Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Send That Loan Officer to Hell!
(Drag Me to Hell, 6/8/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
With
everyone else heading to Pixar's Up this week, there's a certain
perverse pleasure in aiming lower—much lower. For Sam Raimi's Drag
Me to Hell has the kind of premise that is so in tune with hard
times it almost qualifies as wish-fulfillment. About to lose your house?
Want to scare away the guys aiming to repossess your car? Easy—just
get your local gypsy crone to send that loan officer to hell!
The damned functionary here is Christine
(Alison Lohman), an underappreciated twenty-something who wonders if
she's too kindhearted for her job. When her boss (David Paymer) stipulates
a promotion on her showing a little ruthlessness, Christine denies the
loan application of a destitute old woman (Lorna Raver) who is 1) creepy,
and 2) must use the weakest denture adhesive in the world. Big mistake,
of course: her unhappy customer gets her revenge by slapping a curse
on her. For the next two days, Christine is destined to be tormented
by a horned demon called the Lamia. On the third day, as sure as federal
taxes, the devil will foreclose on her mortal soul. Maybe she should
have given the old woman a toaster.
All this sounds trashy. Indeed,
it is trashy, but Sam Raimi, director of the Evil Dead
and Spider-Man films, has a Stephen King-like talent for wringing
the genuine fright out of pulp ideas. There's some creepy atmosphere
in Drag Me, and some real jolts, and thankfully little of the
kind of effects-driven spectacle that often substitutes for real imagination.
("Relatively" being, of course, a relative term…) Part
of its success is the time it takes to establish the character of Christine,
who turns out to have a plausible combination of good intentions and
practical opportunism. Despite her boss' dickishness, she accepts full
responsibility for her decision to deny help to the old woman. One wonders
if Bernie Madoff will show the same integrity when the horned demons
come to take his soul.
Until now, Alison Lohman has specialized
in the kind of roles (Flicka, Big Fish) where her sweet-faced
good looks and adorable lisp go a long way. Raimi taps into something
else here-a formerly—fat girl insecurity, the George Bush-like
eyes that are set just a little too close together—that makes her
more than a figure to pat on the head and send to bed with a glass of
warm milk. Indeed, her screen presence here is virtually De Niro-like
compared to that of Justin Long, the actor who plays her boyfriend (and
also happens to be the cool half of the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac"
TV commercials). One can't help imagining the chronically smug Long
saying that troubles with the supernatural just don't happen to Apple
users.
One of the dividends of Drag
Me is the way it exhumes and reanimates some very old ideas. That
everything primitive and unclean that infects Western civilization comes
from eastern Europe (and gypsies) is a notion that goes back to Bram
Stoker and beyond. Raimi updates it, though, in the way the very oldness
of Christine's nemesis comes to seem threatening. When she's done gumming
Christine, and projectile-vomiting bodily humors at her, the crone just
refuses to let go, even as a maggot-spewing corpse. In this, we're seeing
hints of something else rising from the underworld: the coming inter-generational
war, where old Baby Boomers cling to life, dragging down an ever-shrinking
younger workforce with their demands for Social Security and Medicare
benefits. Against that demographic horror, we'll need more protection
than magic .
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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