Midnight Special is a little thin and a smidge too calculated – at least in narrative. Jeff Nichols’ latest film operates within a construct based on payoff, on emotionally and logically convincing explanations for what amounts to an ambiguous – vague? – first half.
Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a boy of extraterrestrial identity, has either escaped the clutches of or been kidnapped from a Texas-located cult that calls itself The Ranch. The cult’s leader (Sam Shepherd) is Alton’s adopted father, and his kidnapper – or, again, rescuer – is his birth father, Roy (Michael Shannon). And the U.S. government is unusually interested, too, observing that the boy’s “prophecies” are actually direct intercepts of secret federal government communications. What exactly is going on here – what Alton “is,” why he’s been taken, why he was with a cult in the first place – preoccupies the viewing experience of Midnight Special, perhaps to a fault. The film opens in medias res and slowly parcels out incomplete information from there.
Yet there’s something engrossing here, too; this is an ideal example of an artwork that needs to be viewed in a certain way – in an unconventional way, even – in order to really succeed. It’s fair to see this as more of a bug than a feature. There’s a lot left unsaid, a fair amount improperly explained and a thorough disinterest in structural clarity. The mysticality surrounding Alton and his journey recalls imaginative Spielberg, particularly E.T., but without the key ingredient of accessibility. Conversations on perception and belief recall Nichols’ masterful second feature, Take Shelter, but without building to anything thematically significant. While Shannon and others like Kirsten Dunst and Joel Edgerton give solid performances, their characters – who operate as an aligned unit – are mission-driven; there’s never the opportunity to engage with them on a more complex plane. Perhaps most troubling is the diminished effectiveness of Nichols’ films: after the probing meditation on paranoia and family that was Take Shelter came Mud, a comparably clean if more conventional coming-of-age story. Midnight Special doesn’t reach either in quality.
But it does in ambition. At its best, Midnight Special progresses like a formally enhanced, reverse-engineered version of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. This is a road movie that flirts with inevitability and principally concerns itself with the parent-child bond; for all of the extraterrestrial intrigue and temporal ambiguities – lots of payphones in use here – that rest in the background, Nichols keeps his focus, for the most part, on a father striving to save his son. As the film begins, Roy does not know what his son is, or where he needs to go, or what he needs to do to survive. He is merely by his side, fighting for the best fate that’s out there within a dreary set of circumstances. McCarthy tells a similar story, but backwards: he surrounds the father-son dynamic of The Road with apocalyptic devastation, and the destination of their journey is never known, let alone made explicit. He mines poignancy out of simplicity with his lyrical, characteristically choppy dialogue, and sharpens the impact by telling a small-scale story within an extraordinary scenario. For both Midnight Special and The Road, these are journeys with unclear ending points; their linear models of storytelling are compensated for by moody invocations of love, dread and anticipation.
Midnight Special does not reach The Road’s level of emotional resonance, and indeed the film would benefit if Nichols were even stricter with his conceit, rather than expanding the action to a collection of government agents trying to track Alton down. The sensory experience of Roy and Alton on the road, shackled up in motel rooms or out to explore Alton’s identity in the Louisiana moonlight, is easily the highlight here. The substance of their encounters and their progress can be interpreted by osmosis. David Wingo’s score, intermixing dread, hope and the alien, is both the most riveting and the most provoking element in the film, guiding its mood as well as its energy as it drifts further into the realm of the unknown. Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone capture their rural landscape, from the wide-open fields to the deserted gas stations, with a special degree of eerie that keeps everything appropriately off-balance, much like Take Shelter.
And the final sequence is astonishing, if admittedly unearned. It conjures up a collection of powerful ideas and emotions through a simple swelling of the music and widening of the lens; as the world of Midnight Special opens up to startling new places – and even as the mythology itself is revealed to be less than fascinating – Nichols successfully projects a feeling of genuine, expansive beauty. Suddenly, there’s real poetry to Roy’s struggle, and Shannon’s performance. The questions of parentage and faith might not reach complete answers, but they do satisfyingly coalesce within the established surreal atmosphere. In its combination of disbelief-suspension and potent effect, Midnight Special plays like a fable, finally coming together as its small cast of characters watches on, with the audience, in perplexed wonder. There’s something curiously communal about that experience. Midnight Special might fail to tell a good story in its script; it might confound more than illuminate, and without intention at that. But by the end, we’re where the characters are: confused, exceedingly uninformed, and undoubtedly moved.
Grade: B-