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!
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