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The Wicker Man
December 28, 2006
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Danika
The Simple Life 4
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, an upstanding officer of the law driven by his own devout moral rectitude. After receiving a letter concerning the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl, Howie dutifully takes a seaplane to investigate. But <b>the local<br />
townsfolk claim never to have heard of the girl</b>, Rowan Morrison, and her<br />
alleged mother clams up and claims her daughter is fine.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>As Howie investigates further, <b>his conservative notions are offended by the rampant sexuality he encounters<br />
everywhere</b> — be it at the local inn, where the<br />
owner grins with crooked approval when his daughter Willow (Britt Ekland, above) joins in the<br />
lewd sing-a-longs and rowdy festivities, or in the elementary school classroom, where teachers talk openly about the<br />
“generative force” of a phallic maypole.<o:p></o:p> When Howie visits the patriarch of the town, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), he learns that the community has reverted to paganism<br />
during the past century. Isolated from the rest of the world, they’ve become<br />
completely dependent upon the earth to provide their sustenance, and this reversion<br />
to a simpler way of life has brought with it a reversion to a more primitive belief system. All of this deeply offends Howie, but he’s convinced there is a cover-up, that the young girl in question is still alive, and that he is thus duty bound to continue his investigation.</p>
<p>That things end badly is an inevitability, and depending on how much you’ve heard about the film throughout the years (the ending was spoiled for me before I watched it), or of Neil LaBute and Nicolas Cage’s remake from last fall, you’ll be less surprised than audiences of its time, which is a shame. <b><i>The Wicker Man</i> is frequently if loosely described as a horror film, but that’s not really the case. Its rhythms are sleepy, and it’s designed to elicit unease as much as anything else</b>. There’s much drunken carousing, with songs about corn rigs and barley and the like. The locals leer and stare blankly, and the camera lingers on their faces and the surrounding landscape. This dawdling had me teetering on disengagement — given that we don’t really get to deeply know any of these other characters — but what keeps your intellect engaged is <i>Sleuth</i> and <i>Frenzy</i> writer Anthony Shaffer’s carefully crafted, symbolically layered screenplay, as well as Woodward’s slightly peeved, clench-jawed performance. <b>Context matters to varying degrees in revisiting older films, and it’s a lot with <i>The Wicker Man</i>, which I still think could have used some tighter editing and a bit different filmmaking technique. Still, this film burns itself into your memory</b>, no matter the decade of its viewing, or pre-revelation of its secrets.</p>
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