Films: 2000s
(2002) The Ring
Saturday, October 14, 2006
The Ring
Director: Gore Verbinski
Release: 2002
Director Gore Verbinski tackles an ungainly plot and too many characters in his 2002 box office giant "The Ring."
The film works because of Verbinski's gorgeous photography and Naomi Watts' absolutely grounded and truthful performance, in addition to an essentially decent story from the works of Koji Suzuki (novelist) and Hiroshi Takahashi (screenwriter of the original Japanese "Ringu," in 1998).
Newspaper reporter Rachel Keller (Watts) is drawn to investigate her niece Katie's (Amber Tamblyn) inexplicable bedroom death, which occurred at home in her bedroom with a girlfriend watching. The girlfriend goes to the asylum and surviving peers tell Keller that her niece's boyfriend died in a car accident on the same night.
The rumor is that the pair watched a cursed videotape that destines death in seven days. Keller visits the rural Washington cabin where the tape was supposedly found, and she indeed finds a copy. Watching it, Keller brings upon herself the curse. Worse, as she struggles to accept this apparent manifestation of the supernatural, she inflicts the curse on ex-boyfriend (and father of her child) Noah (Martin Henderson) and eventually her son Aidan (David Dorfman).
"The Ring" becomes a race.
Keller and Noah dig into the history of a horse ranch and a missing little girl. As the layers are peeled back, a horrific bargain and a horrific crime are unearthed. The ultimate source of the cursed tape is discovered, but the act of laying an unhappy spirit to rest may actually work to strengthen the ghost and force Keller and Aidan into an even worse situation than the one from they sought to escape.
On this level, that of motivation and ethical conundrum, "The Ring" is brilliant.
Keller's choices serve to propagate the evil that lives in the cursed videotapes. As a metaphor for cause-and-effect, psychological and physical, screenwriter Ehren Kruger's script works well. Each step closer to salvation is unwittingly a step closer to compromise. In this, "The Ring" rings true. There is no easy-to-find line of demarcation between good and evil in Kruger's story, but a series of default positions from which one must adopt to avoid being tracked down by a relentless universe. Acting to eradicate one's involvement and responsibility in the cycle created by the videotapes is exactly the wrong strategy. Resolving what is important and how much must be lost to save something else is the required equation.
Interesting mirrors of the videotape situation include the relationship of Noah with Aidan. Noah and Keller propagate a legacy, they make Aidan. Noah chooses not to be a father, but Keller continues to press upon the boundaries of his world. She says that he is a "flake, who never starts what he finishes."
This is also a shaded parallel of the father-daughter relationship between the girl who becomes the ghost, Samarra Morgan (Daveigh Chase) and her father Richard (Brian Cox). In that relationship, Richard Morgan physically exiles Samarra. This starts the cycle of abandonment and destruction that leads to the curse.
The difference in motivation is one also interesting. Noah reaches out to Aidan in a scene where they wait in a car for Keller, gently chastising himself for failing his son. Keller sequesters Aidan, however, sending him to her sister's house while she investigates. Her sister doesn't want him, either, agreeing to take him only if Keller's investigation is about Katie (the niece). Aidan is, in a net result, as removed from mother's love as Samarra was from her father's.
One key problem with the film is that this mother-son relationship seems accidental, when it should be central. Aidan is literally marginalized, left out of the story for long periods of time.
The scenes between Keller and Aidan are mostly meant to show her deep affection for him, but his husband-like relationship with her is confusing. He sets out her clothes, dresses himself in the mirror in little suits, awakens next to her in bed and speaks with her in bizarrely sophisticated conversations. The strangeness of their interaction stands out in "The Ring." It is a great unresolved dynamic and a dangling plot point.
Additionally, there is an undescribed connection between Samarra and Aidan. In an early scene, Aidan's teacher shows Keller picture that the boy drew of Katie's death prior to it happening. Aidan later tells Keller that Samarra puts pictures in his mind and later still, he reveals that what Keller has done about Samarra is not what she was supposed to do. His supernatural connection to the vengeful ghost is never fully explored.
Another mirror of the videotape "ring" is Keller's chosen profession. As a reporter, in the eyes of her grieving sister, her skillset selects her for investigation. She is reluctant, but then when she starts she is relentless.
Her search for the story behind the videotape wreaks parallel collateral damage to Samarra's mother Evelyn's search for a child. Keller condemns loved ones by her actions and by her proximity to evil, in much the same way Evelyn sentences her horses, her daughter, herself and her husband. In a reverse image, though, the Morgans and the islanders around them seek to suppress and contain the awful truth while Keller seeks to unearth and spread it. Richard loathes her for this, likening her efforts to a "sickness."
"The Ring" is ambiguous about who is righteous.
On the one hand. "The Ring" could be viewed as a resound criticism of our need to know, to see everything, to be allowed into the private hell of others' lives. On the other hand, it is a violent warning against isolating the evil of our neighbors - and a prediction that evil will out, that it will propagate itself if left buried and unchecked.
While Keller is destructive to others, spending their resources in several ways throughout the movie, she discovers that the malevolence she seeks has chosen her own medium to meet her halfway. Samarra broadcasts via videotape, sending her awful pictures into the electromagnetic world, where it corrupts the tape and playback devices we use to inform and entertain ourselves.
In essence, Samarra's message is "do not waste time." Aidan echoes this when he tells his mother "we don't have enough time," after Katie's death. Samarra must show the truth, it burns her and it burns the things she touches trying to get it out into the world. But her delivery also represents an extreme and fearsome endpoint to Keller's profession Unchecked, the hoisting of the awful truth into the world can cause new death and despair.
Keller has to go to the place in which Samarra is trapped, and she has to confront what Samarra means, but unlike Keller's world, the story does not stop once it is told. In Samarra's poisonous truth-telling, Keller and Aidan must accept responsibility for perpetuating the telling or die. Every transmission, from point to point, is made under peril of death.
Tell the truth, "The Ring" implores, or the truth will track you down. The truth literally becomes a virus for which the only hope for remission is the act of transmission.
In all of this, while it wobbles and leaves too many details and questions unexplored, "The Ring" captures this swirling neurosis about media. To what do we subject ourselves via our eyes? How much do we need? How much is too much? What do we let our kids see? What will it do to us and to them? What happens if we keep it to ourselves?
But "The Ring" also wants to be a story about fatherhood, about motherhood, about who our children are and where they really come from.
There's not enough of this, and the omission is irritating. What we're left with is a series of meaty themes, inadequately treated, but sewn together with Verbinski's lush reds, soaked and mysterious rain-filled greens and an eye for composition within the scene that makes "The Ring" akin to the Andrew Wyeth paintings upon which Verbinski reportedly based many of the movie's shots.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
