Midnight Special is a political sci-fi film, but very distinct from Marvel Comics fantasies, speculations on a totalitarian future (The Matrix), or nature-gone-amuck nightmares (Jurassic Park), Writer-director Jeff Nichols first evokes recent American social traumas like the sieges at Waco (1993) and Ruby Ridge (1992), then settles those controversial events with an occult, extraterrestrial finale.
Yes, it’s claptrap, but not entirely dismissable, because of Nichols’s compelling grasp of two authentic aspects of American experience: the parochial white South and our continued indulgence of the youth cult. Those issues merge in Midnight Special’s family-rescue/home-going storyline: An eight-year-old Texas child, Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher), is kidnapped from a religious cult by his estranged parents, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Sarah (Kirsten Dunst). They go on the run, aided by renegade State Trooper Lucas (Joel Edgerton), evading federal-government agents who suspect the boy is a threat to national security.
Nichols is a genre junkie with a semi-serious rural interest. Although Hollywood has largely ignored calamities like Waco and Ruby Ridge, the Arkansas-born Nichols unsurprisingly adapts those tragedies to action-oriented, F/X-laden formulas. The New York/Los Angeles axis of Blue State sanctimony may dominate popular culture, but this is the indie director’s opportunity to explore his particular Red State regionalism. Midnight Special operates in a twilight zone of rural, working-class, vaguely religious customs (men wear suits or uniforms for their duties, women wear long hair and long dresses for commitment ceremonies).
Though not a polemicist like Spike Lee, for example, who uses race and ethnicity to elevate his professional status, Nichols, at this stage of his career, applies generic formulas to what might otherwise make his white-ethnic subject matter divisive. After touching on the Waco and Ruby Ridge issues of religious freedom and gun control (“Those words [rights] come from our Lord,” says cult leader Calvin Meyer [Sam Shephard]. “Or from our government,” counters NSA agent Paul Sevler [Adam Driver]), Nichols shifts into a sentimental drama of youthful innocence, family and community loyalty, state vs. federal laws, and, ultimately, a vision of either Christian higher love or cosmic agape.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8UU_CC81aGM%3Frel%3D0
I suppose Midnight Special could be enjoyed like any frivolous Marvel fantasy or slice of Wachowski-family cheese (The Matrix), but its incongruous sci-fi and political elements are rooted in the realities of our disjointed culture. To wit: The title comes from a Leadbelly jail-blues song about the anguish of a Southern black prisoner over his confinement while he fixates on the symbolic hope of a railroad train’s passing light. Nichols lends this Southern legend to modern political anxieties in a way that recalls his little-known 2007 debut film, Shotgun Stories. With its astounding sense of white-rural grievance and guilt, Shotgun Stories has been overlooked because its Faulknerian sympathy with rural gun culture frightened uncomprehending liberal film critics — the same bunch that overpraised Nichols’s subsequent films, the pseudo-Biblical Take Shelter, which made Christian fundamentalism into hysteria, and the utterly phony coming-of-age tale Mud.
After the hair-raising social tension of Shotgun Stories (an apocalyptic folk tale whose rare boldness justifies the indie-film movement), Midnight Special gives Nichols a bid for the popular audience. The chase-film plot shows him struggling toward deliverance: Little Alton has a gift for interpreting satellite and radio signals; he wears goggles, because his ultra-receptiveness can, unexpectedly, shoot rays of light from his eyes, causing electromagnetic destruction and earthquakes. Alton’s uncanny ability to communicate with other worlds — going beyond modern American disunity — rattles the movie, just like that blues song’s passenger-train metaphor for deliverance. But that redemptive light is also a metaphor for a filmmaker’s social mandate.
#share#In Midnight Special, Nichols grapples not only with recent American social history, but also with its current miscomprehension by youths who are vaguely cognizant of history and political principle but whose childlike temperament shows them to be naïvely protective of their own social narcissism. Roy and Sarah Meyer and Trooper Lucas are indulgent guardians, and Alton is a perfectly mystified figure of our political bewilderment. Nichols conveys this through his adult actors — Shannon, Dunst, and especially Edgerton caught in moments of sad, childlike perplexity.
Alton’s youthquake and martyrdom (at a crisis point he projects laser-like stigmata) derive from three of the greatest of all sci-fi movies: Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Brian De Palma’s 1978 The Fury, and Spielberg’s 1982 E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Harking back to those films’ light-and-dark versions of youth-cult aspiration, Alton challenges the corrupting potential of institutional authorities, as did the childlike Roy Neary, the psychic twins Gillian and Robin, and E.T. himself — all endangered by political bureaucracy.
Like Alton, an entire generation has been pacified with comics — easy, unethical, indulgent, ungrounded “moral” lessons.
In this way, Midnight Special connects the memory of Sixties idealism to Millennial threat (and does so more clearly than certain pandering politicians would have us realize). De Palma’s and Spielberg’s sci-fi chase films chased after a familiar idea of innocence. Those movie brats, not exactly committed activists, were caught up in the era of Vietnam/Watergate social adjustment. Their sci-fi films contended with politics and with urban vs. rural social conflict, yet, ultimately, opted for art. Recall the supernal visions of hope and terror in those films. There’s been little to match it since, and Nichols’s generation of film students know it. In The Fury, De Palma put aside the glib political paranoia of his earlier films for extreme emotion and abstract morality. In Close Encounters and E.T., Spielberg sought the supernatural. Southern realist Nichols lacks the mastery to become a comparable fabulist. Where De Palma and Spielberg could distill genre into purest form and transcendent storytelling, Nichols stays B-movie — connected to the rural ethos and his own indie-movie naturalism.
#related#Nichols’s co-producer, Sarah Green, also co-produced Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Ironically, bloggers have tried to explain Malick’s latest film, Knight of Cups, as a new religious expression, but that ridiculous notion is also politically jejune. Nichols attempts to make sci-fi express the political naïveté of Millennial youth, but his secular skepticism (Alton’s guardians believe in him like overly doting parents, not followers) prevents him from attaining Spielberg’s agape or De Palma’s paranoia. When Trooper Lucas pacifies Alton with comic books, Roy objects: “I should never have let you give him those. He needs to know what’s real.” Here’s where Midnight Special reveals the burden of Millennial politics. It clarifies how the ingenuous Occupy and Black Lives Matter youth fads are more vain than sensible.
Like Alton, an entire generation has been pacified with comics — easy, unethical, indulgent, ungrounded “moral” lessons. Youth activists resemble the media-saturated aliens of Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985), who pick up radio and TV signals as if comprehending human history. (Ask Ethan Hawke.) In the end, Midnight Special fails because Nichols doesn’t have the ability of Spielberg, De Palma, or Dante to release anxiety, fear, or joy into pure form and artistic understanding. Our factional, escapist politics are now replicated in our factional, escapist pop culture.