearly having so damn much fun. He throws subtlety to the winds, strutting around in jeans, a denim jacket, and the grown-out mullet to end all grown-out mullets, unfazed by the bad CGI effects that occasionally take over his head. Sheridan as Flagg is pure, unadulterated EVIL, and he loves every damn minute of it. And we love him for it.
There are some clunkers in the cast -- Molly Ringwald and Corin Nemec stand out for their wooden acting and awkward line delivery -- but most of them are throwing their best game at this movie.
The music is also nice. It's got kind of an electric-folk vibe, and is good at using motifs to remind you which of the bajillion characters we're watching. There's some good set design, when you get a chance to look at it past the sometimes unfortunate cinematography. Costumes -- I'm on the fence. The nice thing is that they look like the clothes that ordinary Americans would have worn in 1994. The problem with that is that . . . they look like the clothes that ordinary Americans would have worn in 1994. Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald get hit especially hard with the Unfortunate Nineties Stick. Ringwald spends the movie wearing the kind of pastel flowered Laura Ashley knockoff dresses that tried to be sweet and romantic and ended up being staid and boring. Lowe is saddled with a really terrible middle-parted bowl haircut (the design team couldn't have found it within themselves to give him a Caesar, at least?), as well as the ultimate visual confirmation that high-waisted, pleated, baggy chinos are not a good look on anyone. Ruby Dee and Bill Fagerbakke are exceptions to this. Their characters are time-transplants from 1934, and dress accordingly.
The major problem of the movie is this: You're taking all of these great elements -- great acting, lovely music, strong (if, in retrospect, dated) design -- and you're throwing them at a script of vast, immense, towering stupidity. For a movie that's six hours long (it was originally a TV miniseries) and moves at an utterly glacial pace, there still seem to be no time to learn anything about who these people are, or why they do what they do. At least six or seven times per episode (of which there are four), something will happen where a character will suddenly do something completely inexplicable or display knowledge that there's no way that they should have. The plot lurches forward, leaving credibility by the wayside. Why is Molly Ringwald sleeping curled up adorably against a boy whose crush on her she's actively trying to discourage? Because The Script Says So. Why does Ossie Davis know all the intricate details of a spy plan, when he was not present at the meeting where the plan was made? Because He Read The Script. Even Kojak the dog gets a bit of it, developing plot-relevant skills and understanding of human speech as needed.
I've bitched a little bit about the bad 1930s dialogue that Ruby ("Mayhap it is and mayhap it ain't") Dee and Bill ("Laws yiss! M-O-O-N, that spells [insert noun or phrase here]") Fagerbakke spout, but, in all honesty, the rest of the dialogue isn't much better. Stephen King seems to have had a major hand in writing the screenplay, and there's a lot there that I think would probably work much better on the page than sitting in people's mouths. Actually, come to think of it, I suspect that one reason that Rob Lowe comes off so well in this movie is that he doesn't really have any spoken lines, save for a few words in dream sequences. Lowe is an excellent physical actor, and he has the great opportunity to build a whole intelligent, lovely character without the burden of the dialogue that King and the screenwriters heaped on everyone else.
The superflu, nicknamed "Captain Trips," for reasons that are never fully explained, is a bit of an odd duck. When we actually see people die of it, we see them getting sick, going to bed, coughing, and expiring quickly and gruesomely, but not in any way that's terribly out of the ordinary for Death By Respiratory Infection. However, the vast majority of flu victims seem to have been zapped where they stood, in the middle of daily life, making a cake, or playing ping-pong, or sitting in an office, or what have you. It does not bear close examination, but it does make a strong event for the main characters to react to, which they do with credible grief and horror.
The special effects are uniformly terrible. This was one of the 90s movies that didn't understand the limitations of 90s special effects, and overused them to the point where they become humorous rather than scary. The Demon Morphs on Jamey Sheridan are utterly hilarious, never failing to raise at least a giggle each time they appear, and the Hand Of God that detonates the Thermonuclear Plot Device is a delicious howler. Why, yes, this movie does in fact paint itself into a corner such that it can only be rescued by an absolutely literal deus ex machina.
There are strong yet unmarshaled themes of religion and faith running wild through the movie. Christianity is, of course, the only religion under discussion (what, no Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists were immune to the flu?), and Mother Abagail, at least, seems to think that the Christian God has some stake in what's happening. But very few of the characters are explicitly Christian, and at least one is explicitly an atheist, and no one really seems to care very much, so the God plot ends up looking like someone shoehorned it in and then abandoned it by the side of the road.
And yet, for all that, The Stand is basically pretty watchable. I wouldn't watch it all at once, but it's entertaining enough. The good bits are good, and the bad bits are more laughable than anything else. It's an entirely subtlety-free movie, so you don't have to think too hard while you watch it. In fact, it's better if you just turn your brain off and enjoy the antics. The friendships between Rob Lowe and Bill Fagerbakke and between Gary Sinise and Adam Storke are absorbing and eminently worth watching, and Jamey Sheridan is a hoot and a half. I can't say I'm sorry I watched it, though I can't say I'm especially enriched for the experience, either.
I guess the best place to start this is to say right up front that I'm not a massive Stephen King fan. I don't necessarily dislike his work -- in fact, I think Carrie is absolutely brilliant. I've just never been particularly inclined to pick a Stephen King novel over any other. In fact, my experience with Stephen King has been as much through the movies made from his works as from the books themselves. One thing you gotta say about Stephen King, the guy sure knows how to write a filmable novel. Brian de Palma's version of Carrie was amazing, for instance, and The Shawshank Redemption is a classic. What with the current vogue for dark fantasy, I'd think that The Eyes of the Dragon might also be another good choice for a King film.
But I digress. The Stand. I didn't know all that much about it when I started the film, other than that it was based on a gigantic brick of a Stephen King novel. I've subsequently discovered that the novel was King's attempt to write a sort of American answer to The Lord of the Rings. I can sort of see the resemblance, I guess. They're both very long stories that deal with a Band of Protagonists meeting and kind of dealing with the Force of Evil, and a long walk is involved. This setup works in The Lord of the Rings better than it works in The Stand, because LOTR is drawing from the plot-based tradition of epic poetry, while The Stand draws from the more character-based tradition of the novel. However, from the sketchy understanding I have of King as a novelist, I think he might have pulled it off in the book. The movie version? Um. No.
So what's it all about? The Stand is basically two separate plots. It comes with its own sequel, if you will. The A plot, which takes up nearly a third of the movie's runtime, is the more interesting of the two. The Army has been developing a super-flu with no cure, a plague that kills people instantly and horribly, and whaddaya know, it gets loose. The vast majority of Americans are killed, save for a couple of motley crews of survivors who are left to wander alone in a deserted world, find each other, and attempt to rebuild some sort of society.
This is a great story. It's timely and yet timeless -- a futuristic threat in 1978 when The Stand was first published as a book, a more realistic menace in 1994, when the movie appeared, and definitely something to think about in 2014. It's a quiet, existential kind of horror. You get to see the loneliness of the survivors, their shock at seeing everyone they love die, the apocalyptic collapse of civilization, the triumph of the human spirit as they rebuild. If King had stopped right there, I would be totally on board with The Stand, at least in cinematic form.
The problem here is the B plot, which takes over with a vengeance just as the A plot is revving into full, interesting, after-the-fall gear. The B plot involves a recurring King character called Randall Flagg, who is a demon. No, really. He's an actual, force-of-evil, cackling, supernatural Demon, and his presence in (of course!) Las Vegas causes the Spokesperson of God, Mother Abagail (and we'll be talking about her, let me tell you) to wrench the story from the A plot into the B plot by sending a selection of characters out to Las Vegas to . . . well, it's not entirely clear. Make a Stand (ooo, title drop!) against Flagg, which consists mostly of failing to actually do anything about him while hanging around long enough to witness the absolutely literal deus ex machina squash the story to bits.
Much like the two opposing camps of the story, The Stand is riven in two by the opposing forces of its production values. On the side of the angels, it has its cast. Gary Sinise stands out as Stu Redman, a plainspoken East Texas man who I think is supposed to represent all that is great and good about America, kind of like the Marlboro Man without the actual cigarettes. Adam Storke is subtly fantastic as Larry Underwood, a secondary hero who's much more nuanced and interesting than Stu Redman. These are good characters played well by good actors. Following them is a long list of other good actors doing a phenomenal job of bringing life and humanity to characters that would otherwise be unredeemably silly cartoon cut-outs. These are the folks stuck with the thankless task of making caricatured stereotypes into real, interesting people, and they do yeoman's work here. In no particular order, we have:
1. Rob Lowe as Nick Andros, the Saintly Deaf-Mute. The character is both one-note and wildly inconsistent; he's sweet and saintly enough to make Sam Seaborn look like Dick Cheney, but someone on the production staff doesn't appear to have gotten the memo that "deaf" means "the character can't hear." He sometimes seems to respond to sound, and for a character who, we are told, relies on lip-reading, he spends an awful lot of conversations staring dramatically into the distance, looking away from the speaker. Still, he's nice. You can't really not like him.
2. Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail, the Magical Negro. No, I'm not kidding. Mother Abagail is the Prophet, the Voice of God, the 106-year-old salt-of-the-earth black mammy who guides the rest of the Good Characters with her soulful reliance on the Lord, speaks in the weathered cadences of 1930s melodramas, sings hymns, and (really!) watches over adorable white children. Mother Abagail is the Magicalest Magical Negro character ever to Magical her way across my screen. She's an awful, awful, one-note, racist caricature, and it is only Ruby Dee's magnificent performance that humanizes her enough to make her watchable.
3. Similarly, Bill Fagerbakke as Tom Cullen, the Magical Developmentally Disabled Man. Fagerbakke's acting problem is sort of the combo version of the challenges that Lowe and Dee faced. Like Lowe, he's playing a caricature of a disability. Like Dee, he's playing a mockingly saintly and servile version of a type of person usually cast out of mainstream society. He takes on this . . . well, role -- Tom Cullen isn't so much a character as a collection of tics, which include an over-reliance on bad 1930s catchphrases -- with grace and dignity, and he has a charming and wonderful simpatico going with Rob Lowe. Lowe and Fagerbakke just work really well together, and their scenes are a testament to the power of good acting over bad . . . everything else.
4. Finally, special mention must be made of Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg. Sheridan is playing a wholly unrealistic, medieval dumb-show demonic character, and he dives right in feet-first, whooping with glee all the way. Flagg is an endlessly entertaining character to watch just because Sheridan is so clearly having so damn much fun. He throws subtlety to the winds, strutting around in jeans, a denim jacket, and the grown-out mullet to end all grown-out mullets, unfazed by the bad CGI effects that occasionally take over his head. Sheridan as Flagg is pure, unadulterated EVIL, and he loves every damn minute of it. And we love him for it.
There are some clunkers in the cast -- Molly Ringwald and Corin Nemec stand out for their wooden acting and awkward line delivery -- but most of them are throwing their best game at this movie.
The music is also nice. It's got kind of an electric-folk vibe, and is good at using motifs to remind you which of the bajillion characters we're watching. There's some good set design, when you get a chance to look at it past the sometimes unfortunate cinematography. Costumes -- I'm on the fence. The nice thing is that they look like the clothes that ordinary Americans would have worn in 1994. The problem with that is that . . . they look like the clothes that ordinary Americans would have worn in 1994. Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald get hit especially hard with the Unfortunate Nineties Stick. Ringwald spends the movie wearing the kind of pastel flowered Laura Ashley knockoff dresses that tried to be sweet and romantic and ended up being staid and boring. Lowe is saddled with a really terrible middle-parted bowl haircut (the design team couldn't have found it within themselves to give him a Caesar, at least?), as well as the ultimate visual confirmation that high-waisted, pleated, baggy chinos are not a good look on anyone. Ruby Dee and Bill Fagerbakke are exceptions to this. Their characters are time-transplants from 1934, and dress accordingly.
The major problem of the movie is this: You're taking all of these great elements -- great acting, lovely music, strong (if, in retrospect, dated) design -- and you're throwing them at a script of vast, immense, towering stupidity. For a movie that's six hours long (it was originally a TV miniseries) and moves at an utterly glacial pace, there still seem to be no time to learn anything about who these people are, or why they do what they do. At least six or seven times per episode (of which there are four), something will happen where a character will suddenly do something completely inexplicable or display knowledge that there's no way that they should have. The plot lurches forward, leaving credibility by the wayside. Why is Molly Ringwald sleeping curled up adorably against a boy whose crush on her she's actively trying to discourage? Because The Script Says So. Why does Ossie Davis know all the intricate details of a spy plan, when he was not present at the meeting where the plan was made? Because He Read The Script. Even Kojak the dog gets a bit of it, developing plot-relevant skills and understanding of human speech as needed.
I've bitched a little bit about the bad 1930s dialogue that Ruby ("Mayhap it is and mayhap it ain't") Dee and Bill ("Laws yiss! M-O-O-N, that spells [insert noun or phrase here]") Fagerbakke spout, but, in all honesty, the rest of the dialogue isn't much better. Stephen King seems to have had a major hand in writing the screenplay, and there's a lot there that I think would probably work much better on the page than sitting in people's mouths. Actually, come to think of it, I suspect that one reason that Rob Lowe comes off so well in this movie is that he doesn't really have any spoken lines, save for a few words in dream sequences. Lowe is an excellent physical actor, and he has the great opportunity to build a whole intelligent, lovely character without the burden of the dialogue that King and the screenwriters heaped on everyone else.
The superflu, nicknamed "Captain Trips," for reasons that are never fully explained, is a bit of an odd duck. When we actually see people die of it, we see them getting sick, going to bed, coughing, and expiring quickly and gruesomely, but not in any way that's terribly out of the ordinary for Death By Respiratory Infection. However, the vast majority of flu victims seem to have been zapped where they stood, in the middle of daily life, making a cake, or playing ping-pong, or sitting in an office, or what have you. It does not bear close examination, but it does make a strong event for the main characters to react to, which they do with credible grief and horror.
The special effects are uniformly terrible. This was one of the 90s movies that didn't understand the limitations of 90s special effects, and overused them to the point where they become humorous rather than scary. The Demon Morphs on Jamey Sheridan are utterly hilarious, never failing to raise at least a giggle each time they appear, and the Hand Of God that detonates the Thermonuclear Plot Device is a delicious howler. Why, yes, this movie does in fact paint itself into a corner such that it can only be rescued by an absolutely literal deus ex machina.
There are strong yet unmarshaled themes of religion and faith running wild through the movie. Christianity is, of course, the only religion under discussion (what, no Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists were immune to the flu?), and Mother Abagail, at least, seems to think that the Christian God has some stake in what's happening. But very few of the characters are explicitly Christian, and at least one is explicitly an atheist, and no one really seems to care very much, so the God plot ends up looking like someone shoehorned it in and then abandoned it by the side of the road.
And yet, for all that, The Stand is basically pretty watchable. I wouldn't watch it all at once, but it's entertaining enough. The good bits are good, and the bad bits are more laughable than anything else. It's an entirely subtlety-free movie, so you don't have to think too hard while you watch it. In fact, it's better if you just turn your brain off and enjoy the antics. The friendships between Rob Lowe and Bill Fagerbakke and between Gary Sinise and Adam Storke are absorbing and eminently worth watching, and Jamey Sheridan is a hoot and a half. I can't say I'm sorry I watched it, though I can't say I'm especially enriched for the experience, either.