Critic Doctor (Herb Kane) - Review by Peter Sobsczynski: Cold Creek Manor

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FILM REVIEW

COLD CREEK MANOR
by Peter Sobczynski

September 19, 2003

(out of 4 stars)

FILM CREDITS: Written by Richard Jeffries. Directed by Mike Figgis. Starring Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone, Stephen Dorff, Juliette Lewis and Kristen Stewart.

As you may have heard, Walt Disney Studios has begun test-marketing self-destructing DVDs, discs with a special coating that will become unplayable 48 hours after exposure to oxygen (or until someone figures out how to crack the code to extend the shelf life.) Apparently, there was confusion when the memo on this development was issued and some people at the studio must have believed that they were supposed to create actual movies that self-destructed as they unspooled. How else to explain a botch like "Cold Creek Manor", a laughable suspenser that squanders the work of a lot of talented people on a script that is so riddled with holes, inconsistencies and other head-scratching moments that even Dean Koontz might question some of the story logic?

The earliest sign of trouble is that Dennis Quaid, the star of the show, is playing a character named Cooper Tilson. While "Cooper" is a perfectly adequate surname (as Quaid himself demonstrated when playing Gordon Cooper in "The Right Stuff"), it is pretty silly as a first name and only a certain type of person should even attempt such a thing. (Richard Dreyfuss, in his gawkier days, could have pulled playing a guy named Cooper.) To put it simply, Quaid does not look or act like anyone named "Cooper" to ever walk the Earth-he is the kind of guy who gave kids named Cooper swirlies back in high school. I wouldn’t even have brought this matter up except that this is one of those films that climaxes with a chase and fight during a thunderstorm where everyone is screaming "COOPER!!!" at the top of their lungs, which only serves to exacerbate the situation.

Anyway, Quaid plays Cooper Tilson, a documentary filmmaker who, after a bad day in the Big Apple-including a faulty alarm clock, cute kids Kristen (Kristen Stewart) and Jesse (Ryan Wilson) running late for private school, wife Leah (Sharon Stone) being hit on by her boss and one of the kids being hit on by an SUV, he decides to pack the lot of them up and move to more sedate and bucolic surroundings. Within minutes, the family discovers Cold Creek Manor, a run-down, yet still enormous, mansion in upstate New York-complete with an Olympic-size swimming pool, 1200 acres (though the spread seems to be about the size of Connecticut), dozens of rooms and, inevitably, secrets and, inevitably, a host of secrets and lies and past horrors (starting with the name of the place, which would seem more at home on a bottle of fortified apple wine). And yet, there is finally room for a tetherball pole so Cooper immediately buys it and moves his family upstate. (Apparently, he is also the most wildly successful documentary filmmaker in American history because he can afford the house, an army of movers, a new truck and even a horse with nary a thought.)

The next major sign of trouble is when we get a load of the town that the Tilsons have decided to make their new home in. Upstate New York, to the best of my knowledge, is a nice enough place but in the world of "Cold Creek Manor", the entire area is populated with nothing but slack-jawed hillbillies (complete with out-of-place accents) who resentfully refer to the newcomers as "city folk" and who all gather at the local one-stop gas station/grocery store/restaurant/bar (seemingly the only example of each in the county) to drink up simple country wisdom and to stare balefully at each other at the appropriate time. In other words, the film confuses upstate New York with the Deep South and makes the area seem like the town in "Deliverance". Either director Mike Figgis, an Englishman, was sold a faulty atlas or he really has no sense of direction.

Anyway, Stephen Dorff (the destitute man’s Ethan Hawke) pops up as Dale Massie, a surly, violent alcoholic dope whose family once owned Cold Creek Manor. However, when Dale was in prison, he missed the payments (not surprising since the joint is big enough that the mortgage would cause Bill Gates some cash-flow problems), the bank foreclosed and the Tilsons got it for a song. Now on parole and shacking up in a trailer with ultra-skanky girlfriend Ruby (Juliette Lewis), Dale volunteers to help the Tilsons restore the house to its former grace and because they are idiots, they graciously accept the offer. Of course, what Dale (who already has had a wife and a couple of kids disappear under mysterious circumstances) really wants is to chase the Tilsons out and reclaim the homestead for himself. He attempts this through a program of subtly humiliating Cooper at every turn (though he manfully refrains from mocking the name), infesting the house with snakes and even dispensing with the family pet in the single goofiest variation of the "Fatal Attraction" boiled bunny I have ever seen. Inevitably, he starts Dorffing up the surroundings with his "Shining"-era Nicholson impression while Cooper, who uncovered many of the secrets and lies (and a couple of corpses as well), tries to save both his family and his new herb garden.

There is a germ of a good idea somewhere in the ruins of "Cold Creek Manor"-for example, it could have played as a contemporary version of Polanski’s "The Tenant" in which a paranoid city boy, no doubt consumed with anxiety over having bought a house he can’t afford, goes around the bend thinking that his pleasant small-town neighbors are secretly out to get him. Instead, the screenplay is just a collection of cliched scenes that inspire nothing but bad laughs from viewers and some of the plotting is so awful that it boggles the mind. For example, the sheriff of the town (Dana Eskelson) is such an idiot (She spots parolee Dale smacking Ruby-who happens to be her sister, mind you-in a bar, she merely lets him off with a warning and later dismisses an old retainer, still holding a couple of teeth, as "circumstantial evidence") that you assume that she is somehow in on the plot. Sadly, she isn’t-she is merely incompetent enough to give even Barney Fife pause.

Most of the actors either look bored (especially Stone, who deserves a better comeback than playing a doormat housewife) or chew the scenery relentlessly (Christopher Plummer pops up briefly and pulls off the impressive trick of managing to overact even after he dies in his final scene). However, the most embarrassing performance is the one behind the cameras by director Mike Figgis, a man who has made some of the more intriguingly radical feature films in recent years (such as "Leaving Las Vegas", "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" and the multi-screen digital-video experiment "Time Code"). However, even though he once vowed to me that he would never go back to conventional filmmaking, he must have discovered that, unlike the enormous audience one can expect as a documentary filmmaker in America, people don’t always come out to see "intriguingly radical feature films" in large numbers. Clearly, he is doing "Cold Creek Manor" for no other reason than to earn a hefty paycheck to go off and do his own thing for a few more years. This would be okay if he were able to fuse his unique sensibility to a highly commercial property (the way that Brian De Palma did with "The Untouchables") but it is clear that Figgis is as bored with the film as we are and aside from a few interesting visual flourishes, "Cold Creek Manor" comes off as nothing more than a dull piece of hackwork that would be disappointing coming from a first-time film-school grad, let along a director of Figgis’ stature.

The trailers for "Cold Creek Manor" hint that there is a supernatural element at play, even though there are no such moments in the actual film (aside from one sequence that plays uncomfortably close to one of the key scenes in "The Ring"). Before the screening, I was asked by one confused colleague if the film was supposed to be a supernatural horror film or simply a thriller. I said that I assumed it was the latter and I would like to take this time to apologize for being wrong-I can think of many words to describe the film (many of which you have just read) but "thrilling" is definitely not one of them.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

CRITIC DOCTOR DISCLAIMER

While the views expressed by Peter Sobczynski do not necessarily reflect the views of Criticdoctor.com, the Critic Doctor will occasionally examine Mr. Sobczynski's film reviews to bring forth an honest examination of those views expressed.

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