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Donald Sutherland is lost in the soulless world of Invasion of the Body Snatchers |
Director: Philip Kaufman
Cast: Donald Sutherland (Matthew Bennell), Brooke Adams
(Elizabeth Driscoll), Leonard Nimoy (Dr David Kibner), Jeff Goldblum (Jack
Bellicec), Veronica Cartwright (Nancy Bellicec), Art Hindle (Dr Geoffrey
Howell), Don Siegel (Taxicab Driver), Kevin McCarthy (Running Man)
Sometimes, as we look around our office-based world, it’s hard
not feel that most of it is taking place on a weary treadmill. That we are
going through the motions with no engagement or feeling, that we are all cogs
in the same machine. Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, like all great science fiction films, taps into this sense of
individuality being lost in our modern age, and mixes it with a brilliant dose
of Cold-War paranoia. Like much brilliant science-fiction, it offers a window
on our world that makes us pause and reflect on our own lives.
Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) is a health inspector
(has there been a less sexy job for a hero?) in San Francisco. One day his
colleague Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) confesses to him that her
boyfriend, dentist Geoffrey (Art Hindle), has changed so much that he feels
like a completely different person. Turns out she’s not alone in the city – many
people are reporting their loved ones have become distant and changed. While
Matthew’s friend, celebrity psychiatrist Dr David Kibney (Leonard Nimoy),
laughs off their concerns, Jack (Jeff Goldblum) and Nancy (Veronica Cartwright)
Bellicec are keen to listen – especially when they find a copy of Jack growing
in their home. Can the people of San Francisco really be being replaced by
copies in an alien invasion?
Invasion of the Body
Snatchers is not just a great remake, it’s a great piece of film-making in its
own right. It takes the ideas of the original and ramps them up into a
Nixon-era paranoia fest, to create a creepy and unsettling film. It’s a film
that perfectly understands the one thing all people value, perhaps more than
any other, is their individuality and ability to feel and experience emotions.
These are the two things the Pods take from you – in all other respects, the
people are unchanged, they’re just unfeeling drones.
What Philip Kaufman does really well is fill the film from
the start with unsettling moments, and hints that things are wrong. The film
opens with eerie visuals as the Pods arrive from space and slowly infect the
vegetation of the planet. Unusual camera angles and lingering shots pick out
people in the frame, behaving suspiciously robotically. Robert Duvall has a
wordless (uncredited) cameo as a priest on a creaking swing in a playground – the
sound and visuals both insanely unnerving, especially considering Duvall’s
wordless intense stare.
Pod people go about their work of taking over the earth with
a relentless, eerie silence. Do they cling to silence so much, so that their
piercing screams when they detect a rogue human can be heard? Late in the film,
we see several instances of Pod people, freeze, point rigidly at an unconverted
human, and then let out an inhuman shriek (it’s unsettling beyond belief). When
pursuing humans, the run with a wild pack abandon. Throughout the film, the
camera hovers on moments or scenes, asking us to wonder what’s going on. A
floor cleaner mindlessly moves his cleaner across the floor and the camera
lingers on him for what feels like ages – is he a pod person? Or is he just an
ordinary joe going about his work? Kaufman sprinkles moments like this
throughout the film.
He and screenwriter WD Richter also tap into a sadness of
the late 1970s – the world of the hippie, where it felt the world might change,
is passing. Matthew, David and Jack all feel like old college buddies – you can
imagine the three of them hanging out at Woodstock. Jack and Nancy have clung
to their hippie lifestyle, but are reduced to running a mud-bath and trying to
peddle Jack’s poetry to the bored and uninterested. David has repackaged
himself into a soulless, impossibly vain and self-important TV psychiatrist,
dishing out cod-advice and lapping up praise at swanky book launches. Matthew
is a slightly grubby civil servant. Kaufman and Richter do a great job of
suggesting the younger, more idealistic roots of these characters with minimal
dialogue and action. It adds a rich theme to the film – are the Pod people and
their mechanical, soulless routine just where the human race is going anyway?
Is it any coincidence that the invasion takes places in hip San Francisco?
Kaufman shoots the film with an eerie off-kilterness, helped
a lot by Michael Chapman’s excellent cinematography. Ben Burtt’s soundscape is
also brilliant – from the creak of the swing at the start and the shriek of the
Pod people, to the deafening silence late in the film of the almost completely
converted San Francisco, as the Pod People go through the motions of their old
lives, devoid of emotion. The design of the pods, and the growing replacement
humans, is horribly eerie. This creepiness helps hammer home the sense of
paranoia as more and more people are replaced by Pod people – leaving us, like
the characters, constantly questioning who is “real” and who isn’t? Who can we
trust?
Donald Sutherland is the perfect lead for this – he has both
a slightly ground-down world-weariness but also a strong sense of maverick
individuality. He’s an interesting, challenging actor and he’s very easy to
empathise with. A lot of the film’s emotional force comes from the deep
friendship (which could perhaps be more) between him and Brooke Adams (also
very good). Leonard Nimoy offers a subtle inversion of his Spock persona,
taking elements of Spock’s logical coldness and inverting them for both maximum
smarm and creep. Goldblum and Cartwright are just about perfectly cast, with
Cartwright especially good (and reaffirming her scream-queen skills) as a woman
with a surprisingly sharp survival instinct.
Kaufman’s Invasion of
the Body Snatchers is easy to overlook in the list of great American 1970s
thrillers due to being both (a) a remake and (b) a science-fiction film. But
this is an unsettling investigation of an America on the verge of changing from
one type of generation to another. It’s unsettling, intriguing and gripping –
wonderfully made and very well acted. It’s a film that understands paranoia,
isolation and our love of our own individuality more than many others I can
think of. It’s one of the great American 1970s films.
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