Review: The Exorcism of Emily Rose

by Karina Longworth Sep 9th 2005 // 6:16AM

Filed under: Drama, Horror, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Movie Marketing



Before anything at all happens in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the new film from director Scott Derrickson, eight ominous words appear on screen:

This film is based on a true story.

It seems like an important thing for us to be aware of right off the bat, because very little in the film to follow resembles any kind of true life, at least as most of us know it.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose is ostensibly based on the story of Anneliese Michel, a German college student who believed she was possessed by multiple demons, including Lucifer, Nero, Judas Iscariot, and Adolf Hitler. In 1975, several years after Michel had started suffering from extreme seizures and exhibiting generally unexplained behavior (compulsions to self-mutilate and publicly urinate; the ability to speak languages Michel had never learned), the Catholic church gave her priest permission to perform an exorcism. Various traditional Church rituals were performed at least once a week for ten months, until, in July of 1976, Michel died of starvation (she had claimed for months that the demons would not allow her to eat). Anneliese’s parents, and the priest who officiated Michel’s exorcism, were brought to trial on charges of manslaughter, and sentenced to six months in prison. Michel's grave has since become an ad-hoc holy site for devout believers, even though the Church later issued a statement denying that Michel had ever been possessed.

 
Emily Rose takes this story, adapts it to an unnamed, wintry locale in the present-day US and folds it into a strange hybrid of courtroom drama and 70s-era hysteric shock-horror. After a quick look at Emily’s bleak and creaky, unconvincingly snowbound deathplace, presided over by the almost cartoonishly somber Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson), we plunge straight into the world of big city Law and – I mean, law and order – and the rest of Emily’s story is told in dream-logic heavy flashback.

In the present day, Father Moore is about to stand trial. The cynical DA sits at a coolly lit glass table and informs his staff that choosing the right prosecutor is key. “We need a Christian, a Catholic – someone who knows this shit inside out.” We’ve seen this kind of scene before on countless procedural shows; its point seems to be to remind us that, you know, sometimes you gotta play a little dirty in the name of justice. Message received. The ideological lines are thus drawn early on: on one side, you’ve got the law, doctors, and supposed Christians who are so unloyal to their faith that they’re willing to prosecute a representative of their own Church. On the other side, you’ve got God. Which team do you want to be on?

This is one of a new breed of otherwise-mostly-crap films populated by a bundle of great actors. Campbell Scott is only not a major star because he’s too good-looking for anyone to take him seriously; paradoxically, he’s also usually too smart (or too stubborn) to take paycheck work like this. Here, solving both problems by hiding behind an anachronistic mustache, he plays Ethan Thomas, the ostensibly-God-fearing barracuda eventually selected to up against the Church's lawyer, a mid-level litigator named Erin Bruner, played by Laura Linney.

Linney seems to be the go-to gal when casting lonely blonde women of a certain age, and in this case she brings a fascinating quality to a script that’s only concerned with the clockwork of her character on the crudest level. Erin works too hard, drinks too much and too often by herself. When we’re introduced to her, she’s smilingly analyzing a case file to the accompaniment of multiple gin martinis, like some dreary singleton ancestor to Nora Charles. She manages both the feats of drinking and the feats of working by remaining obstinately unsentimental – she’s a beautiful 40-year-old woman with no friends, no sex life, no cats (she’s afraid of them), and no system of beliefs (ditto).

Of course, at the beginning of the film, she has no idea that there’s anything wrong with her, but every frame with her in it is composed so that what she's lacking is all that we see. For one thing, she’s got incredible hair for such a single-minded career woman. Her fellow lawyers (all men) look on her with pity, as if it’s a cruel shame to see a broad letting her obvious aesthetic appeal go to waste. Even more shamefully, Erin parlays their pity back into her own game. When her boss sweet-talks her into taking the Rose case with the promise of promotion at the firm, she purrs, “How high do I get to rise this time?”

It’s not new to see a female character who blatantly correlates career success with sexual satisfaction, and it’s old as hell to place such a gal in a narrative that eventually demands her to “re-evalute her priorities.” But Linney approaches such boring business with what can only be described as a twinkle in her eye. She turns the dreariest parts of the script (and it gets pretty dreary) away from clock-watching tedium. She’s obviously here because her appearance on Frasier didn’t quite pay the bills like she thought it would, but at least she’s having fun; that’s more than can be said for Scott, who might as well be wearing an baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan, “I’d rather be doing Mamet”.

Unfortunately, on the whole it’s not a fun film, and that sets it far apart from the many good courtroom dramas flooding my television, as well as most contemporary horror. Most of the problem lies in the fact that the two generic modes don’t exactly blend seamlessly. The most interesting thing about the Linney/Scott plot is that, for a good deal of the film, Erin seems to be getting her ass kicked by the prosecution. Though the film obviously wants us to take the religious argument seriously and throw down on God’s side, we’re also clearly shown that we’d be crazy if we did. Prosecutor Thomas objects to one aspect of Erin’s “if the medical diagnosis is not entirely airtight, you must acquit” argument on the grounds of “silliness, for one”; the cookie-cutter judge overrules that motion, but Thomas’ protest is duly noted by those in the audience.

Meanwhile, the flashbacks to Emily’s worsening condition are so theatrical, so visually impressionistic (you’ve seen glimpses of black-eyed ghouls in the trailer – in practice, this is more effective than you might think), and so reliant on the limp shock of a beautiful girl made ugly (and Jennifer Carpenter, a very beautiful girl, is, at Emily’s worst, made very, very ugly) that, with the turn of just a degree or two to the left, they could easily be played for camp. But this narrative raps its ruler on the desk and demands utmost seriousness; at the same time, it backs away from answering any real questions about the possibility of possession or the existence of real evil, supernatural or otherwise.

To answer the question that seems to be on minds, without giving too much away: no, it's not scary as much as it's occasionally disturbing, and, less occasionally, sort of provocative on a very low philosophical level. But scary? Not so much. The actual exorcism scene – the money shot, which employs the spooky audio recordings the marketing department has been Blair-pimping in a last-ditch effort to get you to believe that this is a biopic – is itself badly edited and confusing. Later on, characters refer to the damning evidence of Emily’s possession parceled out within it, which I think I mostly missed by blinking. As the film’s reason for being, it’s scary for a lot of reasons, but probably not for any that Derrickson intended.

I must reiterate that Carpenter is one of the cutest girls I’ve seen in movies lately; various close-ups, if isolated, could be read as essays to explain exactly why the devil would want to embody a virginal brunette in the first place. She’s also good enough, and committed enough to the role, that her Emily could have made a compelling protagonist had the filmmakers gone about this task as a straight horror film. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen a horror film that took fear itself seriously. I wish Derrickson and Co. had been up to the challenge of bringing the serious supernatural thriller back from the dead; instead, they chickened out and made a legal melodrama. But why begrudge Laura Linney the opportunity to make car payments?

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