USA’s The Sinner
Part 3
Directed by Antonio Campos
Written by Derek Simonds
* For a recap & review of Part 2, click here.
* For a recap & review of Part 4, click here.
Cora (Jessica Biel) lies in bed, in jail, dreaming of home. She later talks with a psychologist, who takes her back through old memories of being 13. She’s asked what she’d tell herself, back then. She replies: “Run.”
Out on a trek, in a stark juxtaposed shot from the inside of Cora’s cell, Dt. Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) and his semi-estranged wife Faye (Kathryn Erbe) are hiking, and he is sweating it out fierce. At the station, he’s not entirely thrilled with the psych report, as it doesn’t seem out of whack. He’s wondering about the song that played on the beach, the one which triggered the exact identical response in the interrogation room with her. Psych says it’s possibly linked to PTSD.
Harry: “So, she‘s somewhere else, and she‘s stabbing someone else.”
At home, Mason (Christopher Abbott) is continually dealing with the fallout, the media attention. His wife calls, asking to see their boy. She’s in a bad space, though the father doesn’t sound averse to bringing him to see his mom. One ray of light in the life of Cora. Only that doesn’t turn out so well, once Mason doesn’t bring their child to see her, realising this could and likely will be a long, difficult road. After finding out things from the cops about her former life.
Harry goes to see the Laceys, adopted family of Cora – Elizabeth (Enid Graham) and William. They say she ran away five years, about the Fourth of July, a day before. Of course mom calls the girl selfish, so on. Sick little Phoebe died only weeks after Cora ran off. It’s obvious just from being around them something wasn’t right between the two adopted parents and Cora.
Note: We keep getting the wallpaper imagery, and now we’re going deeper inside. A great visual representation of going deeper into the walls of a home, discovering what’s actually inside as opposed to whatever it might look like on the outside.
We see more of Cora having nightmares. Terrible ones. She loses her mind in the night, having a dream of a woman telling a man to “give her another hit” and then someone steps right down on Cora’s chest, it cracks. As guards come to subdue her, she pleads they don’t put anything in her arm. When they pull up her sleeve they see the dried, cracking wounds of an old injection site, a veritable crater. Same goes for her other one, too.
Before Cora met her husband, after she left home, she got hooked on heroin. But there’s a deeper story. And Dt. Ambrose is going to get digging. He finds out something else, that Cora had a new visitor recently: Margaret Lacey (Rebecca Wisocky), the cool aunt. Seems Cora disappeared a long while, then showed up at a detox centre. Elizabeth refused to have a “whore” and a “degenerate” living with her, so aunt Mags took her. Yet she blames herself for ignoring the “signs” of something larger wrong. Like a large, jagged scar on the top of Cora’s head, one her aunt never discovered the story behind.
Quick flashes to the old Lacey home, Cora as a teenager. Dad isn’t happy sharing a room with his daughter, so long. There’s many nasty things going on beneath the curtains here. So then dad takes sick Phoebe, transplanting her back into the room with Cora, where the two girls eye each other with a strange emotion running like a current between them. Afterwards, they have an awkward discussion. And Phoebe, for the one slowly dying, is surprisingly more free than her sister, knowing about sex, even reading a stashed magazine she took from the hospital.
The further Harry gets into the details, the more he sees a sort of spiralling abyss into which he’s falling. Someone named Caleb Walker brought Cora into the rehab facility several years before. It also didn’t look like she was a regular junkie, she was clean, wearing new clothes. Strange, no? Meanwhile, Harry’s got himself a problem. He might be fixing things up with his wife, but he’s still hooked on his dominatrix lover; she purposely spills oranges in a grocery store, watching him as he dutifully picks it up.
More flashes back to the past. Elizabeth finds the magazine from the girls’ room, and so Cora takes the blame, admitting to her apparent sins. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” she and her adopted mom pray together, kneeling painfully on a line of dry white rice (at least that’s what it looks like) in penance. It’s the little sister who later must try getting through to the older, to show her all this religious stuff is bullshit. That’s when the two bond mischievously over makeshift communion, wine and crackers, lying on the floor next to the crucifix together. Interesting to see how the young would choose to worship Jesus over how the older, more foolish deem it necessary to be afraid of God, to be scared of his power. These two merely tell Christ they love him, caressing his wounds.
Phoebe: “Cora, God doesn‘t listen.”
Sitting around with people at home, Harry has to listen to other people talk about their perceptions of Cora’s case, from what they know in the media. One guy’s pontificating too hard for his liking, so he gets a bit mouthy. That night he and Faye try connecting physically again.
Mason is still looking for J.D. and he’s tracked him to a bar. They wind up in a bit of a fight after the guy’s nonchalant about the whole ordeal. This puts the cops on Mason, luckily Caitlin Sullivan (Abby Miller) helps as much as she can, what little she can.
Back at prison, Harry brings in the tools of the trade, asking Cora to show him how she shot up heroin. Except it seems she doesn’t know much about the process, really. So, what exactly happened to her back then? Was someone force feeding her the drug? Oh, I’d bet on that. She barely remembers the two months she was gone; “fragments,” she tells Dt. Ambrose.
Was Cora forced into prostitution? It seems like an almost human trafficking-type scenario, a pimp plying her with heroin to sell her off. I can’t help believe it’ll never be so simple; ugly, but not simple. We get a last flash, of that room with the black wallpaper, a man in a strange mask, kind of like a ski mask, and he asks: “How are you feeling today, Cora?”
Whoa, this episode – like the one preceding – blew the lid off my expectations. There’s so much more to this story than I ever thought. Can’t get enough of the mystery, plus the well drawn characters like Harry Ambrose, who make the picture that much more complete. I’m frothing for the next episode! Part 4 is next week.
Found footage sometimes doesn’t feel like its actually been found. There are movies in which I forgive the sin. Others feel as if they’re lacking because they need that real quality to make it effective. 388 Arletta Avenue is one of those found footage horror movies that uses its sub-genre gimmick to an advantage.
Immediately, Cole places us in the shoes of voyeur. We are doing surveillance on James (Stahl) and Amy Deakin (Mia Kirshner), just as if we were the unseen protgaonist ourselves. And just as immediately the strange events begin swirling around the married couple, specifically James when he finds a burned CD in his car – one he didn’t make – and songs on his computer to back it all up. There’s a quick addition of tension into the plot between these two characters. It starts fast with such tiny intervention from the unseen stalker, you begin to imagine how bad it can manage to get from here on in. If this were real life, if you knew you hadn’t burned some CD, wouldn’t paranoia kick in?
I personally enjoy the hell out of 388 Arletta Avenue. I dig found footage, but I know there are plenty of tired entries into the sub-genre out there. Because so many either copy too hard and rip-off their predecessors, or they just don’t do anything to make the found footage gimmick worth watching.
Forever, until the end of time, Martin Scorsese is one of my favourites. His directing is some of the greatest of his generation, as well as all time. He has a way of captivating the audience with a subject, never letting go. As a director, the way he paces a script from the page to screen is part of why I find him so fascinating.
The slight suggestions of many psychological moments in Travis’ head are hinted at impeccably. In this film, you can see how tuned in to the character’s inner workings Scorsese found himself as a director. For instance, in the diner when Travis goes to hang with his cabby buddies, his racism – or at the very least his racist-leaning thoughts and ideas – becomes immediately clear with a brief shot of him looking at the black men sitting nearby. It’s so short, yet you can tell by the way Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman manage to make the shot look there’s a deep seated sense of racism in Travis. These come in handfuls throughout the screenplay. Even in the last couple shots we’re given this amazing series of shots where Travis looks in his rear-view mirror, that paranoia and fear, that anger, every last drop comes back fierce. If only for a moment. Enough to make us question whether a violent episode will again strike in Travis’ life (I believe it will). Same as in the diner scene. Of course we later get more of Bickle’s inner feelings, but for the time being that single shot allows us to speculatively enter his thoughts. His look, his previous glance at the man Peter Boyle’s character introduces him to, these tiny pieces add up to give us a pathway in. Although it isn’t particularly a pleasant path. The morality with which we’re confronted in the journey Travis takes, a dark and often nasty journey, is never easy to stomach. Ultimately, drawing us into the inner world of this man is a technique for gearing us up towards the big moral dilemma Schrader’s script poses. That is to say, Travis kills men in the finale who, by most accounts, probably deserve to die; they’re all complicit in prostituting a minor(s). But he also only killed those guys because he failed to murder a politician. His killing them was a diverted murder. Either way, Travis was going to kill. Can we still accept that he, in the process, did a good thing? Or is that all tainted by his lust for violence? A hard question to answer.
Overall, the cinematography is fantastic. The editing – by Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro, before the collaboration between Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker – is another perfect addition. The way so many of the scenes are cut adds that definitive 1970s style. Moreover, it helps everything flow well, which is the primary goal of any editing. There are lots of instances where the editing can make or break a picture’s worthiness. Luckily, Taxi Driver is put together so that every little cut only serves to make the flow and the look and feel of the movie unique. My personal favourite instance of where the shots and the editing collide in perfection: when Scorsese’s unstable character gets into the cab he asks Travis to look up to the building across the street, and not only does he verbally guide him, the sequence is edited so that we literally follow Bickle’s eyes as they go up the building, across a couple windows until landing on the right one. It’s an impressive, underrated scene that doesn’t always get mentioned. Even better is the fact that the Scorsese character is effectively a catalyst, the antagonist who plants a truly ugly seed of violence in the mind of Bickle.
This is a 5 star, flawless piece of cinema. I haven’t bothered to mention De Niro specifically because what’s to say? One of the most famous portrayals of an outsider on film, and one of the most famous characters in the history of moving pictures. His outrageous dedication to the craft of acting makes for something spectacular to behold. Travis Bickle comes alive with each and every viewing, every time becoming more and more disturbing, as you dissect the layers of his performance, and also the layers of Schrader’s writing.
We open on Lilith Bode (Jennifer Landon) having dinner with a mysterious man who seems an awful lot like the serial killer roaming around Banshee. He’s got some seriously weird shit going on – horn implants in the forehead, an upside down cross on his torso, a massively creepy piece on his back. Wow. And meanwhile, as Lilith cleans the dishes after dinner, he’s got himself a new victim in a secret room by the pool table. Yikes. What an opener! This might be off the wall, but it’s intriguingly off the wall.
Cut back to three months ago. Rebecca (Lili Simmons) is taking care of Hood (Antony Starr). He asks her why she’s even there, why she’s running around messing with the people in that wild little town. He cares for her, or cared for her. He essentially lost Carrie, Siobhan died. Now that Rebecca’s gone, his worst nightmare has basically come true. Every woman he’s loved has ended up either disappearing from his life, or dying.
Seems like Calvin is having troubles. He’s drinking away his troubles having doubts about Watts and his deal with Proctor. There is a situation about to rear its head: “Watts has to fuckin‘ go,” says Calvin after a shot
Nice episode. Very unexpected. The next one is titled “A Little Late to Grow a Pair” and promises lots of interesting things.
