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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Carrie

CARRIE (Kimberly Peirce). 96 minutes. Opens Friday (October 18). See listing. Rating: NN


Well, Carrie, your mother was right: they’re all gonna laugh at you.

They certainly won’t be screaming at this 21st century Carrie, a dull, witless remake by Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce of Brian de Palma’s overheated 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.

De Palma’s movie has its issues – you always feel the director was about three seconds away from touching himself in the editing room – but at least it has a point of view and a sense of creeping terror. Peirce’s movie is what we get when a director has no vision and a star gets no direction.

Transposing huge chunks of Lawrence D. Cohen’s screenplay to the present day, with a couple of nods in the direction of smartphones and Google, this Carrie trades de Palma’s hazy eroticism and explosive horror for a bland sleepwalk through the same material.

It’s not that Peirce doesn’t do anything different with the story or the characters, it’s that she doesn’t do anything at all. There’s no style, no sense of subtext, no hint of a guiding intelligence behind the camera. Things happen in this movie because that’s the way they happened in the last movie.

As the neurotic wallflower who becomes a telekinetic fury, Chloë Grace Moretz does exactly what she did in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, forever looking outside the frame in the hope that someone will tell her what to do. Once Carrie turns on her persecutors, it’s all blank stares and wizard hands – a physical performance rather than an emotional one – with a startling disconnect between what Moretz is doing in close-ups and wider shots, suggesting reshoots intended to intensify or at least enhance certain moments.

Julianne Moore tries to one-up Piper Laurie as the hysterical Momma White, but Peirce never finds a context for the character’s religious mania. Surely there are ways to place the Whites in the context of modern Christian fundamentalism that would at least make the “dirty pillows” scene play as camp. Remember, Moore played Sarah Palin she knows at least one effective way to channel delusional conviction.

People mock Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (which also featured Moore in a key role, curiously enough), but if nothing else, that remake functions as a sly commentary on the passage of time between versions. Peirce’s Carrie just ignores it things happen in this movie because that’s the way they happened before, heedless of the massive societal, technological and cultural changes.

In flashes, Judy Greer’s lively take on the sympathetic gym teacher Miss Desjardin – flintier and more conflicted than Betty Buckley, and able to suggest a complex history in her key confrontation with Portia Doubleday’s generic mean girl, Chris Hargensen – hints at the possibilities of a properly contemporary Carrie.

But Peirce is either unable or unwilling to follow her lead.

What a pointless, bloody waste.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision

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