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The Two Film Worlds: There are apparently two audiences for movies. This is fine, I guess, since I am becoming convinced that there are two separate and distinct film industries. The first audience is composed of the people who go to movies for the "ride." This audience is fairly film illiterate. They haven't seen movies older than, say, Star Wars, and don't notice inconsistencies of plot and character so long as the movie continues to stroke them. There isn't anything wrong with this, per se, although I personally think it promotes mediocrity in the arts. Of course, this audience doesn't see film as an art. They just want to be "entertained." This is the arena of the marketers and demographers, who are hell bent for finding the broadest possible audience possible. The second audience for movies are film buffs, in the broadest sense of the word. This audience worships at the altar of Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Scorsese. They are savvy to the tricks of the trade and recognize it when a filmmaker cribs from other filmmakers. This audience is more demanding. They want more than just a "ride." This is the province of the "other" film industry, which produces "small" movies and "prestige" movies. Every so often, a film will come along that attempts to bridge the gap between these two worlds. Robert Zemeckis's What Lies Beneath is such a movie. The first audience is going to love it. It will be a big hit. The second audience will resent it, since it intrudes on territory they have declared off limits.

Synopsis: Claire Spenser seems to have the perfect marriage. Her husband is a noted scientist, her daughter has just left for college, and her family lives in a beautiful house in Vermont that overlooks a lake. After her daughter leaves for school, Claire is alone in her house for the first time. Soon, she begins to feel lonely. She begins watching her bickering next door neighbors, and becomes convinced that the husband has murdered his wife. She also hears things in her own house. She becomes convinced that not only did her neighbor murder his wife, but that the wife is now haunting her house. Her husband, Norman, thinks she is suffering from some kind of depression and asks her to see a therapist. The ghostly manifestations continue in spite of the therapy and in spite of Claire's supposedly murdered next door neighbor turning up alive. Eventually, the ghost reveals who she is: a girl who went missing from the town two years ago. A girl that Norman finally admits to having an affair with...

At the Master's Knee: For most of its length, What Lies Beneath resembles a REALLY accomplished piece of Hitchcockian pastiche. This is the sort of film that Brian DePalma has been trying to make for the last thirty years. The whole "neighbor murdering his wife" sub-plot is swiped directly from Rear Window, of course, and another major plot element is borrowed from another Hitchcock movie that I won't name for fear of giving away the movie. There are even some playful nods to The Master liberally sprinkled throughout: my favorite being a shot from below a glass floor. Certainly, the pairing of Michelle Pfieffer and Harrison Ford is one of the only modern combinations of leading actors that compares favorably with, say, Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. But unlike DePalma, who is content to merely swipe things from his idol, Zemeckis plays around with them some. The Rear Window bit is a magnificent red herring and is filmed with such accomplishment that we forgive it and relax when it all turns out fine in the end. Zemeckis has also learned the power of signifying objects from Hitchcock. But Zemeckis is after something else, too.

The Dark Chill: Ghost stories thrive on an ambience of menace. Zemeckis provides this in spades. The subplot about the neighbor turns the screws tight (the scene when Claire speaks to her neighbor through a hole in the fence is one of the most distressing conversations in recent film). When this inevitably plays out, the audience is left to wonder what is ACTUALLY going on. This adds to the suspense and Zemeckis milks it unmercifully. The ghostly occurrences in the second half of the movie, particularly the ones that center around an overflowing bathtub, hint at darker and darker things just behind the curtain. This is where Zemeckis breaks free of Hitchcock (as DePalma has never been able to manage). Zemeckis has been in this territory before. Death Becomes Her, for instance, milked this sort of material for (nervous) laughter, and all of Zemeckis's television work (for instance: "Head of the Class" for Amazing Stories and the various episodes of Tales from the Crypt) are black comedies of a particularly morbid variety. With What Lies Beneath, he plays the horror straight and brings to it an elegance that would be out of place had he indulged his fondness for E. C. Comics-style grotesquerie. Even so, he DOES borrow an E.C. Comics image for the end of the movie and strips it of any kind of comedy. The result is a tremendously disquieting denoument.

Performances: Michelle Pfeiffer may very well have the saddest face of any leading lady in history. It's sadness is profound and imparts a glacial beauty to it that is beginning to seem ageless. Harrison Ford is certainly capable of happy-go-lucky charm tinged with the cynicism of Indiana Jones, but checks this at the door here. These are two unhappy people, it seems, and when the screenplay provides them with "cute" scenes at the beginning, Ford and Pfeiffer seem to be embarassed to play them. Fortunately, most of the rest of the movie asks them to be glum or paranoid, so the casting is particularly good. Pfeiffer, in particular, plays her role perfectly: part somnambulist, part hysteric, part betrayed wife, it's a multi-faceted role that suits her, particularly when she is wet (which is a goodly portion of the movie). Ford is a reliable actor and he is good here, but he isn't asked to do much of anything until the movie is nearly over. When he DOES get to do something, he tranforms his role into one that fans will be discussing for quite some time.

Styling: Zemeckis adds styling to his movie in two ways: special effects and set pieces. There isn't another director in Hollywood who pushes the special effects envelope like Robert Zemeckis. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future 2 and 3, and Death Becomes Her advance the state of the art like few other movies. Over the last couple of films, Zemeckis has been striving to make his special effects invisible. Oh, there are still flamboyant touches: the insertion of Tom Hanks into historical footage in Forrest Gump, for instance, and the opening shot in Contact (which may well be the best opening shot of the last twenty years), but it is the small details where he has REALLY been pushing the envelope. The most amazing effects in Gump, to me anyway, are the removal of Gary Sinise's legs and the ping pong ball. In What Lies Beneath, Zemeckis deploys his effects with incredible subtlety, enabling him to get shots the likes of which were never available to Hitchcock. There is a dolly shot through the window of a speeding truck, for instance, that is so seemless and so organic to the movie that I doubt that most filmgoers will even recognize how amazing it is. Other small touches abound. The effects never call attention to themselves, but they add immeasurably to the movie. As for set pieces: I hesitate to describe the suspense set piece in the bathtub near the end of the movie for fear of giving it and the movie away. It's the best suspense scene in the last ten years or so and will be remembered, I think, longer than any sequence in any other film released in 2000.

The Downside: As good as the formal elements of What Lies Beneath are, and they are very good indeed, the story they serve lacks something. When you strip away everything else, what remains is a story that would be at home in Tales from the Crypt. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, but it is disappointing that Zemeckis and screenwriter Clark Greggson didn't give the movie any more depth than that. This isn't a movie that will have people discussing the meaning of things (by contrast, Fatal Attraction is similar to this movie, but has a ferocious subtextual content--even if it IS wrong headed). In other words, What Lies Beneath is a great package, but once you get it open, it's kinda disappointing.

But, man, the package is great.