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"The Raven" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" are promptly cited, "Sleeping Beauty" also has its role to play. The gentle schoolteacher (Christopher Walken) turns down the invitation of his lover (Brooke Adams) and runs into the Beckettian rupture on a rainy road, five years later he awakens from a coma with an instinct for second sight. "A very new human ability... or a very old one," it comes to him in wrenching spasms—the child in the burning playroom, a pogrom in old Poland, a peewee hockey team plunging under the ice, "it feels like I'm dying inside." New England under perpetual frost like Bergman's countryside (cp. Winter Light) serves David Cronenberg's saddest vision splendidly, a muted veneer to conceal the pain of knowledge. A reluctant assistant against the Castle Rock Killer, the cavernous tunnel and the snowy gazebo that lead to the greenish home of a murderous mamma's boy. (The restrained surface is cracked by one unforgettably visceral moment, the culprit's posthumous twitch in a bloodied bathtub.) Rilke's premonition "like a flag surrounded by vast distances," prophecies that drain the outsider who just wants to be average. The acid test is the Hitler query as applied to a rising political candidate (Martin Sheen), "a real man of the people" on his way to Washington and nuclear missiles, the seer's purpose elucidated at last. Blank spots in "controlled environments," thus Cronenberg in the Reagan Eighties with an analytical view of ingrown fascism and appreciation of singular figures in drab surroundings. "I always thought my power was a curse, but now I can see it's a gift." The rally assassination attempt points up the kinship with Taxi Driver, the protagonist dies happily knowing he's saved a world that has no place for him. With Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe, Nicholas Campbell, Colleen Dewhurst, Geza Kovacs, Sean Sullivan, and Jackie Burroughs.
--- Fernando F. Croce |