(1998. dir: Adam Coleman Howard) The first time you watch it, it seems playwrighterly and contrived, in that way you feel gypped sometimes when you're watching a Sam Shepard play and keep thinking, "Why do they stay in the same room with each other? Why doesn't somebody just leave?" or like when you're watching a Pinter or Genet and think, "Nobody plays that kind of absurd dress-up game unless they're written by a playwright dabbling in sadomasochistic psychobabble." It's also difficult to sit through Dark Harbor without squirming because the characters seem so skinless and vulnerable, their interactions so often embarrassing. Judging from feedback on Netflix, many seem to find it a tedious slog. It is, rather, a very carefully written psychological thriller, performed with something approaching perfection by all involved. You just don't realize it until the second time you watch it because the first time through you think you're watching a whole different movie.
It's a three-human show: Alan Rickman, Polly Walker, and Reedus, and all three actors give incredibly brave, even consummate performances. I've always been a Rickman fan, and I seriously love Polly Walker in this. It's only Reedus, though, who has to dress up as Marilyn and sing "Happy Birthday" to the President, an impossible task, but in context, and I'm including Walker's reactions, particularly the second time through, when your eyes have opened to the true circumstances, it's a piece of mastery. The second viewing, in fact, seems no longer playwrighterly and contrived but thickly, darkly psychosexual, envisioned and communicated with an intoxicating, earthy fecundity. (Like those mushrooms, now I think of it! which is a trope that keeps slithering its way through the symbology.) It's got a great dream sequence, and, in retrospect, there is no single loose end, no moment that does not lead in its way toward the final outcome.
The less you know going in, probably the better. I had an idea it was going to be a remake of Knife in the Water, so when it began to veer a little sideways, I was exactly the tabula rasa it needed. If you can sit through it once, and I understand that not everyone can, then you can sit through it twice, and the second time is infinitely rewarding.
The other thing is the sex appeal. Rickman and Walker are both extraordinarily sensuous actors, and Reedus is unbearably sexy in this. Really, even unwatchably sexy. I had to pause it sometimes, get up and walk around, just to keep from being overwhelmed, like those girls you see at old Beatles concerts who are obviously going so berserk with rapture that they're just going to fall right over.
Rating: four stars
Reedus Factor: five stars
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