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Writer/director Neil LaBute, whose bitter social experiments I've supported in the past, has taken the 1973 British classic -- about a devoutly Christian cop investigating a disappearance on a devoutly pagan island -- and removed most of the religion and all of the point. The story now seems to be about how power corrupts and how a matriarchal society wouldn't be much kinder and gentler than a patriarchy. That's debatable, but this tale was never structured to make that argument.

Neil, buddy, how about I remake In the Company of Men and change the whole point of the film? Would that be cool with you?

A lost-looking Nicolas Cage steps into Edward Woodward's shoes as highway patrolman Edward Malus, who's having trouble getting over an accident he witnessed (and had a small hand in causing). This backstory does nothing for the narrative except to give Cage an excuse to go googly-eyed whenever he sees a pigtailed blonde girl, which, as the movie lumbers along, is often. Anyway, Edward receives a note from ex-girlfriend Willow (Kate Beahan), whose daughter has disappeared from Summersisle, the remote private island off the West Coast that Willow grew up on and eventually returned to. Edward swings into action, arriving on the island only to be greeted by a sea of uncooperative female faces. Summersisle, you see, is a matriarchy, though there are pitiful-looking men straggling about too, relegated to scutwork and breeding.

The original Wicker Man contrasted Edward Woodward's uptight Catholicism with the natives' freewheeling, sexually open paganism. For a matriarchal remake to make any sense, Cage's character would have to swagger onto Summersisle with smug white-male privilege, the way Woodward's cop brandished his close personal friendship with Jesus. But Edward Malus isn't written or played that way; he's just a guy, a decent man, and when he becomes annoyed with the women of Summersisle it's not out of male disdain but simply because he wants to find a missing girl and they're giving him the runaround. His disdain and distrust now seem justified. Needless to say, all the accurate pagan details the original film so scrupulously planted are absent here. It's now a vaguely pagan society whose real sin, the movie seems to say, is that the bitches are in charge.

Ellen Burstyn shows up in full priestessy efflorescence as Sister Summersisle, the distaff equivalent of Christopher Lee's Lord Summerisle in the original, but she isn't given the dialogue to compete with Lee's performance. The debate about Christianity versus the old gods? Gone. So Burstyn is left stranded in a role almost as hollow as the titular object. Sister Summersisle does refer to her ancestors moving to the island to get away from oppressive patriarchy, but LaBute doesn't express the irony that the resulting matriarchy is just as oppressive, nor does the islanders' hostility seem particularly male-directed. I can't really call this Wicker Man misogynist; if it is, it's a very flaccid form of it. It's yet another gender power struggle in the director's portfolio, this time hung onto a story that doesn't wear it well. The Wicker Man should be about the conflict of belief systems, not the battle of the sexes.

After a while, as you may have heard, you do indeed get to see Nicolas Cage running around in a bear suit, and the movie does recreate the original's much-discussed ending, though without a tenth of its force and eloquence. (In the original, Christopher Lee leads his followers in a rousing rendition of "Sumer Is Icumen In" while Woodward shouts various Biblical quotations; in the remake, the islanders chant "The drone must die" while Cage shrieks "Noooo! Noooo! You bitches!" Which is as good an indication as any of how far screenwriting has fallen.) The Wicker Man was always constructed as an atmospheric piece in which a believer finds himself among other believers, doubts his own beliefs, and finally ascends to a higher purpose amid a thick subtext of eroticism and the use of faith as an imposition of the will. This movie believes in nothing -- except, perhaps, that women would enslave and torch men if they had the power, so let's not give them power.

But, hey, any movie can benefit from reinterpretation, right, Neil? How about I remake "The Shape of Things" for a cast of animated cats? Doesn't that sound cool?

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originally posted: 09/03/06 19:46:39
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