Review: Midnight Special
Watching a movie requires a certain amount of faith. You give yourself over to the dark, place yourself in the hands of a filmmaker who implicitly asks you to trust in the series of images and words presented before you and to have faith that your time and investment shall be rewarded. The writer-director Jeff Nichols merits that faith with his fourth feature, Midnight Special, a deeply satisfying blend of road movie, conspiracy thriller, Spielbergian sci-fi, and ode to fatherhood.
It begins in a motel room with two men, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton), childhood friends reunited after decades apart. They are on the run and in possession of 8-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). The boy is Roy's son and he is no ordinary child. Why exactly does Alton wear tinted swimming goggles and noise-canceling headphones? Nichols suggests the boy may be ultra-sensitive to light and sound, but slowly reveals the cause to be something far more complicated and Alton as a figure to be viewed as both salvation and threat.
For Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), the leader of a Branch Davidian-like cult from which Roy and ex-wife Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) broke away after being forced to surrender their son to Meyer, Alton is a prophet whose seemingly unintelligible ramblings and visions may be the secret to the cult's redemption. For the FBI and relatively green NSA officer Paul Sevier (Adam Driver), Alton is a danger to a national security, capable of decoding highly encrypted transmissions. When Alton pulls a government satellite out of orbit and crashes it over a gas station, the urgency to protect him intensifies for Ray, who is intent on keeping the ailing Alton alive to meet his destiny.
Midnight Special is replete with beautiful and astonishing sequences, be it the satellite crash that resembles a meteor shower or the first instance where Alton's eyes emit a fierce blue ray or even the numerous close-ups that hold the faces of Shannon, Dunst and Edgerton for the length of an impossibly held breath. If nothing else, Nichols conducts a master class in mood, expression and tense anticipation. The film may strongly recall Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but this is a work that manages to be something wholly different and original. One can revel in the religious overtones or the superhero allegory, but the story's driving engine is the faith and the indefinable ingredients that comprise that faith.
What, for example, evokes such devotion from Lucas for a boy he barely knows? Why is his reaction to protect rather than capture? Edgerton is very touching in the role; Driver, meanwhile, injects his unique brand of quirk into Sevier - note the sideways staccato shuffle he employs as he approaches Alton in one of the film's standout scenes.
Dunst is quietly sublime as a woman who understands that her own child may not belong to her. Lieberher is wonderfully natural and convincingly enigmatic as Alton, but the film belongs to Shannon. He is simply excellent as the intensely concentrated Roy, who understands that restoring Alton to his rightful place means losing his beloved son. Shannon's unsentimental performance makes Roy's sacrifice blisteringly heartbreaking and shows how fatherhood can be a type of faith. "I like worrying about you," Roy tells Alton, "I'll always worry about you. That's the deal."
If the protracted climax disappoints or feels compromised, it's mainly due to it being one of the few instances where we're shown something that would have been better left to the imagination. The power of imagination is what has been driving this simple story all along and to suddenly abandon that during the film's most important moment feels a sort of betrayal. Nevertheless, Nichols has fashioned a work so lovely and spellbinding that its faults can be forgiven.
Midnight Special
Directed by: Jeff Nichols
Written by: Jeff Nichols
Starring: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Jaeden Lieberher, Adam Driver, Sam Shepard, Bill Camp, Scott Haze, Paul Sparks
