Director: Zal Batmanglij
Runtime: 116 minutes
Cults are all the rage these days in the entertainment world. On the small screen, Fox's The Following proved to be a major hit. On the big screen, Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene lit up indie theaters as well as the festival circuit. And, last year, burgeoning indie It Girl Brit Marling, along with director/co-writer Zal Batmanglij, tackled cults in the micro budget thriller Sound of My Voice. That film, Marling's sophomore effort as both an actress and writer, was not exactly a break out hit, but it did push the writer/actress ever closer to the first stages of stardom. Now, roughly a year later (and with some major backers), Marling and Batmanglij have returned to the territory of their first collaboration. A sequel to Sound in spirit, The East marks another interesting evolution in Marling's career, even as it suffers from a handful of significant setbacks.
Marling's position on camera is flipped around with this latest effort. Sound cast her as a supporting role as a mysterious cult leader. Now, she plays Jane, an intelligence operative for a private firm. Jane's boss, Sharon (an underused Patricia Clarkson), gives her a major, and highly coveted, assignment: to infiltrate and dismantle a growing eco-terrorist collective known as The East. The group, headed by the mysterious Benji (Alexander Skarsgaard), targets CEO's of companies that sell harmful pharmaceuticals or damage the environment via their factories. Yet rather than stage protests or carry out bombings, The East's MO involves giving the responsible individuals an ugly taste of their own medicine (sometimes rather literally).
And, before too long, The East's similarities with the cult from Sound of My Voice arise. Bizarre (but harmless) rituals and anti-consumerist lifestyles permeate the group's compound, even as they plan their violent acts of retaliation. Even as Jane struggles to fit in and earn her place, she gradually earns their trust, up to the point where they take her along for a mission. As Jane spends more time with The East, her periodic visits back home start leaving her less satisfied. The group's methods make her uneasy, yet she can't exactly deny the grains of truth in their ideology.
Yet, once again, Marling's (and Batmanglij's) ambition has outstripped her execution, and not just behind the camera. Sound of My Voice found a perfect vehicle for Marling's gifts as an actress. There's a certain sleepy reserve to her screen presence that was well matched to her role as cult leader. She started off sounding merely dippy, yet gradually revealed herself as a skilled manipulator of the weak-minded and gullible. As the investigative force in The East, however, there appears to be some disconnect. From what we're told, and what the actions suggest, Jane is a quiet, steely, resourceful, and driven individual. Though she loves her boyfriend (Jason Ritter), when she needs to go to work, she can flip the switch in a heartbeat. But for all that we're told, and even shown, Marling can't quite seem to shake the sleepiness from her performance. The role, for the first half, requires the same sort of stern grit that Jodie Foster brought to Clarice Starling, and Marling can't seem to muster up the necessary alertness.
The supporting cast, thankfully, all seem quite game in their roles, as thin as they are. Ellen Page stands out nicely as an increasingly radical member of the collective with a surprising past. It's the sort of role that allows the actress to firmly dispel the idea that she's only cut out for characters in quirky indie comedies. Alexander Skarsgaard and Toby Kebbell have nice moments as well, even though the former is never quite as magnetic a leader as the one from Marling and Batmanglij's first outing. Yet neither actor is served well by the writing. Skarsgaard is given a tragic past that feels empty, at best, while Kebbell's background is used more for exposition and forwarding the plot. Meanwhile, Patricia Clarkson isn't given nearly enough to do, rendering Jane's growing conflict hugely unbalanced.
Even though The East comes with bigger production values and some talented actors, it doesn't quite stick the landing in one key area that Sound of My Voice nailed, and that's the cult itself. The sense of intrigue and danger never fully connects, even with all of the rituals depicted. Sound built more suspense out of the repeated scenes of a ritual handshake than The East accomplishes with its more hazily sketched routines. When the film builds to its bigger moments, Batmanglij manages to pull it off, but the writing is constantly letting down the atmosphere (which receives a nice boost from the dynamic score).
The film's handling of issues also can't help but feel rather thin as well. Even without succumbing to lengthy monologues, the film could have engaged with its ethical issues with greater insight. That missing insight only makes the titular collective more generic. These issues are not helped by the film's final 20 minutes, which rushes through a number of developments in order to set up its open-ended (and rather pat) conclusion. Somewhere in The East are the seeds of a great, morally complex thriller, one that Marling and Batmanglij will hopefully make in the near future. As the next step in the pair's evolution as storytellers, however, it can't help but come up short, even with its more polished aesthetic. The East has competence to spare, yet not nearly enough that is truly exceptional.
Grade: C+
Director: Zal Batmanglij
Runtime: 84 minutes
In 2011, the independent scene saw the rise of a potential breakout talent named Brit Marling. Marling's sci-fi drama Another Earth (which she co-wrote) became a major talking point at Sundance, and the film was released theatrically later in the same year, to mixed reception. She hasn't gone unnoticed. In addition to appearing in 2012's Arbitrage, she is set to appear in Robert Redford's next film, and has begun lining up plenty of other projects. Yet despite her discovery, Marling hasn't completely left behind the low-budget indie aesthetic that brought her into the festival circuit spotlight. Like Another Earth, 2012's Sound of My Voice is written by (and stars) Marling, and plays as a drama tinged with loose sci-fi elements. And, like Another Earth, Sound has its problems, even as it marks a progression in overall consistency and narrative intrigue.
If anything, Sound of My Voice is the "broader" of Marling's two indie projects. Where Another Earth used science fiction to explore issues of chance and confronting one's past, Sound is grounded in a more thriller-oriented narrative. Young couple Peter (Argo's Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) decide to to infiltrate a burgeoning cult hidden somewhere in Los Angeles, and then expose it with secret footage. After receiving instructions to prepare themselves, they are led to the cult's heaquarters, where the meet the elusive leader, Maggie (Marling). Maggie claims to be from the year 2054, and though she doesn't know how she's traveled back in time (the film is set in 2010), she's made it her mission to help a select group of disciples spiritually prepare themselves for an upcoming "journey."
What Sound of My Voice gets right is its depiction of the small cult at the center of the story. From the daffy rituals (that handshake if kind of cool, though), to Maggie's vague philosophical posturing, one can see how susceptible minds would be in awe of her. Even as we identify with Peter and Lorna's skepticism (which is present before they even set foot in the cult's HQ), Maggie as a character still casts her own spell as she gently manipulates her blind disciples. This is in large part thanks to Marling's portrayal of Maggie. Accuse the writer/actress of vanity all you want (granted, some of it is probably valid), but in this film she's firmly out to prove herself as more than a pretty face. Her roles in Another Earth and Sound aren't terribly reliant on expressiveness, yet the actress is able to work quiet wonders with her vocal inflections. Maggie's first appearance feels a little too monotone, but the more time we spend with her, the more magnetic the character becomes, even as we continue to hold her story in immense skepticism.
Yet if Marling's performance gives the film (which only runs 84 minutes) an intriguing center, her work with Zal Batmanglij on the screenplay is less consistent. Unlike Another Earth, which established that its sci-fi conceit was very real in the opening minutes, Sound wades into purposefully uncertain territory. But instead of an intriguing back-and-forth, it's difficult to overcome one's initial doubt in nearly everything Maggie says. Where the film could easily lose its way is when Peter begins to find himself actually entertaining the possibility that Maggie isn't lying. The scene where Maggie gets under Peter's skin is well-played by both actors, but there isn't quite enough grounding the moment to make us question our own doubts. We remain die-hard skeptics even as the movie wants to tease us with 84 minutes of "is she or isn't she?"
That's why Sound's journey is more compelling than its individual parts, or its destination for that matter. Cult mindsets fascinate us for good reason, and watching Maggie hold such sway over her wide-eyed followers is what makes the film worth sticking with. Maggie displays no overt malice, yet there is still a palpable disease we feel at seeing someone control people so easily. That she mostly does it with such a reserved, soothing demeanor is even more unsettling.
In the end, however, the flaws of the screenplay do eventually start to build up and, coupled with the ending, prove frustrating rather than satisfyingly mysterious. There's a subplot involving Peter's relationship with his deceased mother that has potential, yet it's handled so quickly that there's no time for it to accumulate weight. We spend so much time with our eyes on Maggie that the deeper concerns regarding Peter and Lorna's identities start to fall by the wayside. Denham and Vicius handle the material capably, but it ultimately feels rather thin. Maggie may ultimately be a supporting role, but it's all too clear that the screenplay cares perhaps too much about her character.
Even as Sound of My Voice starts to firmly throw some validation to the skeptics, it feels as though it's rushing towards a conclusion, further at the expense of plausibility. Batmanglij and Marling seem convinced that they've earned enough suspension of disbelief that they can throw caution to the wind in the last 15 minutes, and at times it's more irritating that intriguing. Finally, there's the matter of the open conclusion. I won't spoil a thing, but I will say that it comes off as a slightly overblown way of allowing the story to have its cake and eat it too.
In the immediate moment the ending is compelling, but as time passes and the credits scroll in front of you, the more you feel as though you've just been led on an elaborate tease, rather than an appropriately complex and subtle mystery. Whatever debates Sound of My Voice provokes about Maggie's story will likely give way to quibbles about the film's narrative decisions rather quickly. That doesn't stop large portions of the film from being enjoyable, but it does limit the film. Though more immediately gripping than Another Earth, Sound of My Voice is hindered by issues in its screenplay that make its vague sci-fi pieces feel more like narrative cheats.
Grade: B-
