Movie Review - The Box

Based on Richard Matheson’s short story Button, Button, The Box stars Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as Norma and Arthur Lewis. The Lewis’ are an upper middleclass couple; she’s an English teacher at an upscale prep school while he works at NASA with hopes of entering their astronaut program. However, their idyllic live begins to unravel when he is passed over as a potential astronaut and she is informed that faculty members will no longer receive discounted tuition for their children. In the midst of this upheaval they are presented with an unusual opportunity. A man arrives on their doorstep with a box and an offer. The box is nothing more than that; a wood box with a button on top. Press the button and receive a million dollars. Oh, but there is one caveat: someone somewhere, whom you don’t know, will die. Will they press the button? Will they not press the button? At the risk of revealing too much, one of those choices would make for an extremely anticlimactic (not to mention brief) film going experience, now wouldn’t it?

As the Lewis’ begin to investigate Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), the man who extended the offer, they begin to realize that they’re caught up in something larger than they had ever imagined. The movie is based on a short story which becomes problematic. The first half-hour is somewhat promising (despite the fact that Diaz chose to adopt a Southern accent that makes her sound like an escaped understudy from a community theater production of Steel Magnolias). The first thirty minutes follows the original story’s plot points; with the exception of a slight tweak to the ending similar to the version that aired in the 1980’s version of The Twilight Zone. However, the filmmakers decided to not leave well enough alone. Since the original story can’t reasonably be stretched to feature length, they’ve fleshed out the back-story in order to explain the motivation and machinations of Stewards’ offer. But much of the original's charm is due precisely to the lack of information. No details were ever given as to why Steward is making this offer or how it works. Like all good Twilight Zone episodes, it ended with a nice little twist and left the viewers with enough answers to be satisfying but enough questions to keep them thinking.

Is there any answer that could be given as to why or how this works that would be gratifying? If this film is any indication, the answer is a resounding “no.” Without revealing too much about Steward, suffice it to say that the answer is both ludicrous and (from a sci-fi/fantasy standpoint) rather routine; a dues ex machina that is as maddening as it is mundane. Steward has an army of people able to monitor the Lewis’ every movie and the movie quickly devolves into a poor-man’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Box is set in 1976 for no apparent reason beyond showing clips of ‘70s era sitcoms. And you know a movie is in trouble when you wish they’d go back to showing you an Alice rerun. It’s the sort of movie where people arrive on a hero’s doorstep frantically offering to help…but only with cryptically worded messages that inevitably do more harm than good. After all, why say, “Hey, that guy’s gonna kill you” when you can just as easily say, “The crow flies at midnight?” We’ve got two hours to fill here people.

I will give the film credit for not copping out. It creates dark choices (no spoilers, I haven’t even approached mentioning them here) and never backs away from them. The film has fairly nihilistic tone and makes absolutely no effort to graft on a Hollywood ending. I think Rod Serling would actually be fairly happy with the beginning and the ending…it’s all that stuff in the middle that he’d want to fix.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Indecent Proposal (really? Indecent Proposal? A “10”? Sure, why not?) and 1 being Saw V, The Box gets a 5.