Moore's Law

If you were to ask someone to come up with an idea for a movie, what answer would they give? Horror movie? Western? Science fiction? Action? Thriller? Few ideas come up that are startlingly original, yes, Todd Haynes has come up with something so different (though not Guy Maddin or Peter Greenaway different) that one wonders how it even got made.

Safe tells the story of a well-to-do housewife (played by Julianne Moore) who gets sick, but she never really finds out why she's ill. She's convinced that it's due to environmental illness, an unspecified laundry list of maladies due to fumes, EMF, and so forth.

But is this what Safe is really about? While Haynes received a good deal of assistance from people involved with environmental illness and credits them at the end, this film doesn't blatantly advocate the process of natural, holistic healing. The commune that Carol White (Moore) eventually goes to doesn't seem to make her much better, and it's arguable that she's still in decline.

If anything, Haynes is dealing with fear of the unknown. Carol has an illness she can't explain. She grasps for straws trying to rationalize what's going on. At first, she attributes it to stress, though her life appears far from stressful. Then, she hears about environmental illness, and figures that's what she has.

If I had to compare this film to anything, it would be, strangely enough, 2001: A Space Oddyssey. Haynes trains his camera at middle-to-long shots, and, for the most part, eschews panning. In this respect, he shares a common visual language with directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien, with his choices in framing scenes.

Though he's not as dispassionate as Kubrick in 2001, he keeps a distance from his characters. Carol is a modestly shallow character. She worries about her kids, tries to exercise, complains that the furniture folks have given her the wrong color sofa. She's trying to be a good wife, but her life appears to have little meaning. She no longer derives pleasure from her husband.

As she gets sicker, the people around her don't give her emotional support. Her husband is exasperated, though supports her the best he can. Even as she gains some emotional support at the institute she attends, it may be that she has never truly loved herself. It's never clear if she wants more out of life, whether it be love, or to achieve something.

While watching this film, it's similar to watching a Kubrick film. It's creepy in a way that's hard to describe.

What Safe shares with 2001 is a disregard for the human characters specifically to reach a truth about humans in general. 2001 asks grand questions. How did humans evolve from apes? It posits that unknowable aliens helped humans to create tools, and now are waiting for humans to be ready for the next stage of human evolution.

Haynes's questions are not nearly as profound. What he asks is what do humans want? At some level, we want to be well. We want to be happy. We want to be loved. Nothing scares us more than to be ill, to not know why we are ill. He wonders how people behave when they are ill with something they can't readily identify. In the end, he can't answer those questions without profoundly affecting the film.

Imagine, for example, if Carol, after staying at the retreat is cured. Then, we end up thinking about her illness, and her cure. We somehow know that she will not get better, and in that sense, we wonder about ourselves, how we would handle the situation if we were in her shoes. She's nobody special. She may live a more wealthy, more shallow life, but like the bland characters that populate 2001, it's the blandness that makes us think beyond the characters as characters (although, in 2001, the blandness is meant to contrast greatly with the aliens, creating a sense of awe, in comparison to the ordinary).

It's hard to say how well Julianne Moore pulls off this role. She's certainly believable as the housewife who's world is upended by an illness she can't identify. She loses the support of her husband, and it's never clear if her stepchild ever cared that much for her. When we meet her new friends, we wonder "Are they crazy? Are they cultists?", and yet, we want her to be well, so we hope what they say is true. Again, we question how the retreat members deal with their situation, wondering if we, in the same situation, would want to resort to new age solutions.

In Safe, Julianne Moore is every woman, boring and bland enough, that we don't think of her as a character, but as a reflection of who we might be. It's an audacious film. It isn't Kubrick. Haynes's concerns aren't the same, but it is heavily influenced by the way Kubrick sees the world.