Picnic at Hanging Rock is crap
Saturday, December 6, 2008 at 2:32AM About a movie where falling into a time warp is the most reasonable explanation of events, as opposed to a something that isn't bullshit.
I think that it's fair to say that for the most part I'm fairly easy going on movies. With a few exceptions, Love Stinks [wp] staring French Stewart for example, I'll find something to enjoy in even the most mediocre film. Rarely does it a film annoy me to the point where I need to blog about how much it annoyed me the very next day.
Last night we watched Picnic at Hanging Rock which Lydia had gotten from the library. I'd heard the name of the film a few times before, mostly in relation to how it influenced the Blair Witch Project [wp], which is especially apt because the novel on which Picnic at Hanging Rock is based is presented as a factual account of events.
This film was no Blair Witch Project. The trouble largely that I had with it was that there seems to be no reason nearly anything happens, things are not explained and nobody in the movie acts in anyway like normal humans would. The movie focuses on three British boarding school girls in Australia who vanish while on a school trip to Hanging Rock, which is basically a big rock. Also vanishing is a school teacher, who either went to look for the girls, killed them or just ran around with her skirt off. That bit is never made clear, nor are any number of things.
Things that reasonably the characters themselves should know, but the author, director or whomever, simply doesn't think we'd care to know. What happens when the Foppy British boy follows the girls before their disappearance? Despite the fact that the girls take an inordinately large number of naps while walking up a moderately steep hill, he never catches up to them and later when he's really the prime suspect in their disappearance his explanation to the police of what happened after he ran after them amounted to him shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Meh".
"Meh" presumabely being the early twentieth century equivalent of "You'll have to ask my lawyer", because the police ask no follow up questions.
Now it can be argued that nothing is ever explained in The Blair Witch Project either, but to a degree that's the point of the movie. The Blair Witch Project is presented one hundred present through "found" footage, and it's more about experiencing what happened to the lost film makers as opposed to finding out what happened. Picnic at Hanging Rock is mostly focused on the aftermath, and the mystery thus an explanation should be presented.
The closest thing to any sort of explanation that we do get is via Wikipedia, which offers us information of an extra chapter cut from the book that offers the solution to the mystery [wp]. The explanation? Oh it's good, especially from a film with no science fiction elements in it what-so-ever.
While exploring Hanging Rock on a picnic trip, the girls experience several incomprehensible phenomena. Driven giddy by some supernatural suggestion of the monolith, they throw their corsets over the cliff. However, the corsets never fall to the bottom and instead hang in space in an impossible fashion. The girls and Miss McCraw notice a mystical "hole in space". Marion, Miranda, and Miss McCraw transform into lizard-like creatures and crawl into a hole in the rock, which another boulder then covers, leaving Irma alone and clawing at the fallen rock.
But wait, the book's readers have a solution which is, sadly, even more realistic and only half as convoluted.
Many readers interpret this to mean that the girls have fallen into a time warp. This is compatible with Lindsay's fascination with clocks and time throughout Picnic at Hanging Rock. It also ties in with the tension between Aboriginal and English Australia that is clear throughout the book. The girls somehow succumbed to a magical, yet natural Australia, and were forever lost to their civilized schoolmates.
Think of how being able to pull in transmogrification, time warps and holes in space are going to really change the mystery genre. Who killed Kennedy? It was probably some kind of Grant Morrison like time bullet. The killer in Psycho wasn't Norman Bates, but a wormhole. Rosebud was a Cylone.
The first commenter to mention anything like magic realism as a defence for this film gets poked in the eye.
Reader Comments (2)
It definitely isn't for everyone, though. It's the director's intention to leave what happened hazy.
"`We worked very hard,'' Weir told an interviewer for Sight & Sound, ``at creating an hallucinatory, mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotize the audience away from the possibility of solutions.''
I remember being a little frustrated the first time I saw it that you never really know what happened to the girls, but it makes it a far more memorable, layered movie. As Roger Ebert points out, if the movie did indeed baldly state what happened, it would be a completely different movie: it would be a run-of-the-mill whodunit.
As it stands, it's more of a dreamy movie that is about human repression and folly, the strange environment and time it took place in, and life's lack of neat endings, and not the answers. (It also follows in the tradition of Australian film of how things can go very wrong, very quickly in the outback, and man's continuing arrogance, even in the face of the vast expanse and danger of the country.)
One of the reasons, I'd think, that it's a classic is that it doesn't tie everything up in a little bow at the end. What if they had said that the gardener had did it, or a time warp, or they had died of starvation?
Now THAT would be meh. After all that lovely imagery, leisurely pacing, and social commentary, it would feel cheap and tacked-on. That is why Weir actually trimmed a few minutes for the re-release the ensure that there are no clear answers.
It would be too tidy a resolution. The whole point of the movie is that you don't know what happened, rather than some oversight or cop-out on the director's part.
You can either enjoy it for what it is, or don't, but I wouldn't dislike it because it isn't like every other mystery movie out there.
I'll bet that you'll remember this movie for a lot longer than if they offered some simple explanation: now the images, strange stillness, and mystery remains.
(And, if you insist, you can have fun postulating what "really" happened. But, again, that is beside the point: nothing really happened. The film is about an event and people's reaction to it, not a stark record of the facts behind the event.)
Some of the best movies are the ones that don't spell it out for you, I think. We live in an age where we want everything spoon-fed to us, logic to dictate everything, and there be no ambiguity or wonder. A lot of the magic of film is lost there.
Even wham-bam awesome films like the original "Manchurian Candidate" are improved by strange, murky elements of the woman's involvement, all the way up to the children's escape in "Fanny and Alexander" or the ending of "Solaris."
More unique and interesting, no? As Kuato said to Quaid in "Total Recall", "Open your miiiiiind."
Had the movie managed to create that sense of atmosphere for me that you've referenced then maybe I'd have been okay with it. I don't need to know why the world is ending in Last Night to enjoy it, I can enjoy it for what it is.
You can say there's social commentary in it, but it's so vauge and ill-defined that really it could be about anything. Natural Australia versus modern British ways of life. Women's sexuality. Women's lib. The brief Canucks career of Mark Messier. It's about everything because it's a blank slate, and thus it's also about nothing.
The film is pre-dated by Hithcock who does mood and suspense so much better. For me it fell flat, out of touch and out of step. Far more old fashioned than even something like Birds, a film where there is no neat and tidy explanation either.
Really for me it felt like the time period it was set in. It remninded me of all the staid and dull English comedies of manners that I had to endure through various literature classes where the characters were very concerned with things that had stopped concerning anyone around the time when the cotton gin came into use.
This isn't really about people's reactions to the events, as you suggest, because nobody at any point in this movie acts as a living person has ever acted. Blindness was a movie, and a book, about people's reaction to the event because we saw people react like people. Here people reacted as if they were, at the very least, under heavy sedation even when not magically hypnotized by a mountain and lured into a tear in space time.
This is of course all subjective. Perhaps you know people who would act like this, in which case I'd hide my perscription drugs if I were you.
Again that's just my opinion. And I realize that I totally failed at trying to avoid continuing the debate on this.