A Film Canon

Take Shelter plays like a revisionist midwestern nostalgia piece, or Field Of Dreams with bad dreams, in which landowner Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) experiences a series of apocalyptic visions that induce him to pour all his time and money into building an underground shelter for his family. These visions, which occur periodically throughout the first third of the film, represent an intensification and exhaustion of Spielberg's proclivity for the upward gaze of a child, here intensified to the upwards gaze of a deaf child, Curtis' daughter, whose imminent surgery is put into jeopardy by his actions, and whose cochlea gradually becomes continuous with the spiraling tornado that dominates his visions. As a result, those visions tend to be primarily visions of sound, or of images raised to such a pitch that they can effectively be heard, strangling and stifling Curtis with their sublimity. Not only does this produce an unusually and spectacularly variegated topography of cloud and light, as if Nichols were belatedly and idiosyncratically completing Spielberg's shelved Watch The Skies project, but the claustrophobic expansiveness peculiar to a deafened image, as if the sheer fact of living beneath something as immense and crushing as the sky constituted live burial. In this way, they pre-empt the claustrophobic conclusion, and its gas-masked fusion of sight and sound -  part of an unusual movement away from the visionary register of the first act in favor of a revisionary, indie flatness, in which Curtis' experiences are more or less decisively diagnosed as the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, and our wonder simply presented as something requiring medication. From that perspective, the final movement back towards a visionary register, and the way it's presented as a twist, is a little disingenuous - but it's also understandable why Nichols resorts to it, just because there's ultimately something a bit unsatisfying, and even facile, about a revisionary destylising of a genre, or mode, that's almost entirely driven by style. Field Of Dreams and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind - the two biggest touchstones here - are both extremely slow films, but they're so gorgeously and contemplatively style-driven that their slowness isn't noticeable, whereas Nichols frequently seems to retain their slowness and discard their style, making his own film feel a bit cosmetically, or ponderously slow. It also doesn't do any credit to his own tactile proclivity for style, again clearest in the first section, which seems poised at the same level of sign language as Curtis' daughter, who can speak the general sign for "storm", but not the individual letters.