Review: Munger Road (USA, 2011)
What, exactly, is a movie supposed to do?
Recently, writer/director Joss Whedon got himself in a bit of hot water by suggesting that the ending to The Empire Strikes Back was bad. Of course, he was very quick to walk back the implication that he thought the movie itself was bad; rather, he was trying to say that the film betrayed the basic concept of what a movie should be, by leaving the story without a resolution. It's worth quoting him in full, so we know exactly what we're talking about:
“Well, it’s not an ending,” Whedon explained about the 1980 film, which had a cliffhanger leading into the next entry of the series, Return of the Jedi. “It’s a 'Come Back Next Week', or in three years. And that upsets me. I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn’t end I’ll go to a French movie. That’s a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself, it can’t just build off the first one or play variations.”
This is precisely the kind of comment that film nerds such as myself absolutely LOVE to tee off on. It opens up a whole host of questions: does a movie have any responsibilities to the viewer? Are there certain requirements that must be in place for one to say, "this is a movie"? Is the very nature of cinema something that requires a "complete within itself" artwork, as Whedon insists? And is there any possible way he's not being jokey by crapping on French film like that? (The answer to the last question is "No," if you're curious.) These type of meat-and-potatoes questions about the nature of film are certainly fascinating, but let's table the whole "what is the nature of cinema blah blah blah" question for now. After all, this is ostensibly a movie review. But this very basic question is raised almost immediately by the ending of Munger Road. So we have to address it, at least in part.
Munger Road is a bifurcated story that slowly comes together in the final act. For the first two-thirds of the film, we have two stories. The main narrative concerns four high school seniors, two girls and their respective boyfriends, who decide to spend their Friday night exploring the local town myth: namely, that the lonely stretch of road two miles outside of town is haunted by ghosts. (If we're being particular, and I think we may need to be for the rest of this review to be clear, this infamous Munger Road intersects with train tracks, supposedly the site of a horrific school bus accident years earlier; rumor has it that if you drive your car onto the tracks, leave it in neutral, and wait, the ghosts of the dead children will try to spare you their fate by pushing your car off of the road.) Our four erstwhile protagonists head off with a video camera and an adolescent sense of fun, to document their attempt to experience something supernatural. Simultaneously, their small-town police chief (wonderfully underplayed by veteran character actor Bruce Davison) gets a report that the man who murdered six children in their town years ago has escaped from prison. Clearly, we're meant to sit back and wait for these stories to intersect - and they do, with deeply ambiguous results.
Here's the obvious assumption: the kids will run into the killer, and he will dispatch them, while they suspect something paranormal is taking place. No? A fairly cut-and-dried assumption. And for the entire second act, this is what the audience is led to believe, as well. The kids get stuck out by the train tracks. One of the boys, reviewing the camera footage, sees a man standing behind the car during one of their oblivious conversations. (Oh, and fyi, does he tell anyone? No. No, he doesn't. These kids have some classic cases of dumb-dumb disease going on, not that there's anything inherently wrong with that.) One of the boys goes to get help, and soon the others receive a text from him showing a picture taken from ten feet behind their stalled car. Needless to say, everything pretty much goes downhill from there. The cops slowly realize where the killer probably ran off to - a cabin he owned off of, you guessed it, Munger Road - and the race is on to save the kids before the killer can wipe them out.
Which brings us back to the original question: What do you expect from a film? While I'm enormously sympathetic to Whedon's argument, I'm also firmly in the camp of those who think that anything announced as a trilogy has the right to end whenever it damn well pleases. This isn't to say that the first film in a series is permitted this right: Star Wars needed an ending, because nobody had any clue whether or not there would be any further films. But once we got to Empire, it was already established that this would be the middle film, and the conclusion would come once Return of the Jedi arrived. The same thing happened with Back To The Future Part II, which gave arguably an even more abrupt ending. One could argue that these films earned the right to such a structure by having such phenomenally successful first acts; "This is the story we want to tell," they argue, "and you have to accept that they are incomplete without their counterparts." This is no different from the film serials of the 1940s and '50s, in a sense - Whedon is absolutely right to identify the "Come Back Next Week!" aspect. But this is a form of narrative in its own right, is it not? The right to leave your audience hanging, to tell them "We're not done with you yet." You might not like it - Whedon obviously doesn't - but you can't say it's not the right of the medium to choose its structure, for good or ill. This becomes even more clear when it comes to something like The Lord of the Rings. Do you really have the right to demand that, say, The Two Towers exist purely on its own, without any context derived from the preceding or subsequent narrative? A less charitable person might say "Bullshit on THAT idea." I'll leave that to a less charitable movie blogger who doesn't still hope to shake Joss Whedon's hand someday. (Come on, the man makes excellent art.)
But what about first installments, particularly of new stories? One could argue that Tolkien's work existed prior to the films, and therefore should play by a different set of rules in assuming that an adaptation should hew to the same narrative structure, implying separate works that make up a whole. In this reading, The Empire Strikes Back might not be afforded the same generosity. But what about the first film, Star Wars? It's a wholly self-contained story, much like The Matrix, or Iron Man, or any number of hero origin stories that require no further information to feel like fully embodied stories. By this reading, maybe Whedon is wrong, but only in demanding that an extension of a franchise should play by the same rules as its progenitor: first features must provide a wholly contained story, but subsequent editions are allowed the freedom that an ongoing narrative allows.
Do you see where I'm going with this? Munger Road ends (spoilers from here on out) with a climactic, exciting, and interesting build, where the music swells, the camera slowly zooms in, and suddenly we cut to black and are greeted with the words: "TO BE CONTINUED." My reaction was simple, and the more I think about it, the more sure I am of my response: Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.
This is a small independent film, low budget, based off nothing but its own moxy and original storyline. Am I supposed to assume that a second installment is a given? (Based on the lack of activity on the official website, which suggests no changes since it appeared two years ago, I'm not terribly hopeful.) The film, in and of itself, is strong, suspenseful, and smart; everything until the final ten minutes is a solid three-star horror film. Everything from the acting, to the script, to the cinematography, is capable and sure-footed, with minimal missteps. In particular, there is a dearth of jump-scares or "gotcha!" moments designed to get your pulse racing. Instead, what we get is a slow-burn, tension-mounting 90-minute arc designed to pull you in and then turn the screws. It reminded me at times of The House of the Devil (a favorable comparison if ever there was one) in that it steadfastly refused any traditional goosebumps or periodic shock releases of emotion, as horror movies generally demand. I was impressed and appreciative of this, right up until the end. Even more so, I should say, at the end, when we get the genuine idea that there really is something supernatural going on. It's an unexpected left turn that the movie earns, with its restrained tone and suggestive camera work.
AND THEN. Aaaaaaand then. We get the rough equivalent of a Final Girl, sitting in the back of an ambulance, as the suns peeks over the horizon and an office consoles her, and Bruce Davison, holding the MacGuffin camera the kids dropped, says, in a low and unsettling tone: "So....what did you really SEE out there?" And - cut to black. Nothing. This isn't a case of "Oh, we the audience saw it, so it's cool." No. Nothing was explained. We didn't get even a hint of something deeper, the film is so committed to its conceit of not revealing what's at work. But unlike other movies, that rest content in the knowledge they told you everything, and the full explanation isn't needed for narrative closure, here we have the opposite. You don't get to know what happened, the film says, because we haven't gotten to it yet. Stay tuned! To which I politely reply: Bullshit.
Because Munger Road hasn't earned this. It has no sense of continuity, no conveyance that we're in a world larger than just this one film. It simply turns on the lights and says "Whoo, I'm exhausted. Pick this up later?" It's a cheat. And a lazy one, at that. It's not a serial, because to be a serial, you need to have a pre-existing body of work that permits such a claim, especially in cinema (versus Youtube videos, or other more easily ongoing story forms). And thus, the movie burns its bridges. I'll watch a sequel if it ever gets made, but right now, that doesn't seem to be on the horizon. And without such a companion piece, the film is a failure. Because it's not complete. It's a work of art stopped halfway through. It's a concept album where someone got bored and abandoned it before it was done. And a work of art incomplete is no work of art at all. It's an effort. Ambition without substance. Admirable, but common. I can admire a friend of mine starting a screenplay, but until they finish it, I'm not impressed. Munger Road is full of sound and fury, but it signifies nothing other than its own lack. What a shame.
