Symbiotic Reviews

Take Shelter Cast: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain Director: Jeff Nichols Running Time: 2 hours
by Jericho Cerrona November 16, 2011

Take Shelter is a rather brilliant character study starring the commanding Michael Shannon as a man experiencing apocalyptic visions. It was written and directed by Jeff Nichols, whose only other film was the well-received Shotgun Stories (2007), also starring Shannon. Here, the actor plays Ohio blue-collar worker Curtis, who has a loyal wife (Jessica Chastain) a young daughter with a hearing disability (Tova Stewart), and an aptitude for terrifying hallucinations. Often, these hallucinations appear in the form of recurring nightmares, while the sight of motor oil rain, flocks of migrating birds, and foreboding storm clouds at other times appear while he’s fully awake. The film charts Curtis’s growing fear and paranoia, which include building a tornado shelter in his backyard, and how all of this affects his family as well as his coworkers. The movie is by turns subtle and brooding, a psychological thriller in which the most thrilling moments occur during character interactions and dialogue, a rare thing in movies these days. Nichols effectively blurs fantasy and reality, dream and delusion, madness and prophetic doom, but never strays from the core of the story; which is about a good man desperately trying to keep his family together.

Ever since his Oscar-nominated supporting role in 2009’s Revolutionary Road, Shannon has seemingly come out of nowhere to become one of cinema’s most interesting actors, but the truth is that the theater-trained thespian has been appearing in films since the early 1990’s. Here, Shannon takes the unhinged intensity he displayed in movies like Bug and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? and tailors it to a character that is entirely sympathetic. Instead of just being a weirdo losing his mind, Curtis is a deeply flawed but fully believable figure, and the brilliance of Shannon’s portrayal is that he never goes for melodramatic grandstanding. Instead, he turns in a nuanced and multi-layered performance, and in the one scene where he finally does snap, Shannon’s explosive fury feels earned rather than forced.

Take Shelter is leisurely paced, and may bore some audiences looking for cheap thrills and jump-scares. To clarify; this is not that kind of movie, and ultimately its all the better for it. Nichols is more interested in probing the fractured psyche of someone with a history of mental illness than making a typical thriller. For instance, his mother (Kathy Baker) was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her thirties, and much of the film simply charts Curtis’ attempts to wrestle with his apparent delusions by seeking medical help while keeping everything a secret from his wife. In fact, the relationship between Curtis and Samantha is one so rarely seen in the movies, showing two people that love each other deeply, but who have lost their ability to properly communicate. Chastain (who has starred in a whopping seven films this year, including Terrance Malick’s polarizing Tree of Life) is excellent in what could have been the clichéd long-suffering wife role. Instead of being a passive bystander to Curtis’s mental unraveling, Samantha confronts her husband at every turn while trying to understand the implications of his bizarre actions, and Chastain is thoroughly believable as a woman fighting for her marriage. By the film’s end, she has become the audience’s emotional anchor.

What exactly happens after Curtis finishes the tornado shelter and prepares for what he perceives to be the apocalyptic storm to end all storms, is best left unsaid. What should be noted, however, is that Take Shelter features a very satisfying third act. Usually, movies that start strong and slowly build a tone of dread inevitably blow it with a silly wrap up; call it the curse of M. Night Shyamalan, but here Nichols has fashioned something truly remarkable that will have audiences talking long after the end credits have rolled. Instead of devolving into camp or overwrought melodrama, the last 30-minutes are so thoroughly gripping and emotionally affecting that the tension is nearly unbearable.

As masterful as Take Shelter often is, it’s marred somewhat by being a tad repetitive. The hallucination/dream sequences are well visualized, but by the film’s mid-point, shots of billowing clouds and rain on windowpanes start to become a little redundant. More effective is the idea that even a good life can come apart at the seams, and that the very notion of normalcy in this day and age is a fleeting mirage. Nichols, whether consciously or not, has made a great movie about the perils of living in rural America, where the costs of proper mental health care is astronomical and the pressures of the average blue-collar worker to provide for his or her family nearly impossible. Whether Curtis’s visions are indications of madness or some kind of prophetic gift remains open to debate, but what cannot be debated is the fact that Take Shelter is one of the best films of the year.