Adolescence is a Powerful Force

Carrie
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Three Stars

By Rollan Schott

One of the interesting aspects of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie”, the 1976 horror classic about repressed sexuality and the power of femininity, was that it was written (novel and screenplay) and directed by men. It’s an odd band to be writing a feminist anthem, but what De Palma’s “Carrie” became, amidst the whir of testosterone involved in the production, was a parable about the Darwinian cruelty of high school and, perhaps more importantly, a paranoid allegory of masculine insecurity, of the buried power of the women that a male-centric society dares to subjugate. It worked both as a sardonic revenge fantasy and as a cautionary tale, and felt all the more dangerous and startling for managing both.

Kimberly Peirce’s remake of the famed Stephen King novel, of the tortured high school senior with untamed telekinetic powers, is not nearly as audacious the feat that De Palma’s was, but it does enjoy the distinct advantage of having been made by a woman, an worthwhile perspective for this material, and one that makes this an intriguing thriller in its own right, if you can forgive the long shadow of the predecessor that shrouds it. Peirce’s film is more product than De Palma’s, glossier, heavier on surfaces but with less visceral unease. She has effectively graduated this material from low-budget cult bait to full on pop art, and if it doesn't have the immediate potency of De Palma’s, its accessibility does make some of this story’s basic themes, such as the way Carrie’s developing powers act as a basic parallel for mysterious and powerful changes her body is enduring, more available.

But what Peirce’s and De Palma’s films do have in common are the strength and courage of their lead performances, here Chloe Grace Moretz in the titular role and Julianne Moore as her domineering and dysfunctionally religious mother. This is acting without a net, and one should stop to appreciate the hubris necessary to take on roles so perilously close to the absurd, to step so far out on to the edge and fight back the vertigo. Moore especially, as Carrie’s mother, is misogynist in a fetishistic way, dwelling relentlessly on the deep-seated contempt for women in Christian texts. She self-mutilates, thumping her head on walls and smacking her temples with coiled fists, punishing herself ceaselessly for the child she born out of wedlock. She moves obliviously about her house in a servile daze. Hers is a ridiculous character, but Moore sells it with vigor, and with a director who seems to understand horror’s proximity to comedy the effect is more upsetting than laughable.

And then there’s Moretz, who already at 16 has produced a wealth of performances within material that should seem taxing to her maturity. Since having faced down a psychopathic Ryan Reynolds in “The Amityville Horror” in 2005, she has turned up in “Texas Killing Fields”, the dark vampire film “Let Me In”, the ultra-violent “Kick-Ass” and its sequel, and now here, where the very youth she seems to have sidestepped for her career is itself upon the sacrificial altar. Sissy Spacek, in her iconic performance from the original film, was impish and pasty, withdrawn in a manic and terrified way. But Moretz’ Carrie is a pitifully pretty, forlorn loner, a girl for whom the revelation of her exquisite beauty on prom night is startling to everyone but us, because the waning of her innocence had already provoked an inevitable sympathy.

But Carrie was invisible, her attractiveness hiding in plain site. Her isolation was not suffocating but empty, and baffling in a superficial and materialistic high school culture where pretty girls like Carrie should enjoy an effortless celebrity. Early in the film she is informed frankly, after her traumatic and humiliating first period in the locker room, that she’s a “woman” now. It is a charge applied prematurely, mistakenly equating a girl’s maturity with her sexual development, and it is that very misunderstanding, of that turbulent whirlwind of late adolescence, that this film is predicated on. “Carrie” is an affecting allegory for the terrifying powers of sexuality, and the uncharted mysteries of puberty, and the way that that confusion manifests itself as insecurity and is expelled outward like a violent quasar into a society ill-equipped to support it. Carrie is but one, but she is also, articulately, that society, her power our fear, her fear our regret.