The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jeff Nichols · a film · 2011 · the theatrical release, about 120 minutes · written and directed by Jeff Nichols
Mode
Domestic drama of a working family in which a clinical case and an apocalyptic vision are one story; realism, horror and fable without irony
Mythos
The man warned of a flood who builds an ark while his neighbours watch, crossed with Cassandra, whose warning no one, herself included, can test; the flood as oil; the child who cannot speak and sees
Phase
Some months in a small Ohio town, from the first brown rain to the night in the shelter, and a few minutes at a beach after
Presentation
Feature film in colour, in English, about 120 minutes; photography by Adam Stone, editing by Parke Gregg, music by David Wingo; Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, Tova Stewart, Shea Whigham, Kathy Baker and Ray McKinnon
Register
Plain observed daylight over flat fields and a family kitchen, broken by dreams that swell slowly into dread; a man’s terror made public once, at a supper
Scale
One household, its one job, one loan and one insurance policy, and the town that watches it dig
Governing Proposition
A man who works a sand-mining crew in a small Ohio town begins to dream of a storm, and spends his job, his savings and his good name building a shelter against it, knowing that his mother’s illness came on at about his age. The wager of the film is that, to the man inside it, illness presents as knowledge and fear for a family cannot be told from foresight, and that a form which never marks a dream as a dream can make its audience live inside that doubt, up to the moment his wife asks him to open the door himself.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Curtis LaForche stands in his driveway with his palm up, and the rain that falls into it is thick and brown, like oil. The film begins with a vision and does not say so. When it ends he is in bed, waking, and the morning is ordinary. Every dream after this one arrives the same way, with no mark at its start, and the audience learns what he learns: that the only way to tell a vision from the day is to wait for him to wake.
The day is a working family’s day. Curtis, played by Michael Shannon, works a sand-mining crew in a small town in Lorain County, Ohio, beside his friend Dewart, played by Shea Whigham. His wife Samantha, played by Jessica Chastain, sews craft goods and sells them at the flea market. Their daughter Hannah, played by Tova Stewart, is deaf, and the family speaks with her in sign. She is to have an implant, and the surgery depends on the insurance that comes with his job. Everything the house rests on is one job, one loan and one policy.
In another dream the family dog turns on Curtis and bites him, and he feels the bite all the next day. Jeff Nichols wrote and directed the film, his second feature after Shotgun Stories (2007), with Adam Stone photographing, Parke Gregg editing and David Wingo writing the music. It was shot in Ohio, where it is set, on a small budget. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, was shown in the Critics’ Week at Cannes that May and won the section’s Grand Prix, and was released in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics on 30 September 2011. It runs about two hours, in the theatrical release.
Movement II
Curtis builds a pen in the yard and shuts the dog, Red, in it, and then gives him away. It is the first waking act a dream produces, and the pattern holds through the film: each dream changes something in the day. A dream of Dewart leads Curtis to have him taken off the crew, and he loses his one friend. The dreams of Hannah taken from the car by figures in the storm lead him to the old storm shelter in the yard, and he begins to build it out.
The dreams grow. Birds mass over a field in shapes no flock makes. The furniture in the living room rises into the air. Wingo’s score lets each one swell slowly rather than shock, and the camera is held to Curtis, so that by the second hour the audience no longer trusts the waking scenes either. The storm that the dreams promise is withheld for most of the film. The viewer waits for it as Curtis waits, without being able to say why.
Curtis knows the other explanation. His mother, Sarah, played by Kathy Baker, lives in care, and her illness came on when she was about his age. He visits her, and he goes to a counsellor at a free clinic, and he takes medication. To the man inside it, the film shows, illness presents as knowledge, and fear for a family cannot be told from foresight. He keeps digging. The two courses do not cancel; he takes both, and the film holds them side by side.
Movement III
To build out the shelter Curtis borrows against the house at the bank, and he takes an excavator from work to dig. The scene at the bank is plain and procedural, and it is as dangerous as any dream: the loan and the excavator are the floor the household stands on, and he is taking it up. He loses his job, and with it the insurance, and with the insurance Hannah’s surgery. A breakdown in this house is at once a medical, a financial and a marital event.
Samantha learns what he has done. Chastain carries her from bewilderment to fury without a speech. Curtis’s brother Kyle, played by Ray McKinnon, stands by as his brother. The shelter is dug in the yard in plain view, financed against the house, and the neighbours watch it go in. Noah is never named, and need not be: the man who is warned of a flood and builds an ark while the town watches is built into the plot, not quoted.
The town gives its verdict at a Lions Club supper. The table is overturned, and Curtis stands before the room and tells it, “There’s a storm coming”. Shannon has held the terror in Curtis’s jaw and shoulders and kept his voice flat for most of the film, and here the voice breaks. The prophet stands up at the communal table and is shamed. Cassandra is crossed with Noah: the warning is true or false, and no one in the hall, the prophet included, can know which.
Movement IV
Then a real storm comes. The siren sounds, and the family goes down into the shelter and closes the door. For the first time in the film the storm is not a dream, and the form turns inside out: what was vision is now weather, and the question is no longer whether the storm will come but whether Curtis can believe it has gone. They spend the night below the ground, with the wind above them.
In the morning the storm has passed, and Curtis will not open the door. Samantha does not open it for him. She has him turn the handle himself, and he does, into a bright ordinary morning of scattered branches. It is the film’s warmest height, and its plainest: a man who cannot trust the world asked to trust it with his own hand, by the one person who has chosen to stand inside his fear with him.
The marriage is the film’s third disclosure, beside the illness and the household’s dependence on one man’s job. Samantha’s anger and then her decision, made in the shelter, are shown as the form love takes. Shannon’s Curtis, who kept his terror in the jaw and the shoulders, comes up into the light with his wife beside him, and the morning outside the door gives no verdict on what his fear has been.
Movement V
The last minutes are at Myrtle Beach. Curtis and Samantha and Hannah are on the sand, and Hannah signs the storm. Oily rain falls on Samantha’s hand. She looks at Curtis, and says “Okay”. The child who cannot speak is the one who sees first, and the vision has passed into the eyes of others.
The ending has kept the film in argument for fifteen years: a prophecy fulfilled, a delusion now shared, a dream within the coda, or the moment a family consents to a man’s reality. Each reading changes what the two hours before it meant. The beach is the least necessary-looking element of the film and the most required, since without it the film is a case history; and it strains the film’s law, which the film keeps by placing the vision as one others now share. The weather of the first shot returns in the last.
The film went on to wide critical regard and small circulation. It marked a turn in Shannon’s career and a step in Chastain’s, and Nichols’s later films, Mud and Midnight Special, built on it. It is often placed among the precursors of the independent horror of grief and illness that followed in its decade, though that line is arguable rather than shown. What it made is a regional working-class drama carrying the apocalyptic register at full strength, and an illness given from inside, with no twist to settle it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little to take, because each dream produces a waking act. The dog’s bite produces the pen and the giving away of Red; a dream of Dewart produces the request to move him off the crew, which costs Curtis his one friend and then his job; the dreams of Hannah taken from the car produce the shelter. The insurance is load-bearing, since Hannah’s implant surgery hangs on the job he loses by taking the excavator, and his mother’s illness, come on at about his age, is the hinge of the middle. The beach, the least necessary-looking element, is the most required: without it the film is a case history. What gives: the first hour repeats itself, two dreams make one point, and the counsellor restates the mother.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: to the man inside it, illness presents as knowledge, and fear for his family cannot be told from foresight. A second disclosure belongs to its moment: a working household in a small Ohio town resting on one job, one loan and one insurance policy, so that a breakdown is at once a medical, a financial and a marital event, and the economy is felt as precarity in the body. A third is the marriage: Samantha’s anger, and then her choice to stand inside his fear with him, is shown as the form love takes. What holds the axis: the times are disclosed more by mood than by articulation, and the ending, refusing to choose between prophecy and illness, withdraws part of the clinical truth it built.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The register is dread, and it rises often. The opening, Curtis in his driveway under a thick brown rain, is a quiet terror. The birds massing over a field in shapes no flock makes, the furniture rising in the living room, the figures in the storm reaching into the car for Hannah: each is a sustained height, and David Wingo’s score lets them swell slowly rather than shock. The supper at the Lions Club is a summit of another kind, a man’s terror made public. The opening of the shelter door is the film’s warmest elevation, the beach its last. Held where it is because the dreams share one tonal key, and effects made on a small budget sometimes lower a moment the framing raised.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The myth is built, not quoted: the man warned of a flood who builds an ark while his neighbours watch. Noah is never named and need not be. The shelter is dug in the yard in plain view and financed against the house, and the community gives its verdict at the communal supper, where the prophet stands up at the table and is shamed. Cassandra is crossed with Noah: the warning is true or false, and no one, the prophet included, can know which. The rain falls as oil, a defiled water that turns the flood from cleansing to poison, and the deaf child who signs the storm is the oracle who does not speak. What holds the axis: the pattern governs the plot without deepening as it goes, and the religious frame stays implicit.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is double: the American independent realism of the working family, regional, observed and unhurried, and the apocalyptic and horror film. The turn sets the second inside the first without irony and binds both to a clinical study of the onset of schizophrenia, so that the genre’s visions are the case’s symptoms. The stake was real for a second feature on a small budget: a two-hour film that withholds its storm for most of its length and ends by refusing to say whether its hero is ill. Held where it is because the path was open: Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) and William Friedkin’s Bug (2006) had joined domestic life, paranoia and the uncanny. A refinement of tone and setting, honestly risked.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The form is the knowledge, and the axis is the film’s highest. The camera is held to Curtis’s experience and the dreams arrive unmarked, so the viewer cannot tell vision from waking until he wakes, and in the second hour stops trusting the waking scenes too: the condition of the man is given as the condition of watching. The withheld storm makes the audience share a waiting he cannot explain. The shelter turns the form inside out: a real storm, a real siren, and the question becomes whether he can open the door, which is whether he can trust the world. The coda puts the vision into other eyes. Told as a case history from outside, the film would know only a diagnosis. Held from the top by the middle, where long stretches are ordinary coverage.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Fifteen years of evidence, and the ending has kept the film in argument through all of them: prophecy fulfilled, a delusion now shared, a dream within the coda, or the moment a family consents to a man’s reality. Each reading changes what the two hours before it meant, and the film supports more than one. Return rewards attention to its rhymes: the dog’s pen and the shelter, sign language as a second channel of truth in the house, Samantha’s craft goods at the flea market as the household’s other economy, the weather of the first shot and the last. What holds the axis: fifteen years is a short record, the critical literature is modest, and return gathers on one open question more than on many.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that a regional working-class drama could carry the apocalyptic register at full strength, and that mental illness could be given on screen from inside, with no twist that settles it. It refined the field rather than reorganised it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a turn in Michael Shannon’s career and a step in Jessica Chastain’s, and Nichols’s own later films, Mud and Midnight Special, built on it. Its place among the precursors of the decade’s independent horror of grief and illness is arguable and not shown, and its circulation was small. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the redirection it can show is local and partly delayed.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across fifteen years. The film as released survives whole, on home video and in digital release. Its presence is steady but not wide: it is taught, kept on home video and streaming, and named among the decade’s American films, but its circulation was small at release and has not become the widest kind. The surface ages little; the cars, the phones and the economy of 2010 and 2011 date it mildly, and the anxiety that followed 2008 is part of its meaning rather than a fixed surface. Fifteen years demonstrate far less than centuries, and the modest presence keeps the figure at the lower end of what that span allows.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Command of the medium is high in several departments and limited in one. Michael Shannon’s Curtis is the film’s instrument: the terror kept in the jaw and the shoulders, the voice held flat until the supper breaks it. Jessica Chastain carries Samantha from bewilderment to fury to choice without a speech. Adam Stone photographs flat Ohio fields under large skies and holds the house in steady, unforced frames; Wingo’s sparse score is placed as dread rather than shock, and wind and rain sound as threat in the waking scenes. Parke Gregg’s cutting lets the dreams run past the point of comfort. The costs: the birds and the storm sometimes read as effects on a low budget, and the middle is shot and cut in plain coverage, competent rather than load-bearing.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the scene at the bank, plain and procedural, and the furniture rising in the living room. One law governs both: what holds a household up, a loan, a job, a floor, can give way, and Curtis’s mind and the world obey the same weather. The dreams, the insurance, the sign language, the shelter and the supper all fall under it, across a wide range: domestic realism, clinical study and apocalyptic vision. The law is tested by the ending. If the storm is real, the clinical law of the middle, the mother’s illness, the counsellor and the medication, seems broken; the film keeps the beach within its own physics by placing it as a vision others now share, but the strain is real and holds the figure.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness: Curtis’s, held from inside through the form. The family: a marriage, a deaf child, a brother, a mother in care, and heredity as fate. Labour: a sand-mining crew, its rules on equipment, a man’s place on it. The economy: a loan, insurance, a flea-market stall, the cost of a child’s surgery. Community: the Lions Club and its supper, the neighbours who watch the digging. The natural order: weather as the film’s medium and its threat. Medicine, in a free clinic and a counsellor. These are one movement, since the job, the insurance, the shelter and the marriage turn together. What holds the axis: Samantha’s inner life comes chiefly through Curtis, history and the state barely enter, and the sacred is present only as figure.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.4, then The Unconcealment at 8.2, and The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1. A form in which dreams arrive unmarked, so that the condition of the man becomes the condition of watching, turned inside out when a real storm makes the door the question; a disclosure that illness presents as knowledge, in a household resting on one job and one policy; a plot in which each dream produces a waking act; and an ark dug in public, its prophet shamed at the communal table.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 7.3: a real intrinsic force, the apocalyptic register carried by a regional drama and illness given from inside, with a reach that shows in two careers and its director’s later films, small circulation and a lineage arguable rather than shown. Above it, The Encompassed at 7.4, many orders joined but Samantha’s inner life given through Curtis and history, the state and the sacred barely present; then The Sublime and The Swerve at 7.6, heights held in one tonal key, and a turn on a path others had opened.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 7.7, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, The Imperishable at 8.0, The Swerve at 7.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.3 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at Pressure on Tradition, 7.3, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, in the band of Tier III, a tenth short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires. What holds it below Tier IV is a reach still local, heights held in one key, a middle of plain coverage, and fifteen years of survival.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Take Shelter in its theatrical release of 2011, in colour, in English, about 120 minutes, from the brown rain in the driveway to the beach: written and directed by Jeff Nichols, photographed by Adam Stone, edited by Parke Gregg, with music by David Wingo; with Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, Tova Stewart, Shea Whigham, Kathy Baker and Ray McKinnon. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, was shown in the Critics’ Week at Cannes in May 2011, and was released in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics on 30 September 2011. The film was seen more than once; no print, screenplay or recording was consulted, and the running time is given as approximate. The plot, the order of the major sequences and the ending are known well; the finer order and content of the dreams, and minor lines, less well, and they are not described beyond what is certain. Two lines are quoted, “There’s a storm coming” and “Okay”, where their words are certain; other speech is described. Facts that could not be verified, among them the producers, the budget to the figure, the number of dream sequences, what the dream of Dewart shows, and scene counts, are not given.