Ray Pride

There was a three-month stretch last year where I watched ten minutes--a "reel"--of "The Exorcist" (1973) every day.

Rude or elegant? Accidental construct or masterful design? For my purposes, it's a movie that I still can't grasp, its powerful, menacing grip more lasting than its showboating profanity and puke. It haunts me.

As surely as its success, and that of the release of its re-edit, "The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen" (2000) with a reported gross of over $40 million, and likely mints more in video, has haunted producers, executives and filmmakers for decades as well. Screenwriting team Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman, whose credits include "Hellraiser: Inferno" (which Derrickson directed) and Derrickson's story-by credit for an unreleased Wim Wenders movie, were researching a project for Jerry Bruckheimer when they heard a cop tell a story about a real-life trial after an attempted exorcism led to a girl's death. While commercials allude to "based on a true story," the filmmakers are quick to say that only the barest elements led them to this fictional telling, primarily the fusion of the supernatural with the legal.

It's a dangerous idea in one way, compressing a courtroom drama pitting prosecuting believer Campbell Scott against defense attorney and agnostic Laura Linney with a boldly stylized retelling of a 19-year-old girl's descent into madness. (In courtroom, jailhouse and exorcism scenes, Tom Wilkinson gives an intriguing performance of bruised rectitude.) Vigor or busyness? Do dichotomies or bifurcated narratives inevitably monkeywrench dramatic tension? Will audiences sit still for courtroom tactics when they're there for what you see in the commercials, where a terrified woman shrieks as she stumbles past crooked, hissing figures whose fissures elongate into thumb-smears of black? But the back-and-forth, the film's unique asset, may be its strongest, a movie that can spark thought and discussion as well as hands clutched in the dark. (Derrickson says he's essentially a believer while his longtime writing partner is a skeptic, for instance.)

Laura Linney, whose performance in next month's divorce tragicomedy "The Squid and the Whale" is nothing short of tremulous perfection, has acted in movies like "The Mothman Prophecies," but was drawn to this flame by its appeal to reason. "I wanted to make sure that this movie would be balanced, that both sides of the argument would be fully represented. I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be a movie that would tell people what to think. But just to think in general."

She's not a fan of horror movies. "I tend to go for scary creatures. The alien. The real unknown, what are you dealing with? I've never seen a movie that combines these two genres before. I didn't know if it was going to work, courtroom drama and supernatural, scary exorcism movie sort of thing."

Linney was on Broadway in "The Crucible" with Jennifer Carpenter, who plays Emily Rose, and lionized her as the "best young actress" she'd ever worked with. The lanky Carpenter has eccentric expressive features, with large, feline eyes and an arrowhead of a nose. Yet like legendary actors of the past, she pulls off feats of physical transformation in "Emily Rose," avowedly without any special effects. Her ability to contort, freeze and warp her swimmer's physique into grotesque formations may be the most genuinely frightening thing in the film, worth a million screams and a world of swears (which this PG-13 rated film eschews).

But Linney's role is more in the world of words. "I'm the daughter of a playwright. With the experience I've had, I will certainly go to writers. I don't do it a whole lot. More than anything it's asking that things be taken out. I feel you don't have to tell the audience every single second, stuff you just don't need. A lot of times scripts are written to be green-lit. They're not written to be made. There's a big difference between a script that is going through the studio system that is trying to get funding and then an actual working script for us to actually act. A lot of times, scripts are not actable."

Was research necessary? "The research I did was more in line with what I thought [the character, a lonely, hard-drinking lawyer] would do. I went to Amazon, I went to Google. There are tons of books out there. Good old basic stuff. My role is to freak you guys out. It's fun. It's delicious fun when you're making it."

But nothing she saw changed her mind? "I contradict myself about this all the time. And I really don't feel confident saying one way or the other. I wish I did. And I know that we're living in a time where to be certain is to show strength. And y'know... I think it's okay not to know and not to be sure. I don't know."

She pauses before she continues. "I can go round and round and round about this. I think about it and I think there are times I think absolutely not, other times, am I open to the possibility of it? Mayyyyybe. When you do research and hear of these exorcisms, people's heads splitting open in front of people, what do you do with that information?"

"The Exorcism of Emily Rose" opens Friday.

(2005-09-06)

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