This is a movie that is all about the ending. I hate to tell you to spend over two hours waiting for an ending but I must. The ending is philosophically delicious,theologically profound, and well, emotionally it reaches down your throat, turns your innards to outards, and then tosses them in front of you like a noodle salad.
Which is to say: I liked the ending.
It is one of those rare cases in which the writer/director re-wrote the original ending and the author was 110% down with it. Reportedly, Stephen King was so pleased with Darabont's twist, he claimed he wished he had thought of the ending Darabont wrote himself.
I'm not a spoiler-writer so I won't discuss it in detail. But to describe what happened in my living room as we watched it, I felt first deep disappointment. Then, annoyance, then--when the full ending emerged (and yes it emerged, from "The Mist")--exultation. He not only gave me what I was hoping for he gave it in a moment of sheer beauty. (Okay, I might have even sprung from the couch and threw some cushions around it was so perfect. I'm like that with movies and stories. A little too excited. It's what make my brand of Nerd rather Geeky and maybe a little dorkish.)
Through the duration of The Mist, I was feeling merciful and charitable toward Frank Darabont, a director and screenwriter whom I adore for being a gifted craftsman and for shedding the proper cinematic light upon Stephen King. It is the latter for which I give him the most credit; Stephen King has some serious literary quality that is often dumped in moving from page to screen in favor of the more sensationalistic aspects of his genre. Some of his books and short stories display the literary aspect of his work more prominently than others. Among them I'd name (and this list is nowhere near complete) all of the short stories in Different Seasons--the short story collection that has given us Stand By Me ("The Body"), The Shawshank Redemption ("Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption"), and Apt Pupil (um, "Apt Pupil")--Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone (note to Darabont please re-make this!!), The Green Mile, and The Stand.
And no one, I say NO ONE is better at catching those elements on screen. Darabont has a finely-tuned ear for the Ibsenesque (yes I just said, "Ibsenesque," deal) quality of the characters in King stories and the insightful social experiments the supernatural and horrific gives King the excuse to explore. More simply put, he goes for the human stories in King. No matter how super-natural. over-the-top, eyeball-squishing horror King goes, there is always a human story going on, a story of relationships, of love, of mercy, of forgiveness, of redemption, of healing. Or the absence of these--which is horrifying all by itself, even without The Big Bad Monster with Slimy Appendages. (But I loves me some monsters, just the same, don't you?)
Up until now, Darabont has stuck with the human stories in The Shawshank Redemption, which had no supernatural or horror element, finding all the horror it needed in the reality of prison life, and in The Green Mile, which had a supernatural element more than a horror element, though certainly "Old Sparky" provides enough real world horror to outdo any souped-up, evil alien King could dream up from the ether.
So, admittedly, the whole time I was watching The Mist, which had both heightened supernatural motifs and over-the top, horror genre pulp involved, I was thinking; okay. Darabont is a little out of his element with the horror thing. CGI is both a blessing and a curse. Blessing, see: Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, curse, see: stupid freaking alien that ruined M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. CGI gives us the opportunity to actually see the monsters in resplendent detail and I'm not sure I like that very much at all in the case of The Mist, which by it's very title terrifies because of the opacity of the environ in which the monster emerges. In this movie, we see a little too much and lose some of the terror as a consequence.
Also, Darabont excels at the epic--he tells story that stretch out over time well. "The Mist" was a short story and it was dramatic: it had unity of time, place, and action, taking place over the course of 48 hours or less.
BUT.
Even with some of the horror special effects not particularly well-done, and the fact that he's always done well with epic narrative as opposed to dramatic, I was still giving my beloved Darabont his due. Because it was all satisfyingly Darabont-ish, just the same. By which I mean--slow and long, but the emotional pay dirt in the characters that pacing allows makes you congenial toward it anyway, even if, occasionally, you are ever-so aware of how time is passing. Because that awareness is more because we are not used to directors and writers who take loving care of their characters and their inner experiences more than because we are actually bored. (For slow pacing = bored see: Anthony Minghella.)
And by which I also mean, like in Shawshank and Green Mile, he has the movie impeccably scored and photographed with tenderness in composition and mood. He casts gorgeous, ordinary faces and then loves them, hard and unconditionally, with his camera. And, also like the previous two movies, he has William Sadler being pretty damn awesome and Brian Libby saying "Sh*t" better than any other character actor alive.
So I started out by feeling indulgent toward Darabont, if slightly disappointed and ended up feeling even more reverence toward his intelligence, depth of feeling, and insight. His particular talent and sensitivity is rare: he uncovers nuance in moral questions and, "walks the line," never alienating or preaching but always coming down strongly on the side of hope and optimism, even in the bleakest circumstances.
Darabont's carefulness with material that others have dismissed as cash-cow, grocery-store schlock, blurs the distinction between low art and high. For that, if I were Stephen King, I'd pretty much buy Frankie a lot of cool presents, ply him with steaks, cigars, and liquor, and, man though I'd be, write him embarrassingly mushy cards on major holidays.
I might even consider slicing my finger and his and tying them together in the middle of an open field.
I'd definitely consider an exclusive deal with him as screenwriter and director of my entire estate. Not every writer gets a Darabont.
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