Take Shelter

Take Shelteris a magnificent drama of apocalypse on the brain, writes DONALD CLARKE

CINEMA DOESN’T always respond to the prevailing zeitgeist in the expected fashion. The 1970s, an era of economic meltdown, brought the rise of Spielberg and Lucas. The first decade of the new century, supposedly laid low by anxiety, thrilled to comedy pirates and blue aliens. Burrow beneath the mainstream, however, and you will find barometers of the prevailing mood.

What is this magnificent thing called Take Shelter? You could see it as a study of paranoid schizophrenia. If that is the case, then Jeff Nichols, director of the almost equally fine Shotgun Stories, is taking some liberties with The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Scrunch up your eyes and it looks a little like a horror film.

More than anything else, however, Take Shelteris a meditation on our current enslavement to angst. Do you worry about the weather, the terrorists and the collapsing economy? Yes? Then you will have sympathy for the poor hero of this odd film.

Few actors other than Michael Shannon could make sense of the central role. A gruff man with a sweet heart, Shannon’s Curtis works for a mining company in rural Ohio. He is married to an understanding woman played by (who else this year?) Jessica Chastain. The couple worry about their deaf daughter, but it looks as if they may be able to arrange for cochlear implants on the company’s medical plan.

Chastain is, perhaps, just a little exotic to convince as a housewife in the rural Midwest. But Nichols does a fine job of creating that most unusual and unlikely of cinematic units: a genuinely happy family.

The vision of Curtis, a brooding man with a permanently broken face, struggling to sign with his daughter is as touching as any image from recent cinema. The scene is also threaded with menace. Storm clouds have (both literally and figuratively) started to gather about the homestead.

Curtis is having sinister dreams and waking visions. The clouds appear to curl themselves into fantastic monoliths. A sort of thin, dirty oil permeates the rain. He wakes up at night, after dreaming that his dog attacked him, and suffers pain in his arm for the rest of the day.

Eventually convinced that a great storm is coming, Curtis takes out a substantial loan and sets to building a grand shelter in the back garden.

Corrugating his mighty forehead, running hands through hair, Shannon offers convincing pointers to the character’s inner turmoil. Aware that his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia at his current age, Curtis suspects the visions are signs of mental disturbance, but can’t quite shake the notion that the world really is coming to an end.

As the film progresses – and Curtis’s in-laws increasingly doubt his sanity – an unlikely comparison creeps into the viewer’s brain.

Just as Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Loveimagined how Adam Sandler's signature character might function in the real world, Take Shelter(accidentally, one imagines) ponders how fleshier human beings would actually react to the protagonist of Field of Dreams. An amusing eccentricity becomes (perhaps) a manifestation of genuine derangement.

The film's great achievement is comfortably to combine visual metaphors of biblical grandiosity with an earthy naturalism that successfully roots the film in everyday experience. There is something of The Tree of Lifein the film's search for apocalyptic poetry among mundane provincial lives. But Take Shelterfeels more ordered, less diffuse than the Terrence Malick project. Thanks in no small part to Adam Stone's well-balanced cinematography, Curtis's visions seem every bit as real as the tense dining scenes and shots of men at work.

We cannot reveal too much about the problematic denouement, but, suffice to say, it asks as many questions as it answers. What more can one ask from a grown-up film?