Carrie (2002) Pt. 2

[To read Part 1 of this review, please click here.]

Rik: The other day, you and I were discussing the new series American Gods, which is adapted from Neil Gaiman’s stunning novel. Fuller has proven to be a reliable favorite of mine – chiefly through Pushing Daisies and Hannibal – though I also quite enjoyed Wonderfalls and his ill-fated attempt to bring back the Munsters in Mockingbird Lane a few years ago. (Seriously, I thought it was a cool, edgy try… Eddie Izzard as Herman Munster? Absolutely…) He got a raw deal in being brought into a desperate situation to try to fix Heroes in the middle of its run, but I have liked most of his projects apart from that. (Sadly, I have only ever seen a single episode of Dead Like Me.) And I am excited that he is heading up the latest Star Trek series – Discovery – due out later this year from CBS later, even if I think shifting the show after its premiere to their online All-Access subscription service may not be a wise move. (I am pretty certain the wife and I are not going to spend the extra $$$ to sign up for it, since we have so many pay services already.).

This teleplay was basically Fuller’s third separate scripting job in Hollywood (after writing for Star Trek: Voyager in its last season, but first for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine deep in its run). Fuller also served as an executive producer on Carrie (as he did for Voyager), but as to his level of involvement with the actual production and direction beyond having input on the adaptation he wrote, I do not know. Even though the script includes many elements not seen on screen before (as we mentioned), I would not say the script is a loving adaptation of the novel, as if someone really wanted to prove that Carrie could be done “the right way”. The finished product feels more like rote network fare, has a distinct cheesiness to it almost from the first scene, and is plagued by some amateurish acting from its, yes, admittedly mostly appealing cast (which includes some favorites of mine – Clarkson, Bettis and Isabel – as well as a couple of non-faves: the aforementioned de Ravin and Rena Sofer, the queen of failed pilots).

Any adaptation of Carrie, outside of having to deal with the looming shadow of the De Palma version, is ultimately going to live and die by its casting of the title character and her mother. First, let’s tackle Margaret White, previously essayed in Oscar-nominated form by Piper Laurie (and eventually by Oscar winner Julianne Moore). Here she is played by Patricia Clarkson. Now, it may be a little bit in the too much information department were I to disclose that I have had well more than one not-so-chaste dream about Ms. Clarkson over the past twenty years or so. Somehow, she just does it for me, and even more so with age. Given this, you would think that I would be all over any part she plays, but you would be quite wrong. I think Clarkson does a serviceable job in the role, and my opinion regarding this is really based on my own assumption of what she should be playing instead. I just don’t like seeing her in a role where her sexuality is repressed to an incredible degree – unless one can work a kinky, fundamentalist Christian dominatrix angle into one’s fantasy, and that will just not do it for me… ever. I don’t even like regular fundamentalist anythings. So, the problem is squarely of my own libido.

I think Clarkson does fine in the role, but she doesn’t threaten to take over the film in the way that Laurie and Moore do in their turns at bat, and it is that threat – much in the way that Margaret White’s very presence and lifelong psychosis threaten to consume her daughter’s existence (possibly by killing the girl herself) – that is very much needed in this part. No knock on Clarkson’s acting abilities, but I don’t think she has that extra gear that both Laurie and Moore have shown time and time again that they possess where they can hit an apex of truly unhinged, maniacal abandon if required. Perhaps I also don’t buy the relationship between Margaret and Carrie here because Angela Bettis is nowhere near being a teenager herself, and was, at 28 years of age, the oldest of the three Carries when filming took place. It became almost impossible to believe the relationship between the two, and as I said, part of this is because of my long-standing physical attraction to Ms. Clarkson. It is completely unfair for me to judge someone’s acting performance in this manner, but there it is. I cannot see past this particular glare in my logic. (Despite my insistence to the contrary, I guess that I am quite human after all.)

Let’s move on to Bettis herself. Aaron, you mentioned previously Ms. Bettis’ excellent job in the film May, which is exactly the moment where she stuck in my head, though I had forgotten (or didn’t notice) her in roles previous to May. A past acquaintance at my old, longtime Anchorage gig recommended the film to me for about three months, and I never sought it out on my own, so he finally bought me a copy for my birthday because he was so sure I would love that movie. It turned out that I did indeed love it, and I probably watched May about a dozen times over the next month. It wasn’t merely Bettis that caused my positive reaction to May, as I was really into the pre-stardom Anna Faris at the time, who has a most memorable supporting role in the film. That is not really fair to Bettis, because May is really a shining moment for her, and interesting supporting parts aside, the film is really all hers. In fact, her performance is an indie horror tour de force, though it would not take much to convince me to drop the “indie horror” part and just proclaim it as a tour de force for an actress who probably deserves more opportunities to shine in the same way. Unfortunately, Bettis has never really broken through into the mainstream. Part of this may be due to her looks, which are unconventional to say the least. While I find her personally attractive, she may not be Hollywood’s normal cup of tea. But she keeps working and I delight in seeing her pop up here and there in bit roles. Along the way, she directed Roman, another odd horror-romance somewhere in the neighborhood of May, which starred her May director, Lucky McKee, in the title role. (She also shot her own portion of The ABCs of Death.)

There is more than a small crossroads where Bettis’ performances in Carrie and May meet. First off, both films were released the same year (2002). May hit Sundance in January of that year and was entered in festivals well into the next year, while Carrie was not premiered on NBC until November. However, May did not hit regular movie screens until June of 2003 and then came out on DVD the next month. As a result, the public saw Carrie first, even though May was filmed over a year before. Because the finished product of this version of Carrie looked so dated already when it came out, and because I saw it when it originally aired, it was easy for me to believe that perhaps Bettis used her role as Carrie White as an influence on her portrayal of May Dove Canady, the deeply lonely girl who grew up with a lazy eye covered by a patch and found herself mocked and ostracized by the other kids.

For years, May is kept pretty much imprisoned by her overbearing mother who convinces poor May that dolls are her only friends. As an adult, May fixes her eyesight, but has an overriding obsession that will play a tragic part in her relationships with the people she soon befriends or takes as lovers. For those who have not seen the film, I will leave the plot description there. Like Carrie White, May Canady is awkward and virginal, more than a little unhinged due to her abusive upbringing and seclusion from the outside world, but desperate to find love and acceptance among her peers. To escalate what I started in the preceding paragraph, it is not hard to imagine that the original version of Carrie or King’s novel may have played a part in McKee’s creation of the character of May, and possibly of Bettis’ excellent performance in the role. And because the 2002 Carrie entered the public consciousness first, I am not the only one to have thought that Bettis’ role in that led to her fine work in May, when in fact, it is the complete opposite. I don’t know whether the producers of Carrie saw her work in May at a festival or screening and decided to hire her for Carrie, but it seems clear from the timeframe that we must use her work as May Canady as at least an influencer, if not the primary one, and not the other way around.

Bettis is indeed the best part of the 2002 version of Carrie. Naturally, I  don’t think she equals Sissy Spacek in the role, though I do think she is better than Chloe Grace Moretz in 2013. (We will get to that performance and film eventually…) Since it would be too easy to closely align her take on Carrie with that of May, though there are still major differences, someone who has seen both films may have to divorce their memories of May almost completely to watch Carrie in order to see Bettis as playing a separate character. This was not the problem in 2002 since I saw Carrie first, but May Canady is the defining role in Bettis’ catalogue. Spacek’s looks, especially her eyes and freckles, made her rather unconventional as well, but there was still a noticeable beauty queen look to her in the prom scene where it became hard to imagine that she wasn’t popular already. (In my book, then and now, Spacek is a veritable knockout in that scene.)

Bettis has an “otherness” to her at all times that is both what makes her appealing to me but probably works against her in Hollywood. But in a film where that element of otherness is necessary to tell the story of a girl who is possessed of massively dangerous telepathic capabilities that are largely untapped until she finally is pushed to her breaking point, Bettis may be the one actress of the trio who has come closest to embodying the role of Carrie White in a believably physical sense. (This is not to say she is anywhere near what King wrote of the character, because his Carrie was described as having acne, being fat, and having “bovine reactions”. None of this has never been a part of any adaptation thus far onscreen. I would love to see someone try it though; the film would tie in perfectly with the currently sizzling topic of body shaming and acceptance.) Of the three actresses to fill the role, Bettis is the only one to truly possess that otherness, the alien sense that I mentioned that makes her seem most likely to me to have been cast aside by the popular kids at the school. Bettis’ sharp looks combined with her gaunt but wiry physicality is her most remarkable trait in the role, apart from her acting skills.

And when her character finally makes full use of her powers, Bettis also comes off for me as probably the most potentially frightening of the Carries. While the ballroom scene in this version comes nowhere near the remarkable perfection of the original, Bettis seems genuinely possessed as whatever force has overwhelmed her senses seems to focus singularly upon delivering death and destruction down upon the heads of Carrie’s tormentors, real or imagined. Until late in the scene, Bettis stands stock still, her arms straight at her sides, her fingers held together in spear-like points as her powers are spilled outward in every direction, and even employed on people she cannot see directly with earthly senses. The editing is not nearly as tautly conceived in Carson’s version of the events, and so the film is left relying on the repeated vision of Bettis, perfectly still and staring forward, her eyes wide, as fire looms behind her and the sparks and screams fly from the crowd before her. Especially in a such a reduced (though, ironically lengthier and more detailed) vision of the story, this viewer connected more deeply with her Carrie at this point than any other, and the sole reason is Bettis’ stark. threatening physicality in the role.

Aaron, did you find Bettis as effective in the role as I did, and where did you come down on the dynamic with Clarkson as her mother?

Aaron: I think we’ve actually got a slight disagreement coming up, but first I’ll sign off on your thoughts as to Patricia Clarkson in this role. She is perfectly fine and menacing in the role, and yet lacks the theatricality necessary to really go over the top. On the other side of the equation, we have differing views on Angela Bettis in the role, though we both enjoy her work (here and elsewhere). Bettis may not have been the right age, or the right look for what Stephen King originally wrote, but I find her to be the most believable as a high school student.

You say that Bettis has an otherworldly quality, and while I have found that true of her in other roles, I actually find her the most believable of the three Carries in terms of portraying a socially awkward high schooler. The combination of her body language, stringy hair, not-quite-perfect-complexion, and habit of avoiding eye contact while also awkwardly holding eye contact for way too long when it does happen, struck me as almost painfully realistic. She reminds me of people I knew during my own high school years. Hell, if I’m being honest, she reminds me a bit of myself at my most awkward and insecure. I could actually see this Carrie White as a real flesh and blood teenager, age of the actress notwithstanding.

That also, paradoxically, made her the least immediately interesting of the Carries. Realistic human beings are simply not as striking as the more stylized versions of humanity that normally make it to film and television, and I think this version suffers a bit from that. Because you know what isn’t the most entertaining and engaging thing to watch on screen? A realistically awkward, shy, and uncool high school kid. This was, to hear it from Fuller (in an interview for Fangoria around the time the film was set to be aired), completely intentional. As an avowed fan of the original, Fuller’s stated goal was to make Carrie less of a fairy tale, and more of a realistic tale of teenage angst.

“When we decided to do a remake, we really wanted to ground it in 2002, as opposed to doing a high school show in the ’70s, which is what the original was,” Fuller told Fangoria back in 2002. He also expressed doubts as to his success in translating such an iconic novel, but in terms of cementing the film in it’s timeframe and presenting a more grounded story, I can assure the filmmakers they succeeded admirably. However, that isn’t necessarily a good thing. The fact that Bettis portrays such a realistic teenager actually dulled the impact of her eventual telekinetic murder spree on prom night. You say she’s the most frightening of the Carries during this scene, but I felt the opposite. Sissy Spacek was so alien, with such an angular profile and those piercing eyes of hers, that she looked positively otherworldly, like an alien or a demon, during her big moment. Chloe Grace-Moretz effectively splits the difference between Spacek and Bettis, seeming earthier but far angrier, like rage personified. Angela Bettis is basically in a trance, standing almost stock still for most of the scene and staring off into nothingness. This isn’t to say she’s bad in the role, of course, just that I found the tone of the ending fairly flat, despite the added carnage (this version is definitely the most true to the source material in terms of Carrie’s wide path of destruction). Some of that lies in the directorial decisions, but I also believe Bettis just pulls back a little too much when she should be swinging for the fences in her performance during this scene.

When a movie gets remade and/or sequelized so many times, I start to look for the reasons behind it. Obviously from a studio standpoint the major factor is always going to be money, but I start to look at why the filmmakers wanted to tell, or retell, this particular story. Remakes allow us to chart cultural and societal changes over the years through how different generations tell  the same story, and asking ‘why this story?’ can help illuminate those changes. The problem is this version of Carrie doesn’t give us any real answers to that. This film came out three years after the most devastating school shooting our country had seen (sadly, that record has been surpassed). This film was aired less than a year after the most deadly terrorist attack our country had ever seen. The cultural attitude toward violence, particularly violence in schools, had radically shifted, albeit only temporarily, it seems. And yet Carrie seems to exist blissfully unaware of these events, and so treats the onscreen violence with neither stylistic flair nor nuanced emotion. It’s just there. Maybe that’s a statement unto itself, but I feel it as more of a missed opportunity.

These problems are most likely a side effect of the original plan to turn this Carrie into a weekly television series. Bryan Fuller cited all the proper ‘whys’ when talking about his decision to remake Carrie: he invoked Columbine and spoke of his desire to explore the effects of this sort of violence on a small town and how a person would react to the guilt of having done something so monstrous. It’s likely that Fuller held back on all of that stuff in order to get the pilot movie made and seen by the widest audience possible, so that he could then explore the underlying themes once they’d been hooked. I’d like to rate this movie based on those goals, but unfortunately all we have is this one film. An overlong and generally unsatisfying adaptation of a novel that already had one superlative movie for the ages. 

Perhaps it was unwise to return to that well once again, especially so soon after the financial and critical flop of The Rage: Carrie 2. But of course Hollywood increasingly runs on sequels, remakes, reboot, and reimaginings, so just like Carrie herself, this property would find a way to rise from the grave when least expected.

Rik: At last, that’s all for our discussion of the 2002 version of Carrie. We have one more Carrie that we need to battle: the 2013 version starring Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore. And contrary to our more recent nature, Aaron and I will make a best effort to have that review posted before October rolls around. See you then!

Carrie (2002) Pt. 1

Rik Tod Johnson: Boy, are we ever bad at meeting our own announced schedule...

Welcome back to the next installment of We Who Watch from Behind the Rows, our spotlight on the writings of Stephen King and the filmed adaptations of those works. My writing partner, Aaron Lowe, and I were originally intent on using the month of October 2016 (that’s almost an entire year ago, folks!) to post a series of discussions about King’s novel Carrie and the three feature films and single TV movie adapted from it. We were able to get more than half there, but just barely. The month started out well with the discussion of the book, and we jumped right into Brian De Palma’s Oscar-nominated 1976 classic, and then leapt to The Rage: Carrie 2 from 1999. Then things went wonky for us, one in a positive way and negative for the other. Aaron had to devote more time to the family once his wife gave birth to their second child, while I had medical issues once more when I sustained a truly obnoxious hip injury that led to months of tests and therapy, and basically made it impossible to sit and write for any length of time.

Everything has worked out now though, where we are both itching to get this site (and our other sites) chugging right along again. For We Who Watch, it is especially important for us to be on our game for the remainder of the year, as we have some catching up to do thanks to the spate of brand new Stephen King properties that have hit us in the past couple of months (the first Dark Tower film, the new It movie, and a new TV series built around the world of The Mist; coming up, another series built around and named after King’s legendary town of Castle Rock). You will find a series of recent posts where we have discussed some of these projects after watching the trailers, but first, we need to get these last two Carrie discussions closed for good. Let’s go!

The Film: Carrie (2002, NBC-TV) Director: David Carson

Rik: Before I went into the fiction-reading wilderness for a few years, new Stephen King adaptations (or even original films) were a big thing with me. It was probably the early 2000s where I started to having a falling out (and had already mostly stopped reading his books by then). I am not quite sure where I burned out, but it is a good bet that projects like the 2002 television remake of Carrie was one of the reasons I pulled away for a short while.

I watched this three-hour (with commercials) version live on NBC in the fall of that year. I was really excited that they were doing a new Carrie as well. If there is one area where a television adaptation can definitely excel over a theatrical one, it’s in the ability to have more time (as many dedicated readers often dream) to have the full story told as the author intended. Whether such intentions are really taken to heart by the producers and creators of the film or not, I am always going to be one of those people who takes it as a good sign when more scope is granted to a project.

The biggest surprise with the 2002 TV movie is that an actual attempt is made to whisk in details that had been left out of the De Palma version (and would be in the eventual 2013 theatrical remake as well). Right in the opening scene we are shown the character of Sue Snell being questioned by authorities about her involvement in the Carrie White incident, which is modeled after the regular points in the novel (partially told in epistolary style) where her testimony (and that of others) deepens the information we have been given through other sources in the story.

There are some other small bits from the novel ignored by De Palma and his team that have been added to the rendering this time around, but before we get any deeper into them (or even consider if such additions were really necessary), I need to know something. Aaron, did you watch this TV movie when it originally aired on NBC in 2002?

Aaron: Not only did I not watch it, I’m not even sure I was aware of its existence at the time.

Part of me wants to make a joke here about trying to figure out which one of us had the good delay, and which the bad, but yes, I am, for the second time, father to a beautiful baby girl. It’s been wonderful, and time-consuming, and so far we’ve only had to deal with a tiny hail of stones. Sometimes she gets fussy, but we’ve got a nice altar to St. Sebastian in a closet, so we can lock her in there until she calms down.

You know what? I felt mildly uncomfortable writing that down, when talking about my daughter. This book, and these movies, definitely have a new weight that my younger self would not have considered when first encountering the De Palma film.

As for this version, I only first watched it in October of last year, when we had originally hoped to finish this piece. It’s possible that I had seen TV spots for its initial airdate or read about it in Entertainment Weekly. In fact, those two things almost certainly happened, yet I have no memory of such. The timing may have been off for me. In November of 2002, I was in the first year of my relationship with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, and I recall I wasn’t watching a lot of television at the time. While you were about to fall out with Stephen King for awhile, I already had, and wouldn’t really get back into paying attention to him for another year or so.

I should say that I didn’t actually “fall out” with Stephen King. That implies that I grew to dislike him as an author, when that isn’t actually the case. It’s simply that my literary obsessions moved to a wider array of authors, with a whole new library of titles to read, and I just didn’t keep up with King for awhile. One area where I did most certainly fall out with Stephen King, however, is in his filmed adaptations. It’s well known among Stephen King’s constant readers that the films based on his works are for the most part not very good. That’s nothing new; people are always negatively comparing films to their written counterparts. What really turned me off, however, were the television adaptations of his books. The ‘90s saw a whole slew of TV movies or miniseries based on Stephen King novels and stories, and while they served as an important gateway into his work for me, the novelty quickly faded and the general quality of the films was, to put it generously, suspect. So, even if I had seen some ads or read some articles about this new version of Carrie, I wouldn’t have paid them much mind. It should also be noted that at this time I hadn’t yet read the original novel, which might have had something to do with my apparent lack of interest.

During the opening credits to this version, I began to think I had been ignoring a lost classic, something that had fallen through the cracks and had simply been put out at the wrong time and in the wrong place (i.e., network television in the early 2000s). The film was directed by David Carson (a veteran of Star Trek: DS9 and director of the series-bridging Star Trek: Generations film, though I won’t hold that one against him), but what was most interesting to me is that it was written by another alumnus of the Star Trek family: Bryan Fuller. At the time, Fuller was in the early stages of his career, but following this he would create Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Hannibal. Definitely a writer with some interesting visions and macabre tendencies that are right up my alley. On the other side of the camera you’ve got Patricia Clarkson as Margaret White, a pre-Lost Emilie de Ravin as Chris Hargensen, the lovely Katherine Isabel (sadly underused) as Chris’ friend Tina, and Angela Bettis, so charmingly disturbed in May, as Carrie herself.

With so many interesting names attached I was sure that I would at least find a lot of worthwhile aspects within this adaptation (as a fan of horror films, I believe you get used to seeing the forest for the trees and grabbing on to anything interesting within even the worst films). Ultimately, I believe that my modest expectation was met, yet nowhere near the levels I was hoping for. A lot of this is the product of its time and venue; early 2000s network television was probably not the best place for this story to be told, and like many films of the time, the producers’ faith in CGI was greater than its limits. The story also feels needlessly padded out. You mention that the longer runtime afforded by television can give the medium an edge over the somewhat more constrained feature film, and yet three hours is more than such a slim novel needed, if we’re being honest.

Rik, you said that this adaptation played a part in your general move away from Stephen King for awhile, so I can assume that you found yourself similarly underwhelmed by this version. But, as you say, this version allows for a lot of the stuff edited out of the De Palma film, like the scene with the hail of rocks from the sky crashing into the Whites’ house during one of Carrie’s frequent punishments, and some of the novel’s epistolary elements. Did any of these moments, or even any of the additions to the source material, liven things up for you?

Rik: There’s the rub. It is simultaneously really cool that the producers of this version did add things missing from the first film that seem so vital in telling the story in the novel and also completely disappointing in that the additions really add very little to the story. And the hail of ice and rocks? Once more, a cool scene in the book that just really plays pretty cheesy in this film, and seeing it onscreen made me wonder if perhaps the scene is just a little too ridiculous in the book as well. [Note: it’s not. It works just fine in the novel.]

You realize in watching the 2002 Carrie (or at least I realized) that De Palma made all the right decisions in slicing the story down to its most primal, necessary elements for relocation to a visual media form. The epistolary style of the original novel is nothing more than basic structure; you can throw out the template if you like and hang the story on some other frame, and as long as you shift the important details and motivations of the characters correctly to the form you have adopted, you could tell the tale however you’d like.

To my point, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are two of the most famous epistolary novels, telling their stories mostly through a series of letters to other parties. Both books have seen extraordinary success in being adapted to other media: stage, radio, television, and most especially, the movies. While hardcore fans (such as even myself at times) long for a version of either book that completely captures each story perfectly in the manner portrayed in their texts, there have been very few attempts overall to do so (though some have tried to varying and debatable degrees of success). The epistolary structure may work on the page for many novels, because it is easy for someone to imagine they have been given a stack of letters and they are discovering some amazing story by reading them in order (or even out of order. But letter reading (or even reading scientific articles about telekinesis, such as in Carrie the novel) really does not allow a story to breathe or open up on a movie or TV screen. Part of this lies in the flashback nature of such writings; the stories are being told of past events, and therefore have no sense of immediacy to the viewer. This can often be deadly in keeping an audience on the edge of their seats, especially to modern audiences.

As a result, most versions of either classic novel keep the basic details – most of the characters, locations, settings, and sometimes the time period – and adapt them to whatever structure the filmmakers wish to pursue to tell their version of the story. It may not give us either Shelley or Stoker in undiluted form, but on some occasions, such as the original Universal attempts at both stories in the early 1930s, the results can be staggering and exceedingly popular with audiences for nearly a century. Universal’s Frankenstein threw out the letters and history of the book, mixed in a large dose of German Expressionism, and thrust the viewer directly into a harrowing night of grave-robbing and scientific madness that would have made Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley crap her knickers had she lived long enough to see such a film. (She would have had to be 134 years old to pull that one off though…) While the 1931 Frankenstein may have taken place in the past, within itself sans the letters, that past was “the now,” and the viewer was immediately part of the horrifying adventure. By comparison, the first Universal Dracula is notoriously more stage-bound in its approach and rather threadbare, winnowing down the stage play version of the story, which itself already mostly threw out the epistolary trappings of the book. But still, while the play’s story also takes place in the past, it is not told in the past tense. What is happening on stage and in the film is happening now, and the film’s sets and costumes were modern enough (for 1931) that many of the scenes look like they could have wandered in from a party scene in a Norma Shearer movie… well, apart from the blood-sucking Continental who shows up and ruins nearly everyone’s lives. (Then again, he could have wandered in from a Shearer flick too…) Once more, the letters of the book are disappeared, and the characters transported to a world more directly in line with the viewer’s need to be involved in the story.

The makers of the 2002 version of Carrie seem convinced that they needed to hew as closely to the novel as they could to differentiate themselves from the De Palma version. There are always large groups of fans that want their favorite books transferred wholesale when adapted, but the structure of a novel scrambled about in epistolary form (though roughly half the novel is still told in prose) is hard to replicate onscreen. Instead of jettisoning the somewhat unwieldy (though successful) structure that contains the story and just making sure they hit the beats of the story and maintain the character arcs properly, the filmmakers boldly tear off chunks of the epistolary sections, such as the post-event interviews of Sue Snell, but ignore the bits where we read documents and news articles related to the case. Excising those last bits is the right move, because it would be extraordinarily hard to adapt such a novel to the big or small screen in satisfactory fashion, but the interviews were really a wash for me as well. The film never really commits to the sections in such a way that they ever convince me they were right to include them, nor do they add much of anything to the film except time. The interview sections don’t work for me at all, serving instead to muddle the pace, and especially in the film’s opening, slowing the proceedings to a deadly crawl almost from the start.

It seems hardly fair at all to compare this version to De Palma’s, but that is why we have this website. De Palma’s film surges forward on kinetic energy throughout; even when opening his film with a seemingly slow, soft focus shower sequence with orchestral accompaniment, there is still a nervy, suspenseful edge to everything. Something is going to snap us out of this haze, and it does, instantly with screaming, crying, taunting laughter, and a girl covered in her own menstrual blood. The De Palma version sets viewers into a nervous state from the start and never lets them go, even up to the climax of the film. In this TV adaptation, director David Carson plunges us right into an interview with a survivor of the Carrie White incident, Sue Snell, as she talks to the authorities. “Tell us about Carrie White, blah, blah, blah”... none of this really needs to be seen. You said earlier that nearly three hours of length may not have been necessary for such a slim novel, and you are right. This viewer felt every extra minute of the stretched out running time, and most of that time was devoted to scenes that could have been better shorthanded by letting the audience simply learn what is happening through the actions of the characters, not by underlining everything with Snell’s testimony.

Aaron: I think it would be impossible to not compare any of the subsequent Carrie films to the De Palma original. That film just throws such a long shadow over everything else that it’s impossible to not think about it, to weigh the choices against each other and, for the most part, find the other films wanting. I tried my hardest to divorce my reactions from my feeling for the 1976 version, and sadly failed miserably. That’s not to say that I won’t be fair in my critical analysis, because each of these films deserves to be viewed as its own distinct entity (well, aside from The Rage, which is of course, a derivation of De Palma’s film), but when discussing what makes the translation from page to screen work it helps that we’ve got a prime example of what to do, and a few examples of what not to do.

The thing we seem to keep coming back to is the pace of this version. I rewatched the film this morning, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that two hours twelve minutes (the runtime minus commercials) is too damn long. That’s longer than both of the other versions by over half an hour, and while that may not initially seem like much, you really do feel every minute of it. The infamous shower scene, which opens the other two films (minus a few seconds of volleyball or water polo, and some attempted matricide in the 2013 version) arrives eight minutes into this film, after some schoolroom business setting up the daily ridicule Carrie faces, some gym time (they play baseball this time around), and of course some of that interview nonsense.

You bring up those interview segments, where a detective (played by David Keith) interviews various survivors of the prom night disaster. Most of these scenes feature Sue Snell, although other survivors show up to offer their two cents as well. We’re in complete agreement as to their uselessness, as they don’t do anything to create anticipation or flesh out the world of the film. One thing that really bothered me about these segments is that they seemed curiously removed from the film itself. Of course, the detective would ask questions which would be related in some way to the scenes we’re about to see, and yet they never really tied together. You would think the obvious format choice would be for the detective to ask a question, and then the scene that followed would take the place of the interviewee’s response, but that isn’t at all how it works here. If this film is meant to be a visualization of the survivors’ recollections, we get way too many scenes that no one would have been around for other than Carrie herself. It feels like the interview segments were just slotted into the existing film rather than the film being built around them. Or perhaps they’re simply a byproduct of this film’s origins on television, because I can see the interview scenes being used to recap things for an audience coming back from commercials, or to create some drama heading into the break.

There is, actually, another reason for the interview scenes, although I don’t think they were particularly successful in this regard either. The detective initially accuses Sue Snell of being part of the disastrous prank played on Carrie (which is in keeping with the book), but eventually it’s revealed that Carrie’s body was never recovered. We find out in the final moments of the film that Sue Snell, having gone to Carrie’s home and reviving her from nearly being drowned in the tub by Margaret, has helped Carrie fake her death and leave the state. The final scene is Sue Snell driving Carrie to Florida, while Carrie has some disturbing visions in the passenger seat. That’s right, in this version Carrie lives and plans to relocate to Florida, where presumably she’ll only have momentary peace before having to go on the run from The Shop, or something. I think those interview segments were meant to act as a misdirect, to make the viewer (most likely already familiar with the basic story) think that it was all leading to the same familiar ending.

After thinking this over, I think the only real way to make a version of Carrie that incorporates the epistolary elements of the novel is to excise a lot of Carrie herself. Imagine a Rashomon-style film that is told only from the viewpoints of Carrie’s classmates and neighbors, where each person tells their own story and Carrie is this mysterious girl at the fringes that suddenly explodes with a fury no one knew existed. It would mean getting rid of a lot of what makes the original novel and film so memorable (i.e., it would be difficult to squeeze in the scenes of Carrie alone with her mother, or practicing her telekinesis). This seems like a storytelling form that would lend itself well to television, where each act break could be devoted to another little vignette. Again, I just think it was the wrong place and the wrong time, as we had only just entered what is now considered the new golden age of television, with shows like The Sopranos and The Wire elevating the form, and network television hadn’t yet caught up. A few years later, with much of the same cast and crew, I think this would have been much more successful. Of course, the Rashomon-influenced style would not have been easily replicable, on a week-to-week basis, as this was intended as a backdoor pilot for a potential weekly series, which the final scene implies.

I say most of the same cast and crew could have made this successful, because after watching the film a second time I’m fairly convinced that David Carson was the wrong director. I’ll admit that he fits pretty well into the style of early turn-of-the-century television, but this version of Carrie is very visually nondescript, and a lot of his choices just threw me off whenever they came up. Almost every scene is full of canted Dutch angles and wobbly handheld camerawork, seemingly without rhyme or reason, whether the scene calls for it or not. He also has the habit, which seemed to be more popular once upon a time, of repeating moments of action from multiple angles and in multiple speeds or with different filters. And not just for big stunts, but for the scene of Mrs. Desjardin throwing a bag of feminine products around in the gym, we get to see her emptying the bag three or four times. David Carson also has a predilection for ridiculous excess that comes out in fairly mundane ways. When Carrie White opens her locker to find it full of tampons, the avalanche that comes out goes on and on to almost comical lengths. Or when the bucket of pig’s blood finally falls on prom night, the tiny bucket seems to have been made out of old TARDIS parts, as gallons upon gallons of blood pour out of it.

When I think about this movie, and when I say it could have been successful if they had made it a few years later, I guess I’m mainly thinking about Bryan Fuller. In a few years the writers and show-runners would have much more artistic control over their works, and knowing Fuller’s baroque, Grand Guignol style, I think he would have made a much more personal work than what we see here. I want to see the movie made by Bryan Fuller, creator of Dead Like Me and Hannibal, not the Bryan Fuller who was a Star Trek staff writer.

[That's all for Part 1 of our discussion of Carrie (2002). We will post the second part on Monday, September 11, 2018. Honest... we will. It's already written. We swear...]