More than anything else in a movie, its script has the greatest influence on its overall quality. No amount of great acting, directing or special effects ever quite compensate for a weak script. Gothika is a film that does a lot of things right but never quite escapes the inherent flaws of the script it works with.
Halle Berry stars as Dr. Miranda Grey, a psychologist working at a psychiatric institution for women. The movie opens with her in a session with a woman named Chloe (Penelope Cruz) who claims the devil is raping her. Miranda is unsurprising not convinced and tunes out most of what her patient is saying. From there we meet her husband Douglas (Charles Dutton), the man in charge of this institution, as they discuss the case. They are interupted by another doctor, Peter Graham (Robert Downey Jr.) who seems more than a little smitten with Miranda. She heads home for the night but in the midst of a downpour, swerves off the road to avoid a woman standing in the middle of the road. She wakes up three days later in a cell in her own hospital. Peter is there to treat her and informs her that she is there because she brutally murdered her husband.
This is a supernatural thriller, which basically means that the story is free to ignore logic in favor of spooky stuff whenever the story hits a rough patch. In this case that means the existence of a ghost, whose purpose is left as murky until it becomes a bit of a hindrance to the two or three slack jawed imbeciles in the theater who aren't putting the clues together. At that point the movie includes a scene so heavy handed that the rest of the movie is pretty much superfluous. It gives out so much information in the middle of the movie that it doesn't take much brainpower to figure out the rest of the story with a fairly high probability of being accurate. Almost without a word, we have a moment of such heavy exposition that suddenly see all the creaking machinations of the plot for what they are.
That scene is highly unfortunate as the director, cinematographer, special effects guys and the actors had been doing a nice job of building a creepy unsettling atmosphere. That one scene pretty much sucks the tension right out of the picture at that point. The rest of the story becomes moot and the fun is gone.
Halle Berry is by no means turning in another Oscar worthy performance but she does a good enough job with her character to keep things moving along fairly reasonably despite a ludicrous plot. Robert Downey Jr. helps her out a lot by playing the movie's most reasonable and realistic character, which does a lot to keep things grounded. I like the way his character seems to get mad at Miranda for acting so unreasonably. He knows how smart and rational she is and takes it personally that she will spout wild supernatural theories.
The worst part of the movie is the actually ending which is almost a parody of the Bond movies. It ends on a note so artificial and unbelievable that it will probably wash away any memories left of the good atmospheric work done in the first half of the movie. It is my own memory of the good start that keeps me from handing this movie a very bad grade. Instead I'll say it's on the low side of average. Like I said, no amount of good production can make for a great movie when it is weighed down by a lame script.
- John Shea
Gothika
Directed by: Mathieu Kassovitz
Written by: Sebastian Gutierrez
Starring: Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., Charles Dutton, John Carroll Lynch, Bernard Hill, Penélope Cruz
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