Matheson might not approve of what Kelly has done. Matheson's story, originally published in 1970, grappled with fate, morality, and the eternal mysteries of marriage. Kelly moves the story forward to December 1976, a snowy, chilly month.
Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) designs equipment for NASA and his wife Norma (Cameron Diaz) teaches at an expensive private school. They live in nearby Richmond, Virginia, portrayed as a working-class, somewhat dowdy town.
With two small incomes and one child, Walter (Sam Oz Stone), Arthur and Norma lead a lower middle-class existence. Thus, Norma is taken aback when she's informed that the school will be eliminating reduced tuition for the children of faculty members, which means Walter will have to go back to a public school. She doesn't want to tell Arthur, who is disappointed to learn that he has not been accepted for the astronaut training program.
Then there's the whole deal with her foot: she walks with a limp because she only has one toe. In a scene that helps set the tone of bemused confusion, a creepy student, apropos of nothing, asks Norma to show the class her bare foot. For some reason, right in the midst of the class, she complies with his demanding request, taking off her boot and stocking to show her disfigured foot.
To be frank, the details of Arthur and Norma's lives are handled clumsily. The pieces don't add up, and examined individually they don't make sense either. Why, for example, does Norma have such a broad, cartoonish Southern accent? She's the only person in the film who tawks like that, and it seems perverse, as though Cameron Diaz heard the movie was set in Virginia and assumed everyone else would be talking with a broad Southern accent. Perhaps it's meant to give clues regarding the character's backstory?
Did NASA engineers get paid peanuts in the 70s? I ask because Arthur's story is confusing as well. His father is a cop and Arthur evidently was a cop in the past, but quit that life to become an engineer, or some similar post -- I didn't quite understand his job as a designer of a camera for the Mars mission. He's well-regarded by his superiors, who are surprised to find that he reportedly failed his pyschological exam, another plot thread that is drawn out and then ignored.
The art direction is so aggressive in providing constant reminders that THIS IS 1976 that it makes you wonder, What's up with that? The specifics of the period have almost nothing to do with the story, except to establish that it takes place after the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars. I came of age in California in the 70s, and I never saw some of the outlandish interior decoration that these characters have on their walls.
And then destiny rings the bell, and the concerns about logic begin to melt away.
A plain cardbox box is left on the doorstep early one morning. Contained within is an equally mysterious box with a red button that resembles the all-seeing eye of HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Later that day, Mr. Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) stops by to explain. Steward is elegant and well-dressed, though he's missing a big chunk of his face. His disfigurement is rendered via CGI, which looks ridiculous because it's so obviously CGI, with a portion of the actor's face magically disappeared. Perhaps that's the point. Later he says: "I'm not a monster, I'm just a man with a job to do."
Mr. Steward gives them a choice: push the button and receive one million dollars. If the button is pushed, however, somewhere in the world one person they don't know will die. Or, they can refuse to push the button and receive nothing. They have 24 hours to make the decision.
All this is a set-up for what Kelly's film is really about, which is where all the hard work finally pays off. The rules of fair play, however, prevent me from spoiling any of the good, weird, and dark stuff that parades by.
The tone throughout is deadpan serious, though I'm not sure that every beat is meant to be taken entirely in a serious light. Several moments near the climax are overwrought and/or patently silly, yet they feel integral to the fabric of the universe that Kelly has created. So many other moments are off-kilter that it makes the viewing experience constantly surprising and, yes, more than a little baffling.
I don't understand The Box. I don't know if it's actually a "good movie." But I do know that it contains blissful moments of magical insanity, things I've never seen before. I want to see it again to try and make sense of it all.
And, truly, I'd rather have half-baked Richard Kelly psychological science fiction than a fully-baked and utterly routine mystery thriller.