DVD Review: Take Shelter

Take Shelter

Rated R

2 Hours

Starring

Michael Shannon

Jessica Chastain

Tova Stewart

Story

Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself.

Rotten Tomatoes Score

92%

(Michael Shannon gives a powerhouse performance and the purposefully subtle film making creates a perfect blend of drama, terror, and dread.)

My Grade

A+

**This review will contain plot spoilers, escpecially regarding the ending of the film**

If I had seen this film in 2011, and not waiting until now to see it on DVD, I would have said this is one of the very best films of the year...if not the best. Take Shelter is a movie about family, love, acceptance, fear, paranoia and how families can bind together under the harshest of circumstances. It's about a man who slowly begins to have dreams about a massive storm and now he can't figure out if these dreams are a sign of a tragic event about to occur or if he is slowly spiraling into mental illness. His mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia around the same age he is now. On top of this, his daughter is deaf and he and his wife are trying to get an operation for her that could restore some hearing.

The dreams begin to feel to real for him and while he knows he may be mentally unstable and seeks medical help, he still acts on his dreams. In one dream his dog bit him and his arm hurt all day in the real world. So then he locks his dog up outside. When the storms in his dreams grow more fierce, he takes out a home improvement loan to expand his families tornado shelter. The town begins to gossip and everyone suspects he is crazy. His wife does not know what to think. At first she is angry, especially after he loses his job...and health insurance. But then she slowly begins to realize her husband may be very ill and wants to be with him through this and help him. Whether or not the husband is crazy is not really the main point of the film. This is about a family coming together to battle another type of storm. An internal one that is troubling this man which is affecting his families well being. His family may fall apart before any supposed storm physically destroys them.

This is a beautiful movie through and through. The writing here is top notch and it's a story that makes you use your brain and a smidgen bit of your imagination. Writer and Director Jeff Nichols crafts such in depth, three dimensional characters that you can almost relate to their struggle. He chooses to primarily focus on the family and not to branch to far out into how the townspeople react to this man's issues. Although, there is one brilliant scene where the husband/father lashes out at some of the townsfolk who stare at him as if he's instance. It was a chilling scene into the mind of man who may be losing it mentally. But this story is about the family. About them losing connection to each other and regaining that. Nichols has created a masterful human story. This is not a disaster flick or a sci-fi movie. This is a drama about a troubled man and his family trying to cope.

Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, TV's Boardwalk Empire) turns in yet another fantastic performance. Probably one his more subtle ones, as he only has one big "crazy" moment. In Revolutionary Road he's only in the movie for about 6 or 7 minutes, but was so big and powerful that it garnered him an Oscar nod. I'm surprised he hasn't received any award attention for his bizarre performance in HBO's Boardwalk Empire and I'm equally baffled that he got no award attention for his incredible work in Take Shelter. I guess maybe the movie was to small. And how about that Jessica Chastain? She was in what felt like a million movies in 2011 including Take Shelter and her Oscar nominated work in The Help (and also The Debt, Coriolanus, Tree of Life, etc). She is a fine young actress who will clearly have a very successful career ahead of her. She was so perfect as Shannon's wife, they balanced out amazingly. They were believable as a married couple.

The film looked awesome too. For such a small film it had very realistic looking visual effects. The storm sequences in the dreams looked pretty haunting. They would frighten the hell out of me if I saw them. Which ties into the ending. How about that ending huh? A conclusion that has caused some Internet debate on message boards as to "what did it all mean?". Well I'm not Harvard scholar folks, but I believe this ending doesn't have a set in stone meaning. This is one of those films where you have to open up your mid a tad and think for yourself as to what you think happened. It's completely left open for interpretation. This isn't some summer blockbuster where there is no coherent story and everything is spoon fed to you (although a lot of those movies are really fun to watch, don't get me wrong!). I'm not saying you have to be a smarty pants to "get it" but you just have to open yourself up here.

However, I do have my interpretation of the ending that I will gladly share. So the last 7 or 8 minutes shows the family finally having their vacation at a beach house. This happens right after the husband and wife see a therapist for the husbands mental illness and the shrink saying he will need extensive treatment but it will be good for him to get away for a while. So at this point everyone has come to the conclusion there is something wrong upstairs. Cut to the beach with him playing with his daughter, when his little girl is the first to notice something on the horizon. He looks up and then his wife comes out slowly. When they finally reveal what looks like two tornadoes developing out in the ocean and the water is beginning to recede...which would typically hint at a Tsunami.

This scene is focused mainly on the daughter and the wife seeing this impending storm and acknowledging it at the same time. Meanwhile, the husband is trying to back away to safety and he tells his wife "Sam...let's go, we have to go" and she stares off into this storm with muddy water raining from above and can only say "Okay...". I believe that her "okay" meant "Okay...you may not be crazy after all." Here's my thought: all the dream sequences in the film happened from the husbands point of view. If his daughter or wife were in the dream, they did not show much emotion. In fact, they looked almost zombie like. He was the center of the dream. In this end scene, the wife was the core focus as she was seeing what was happening. The husband was in the background the whole time almost out of focus. So to me, this whole end scene was confirmation that he in fact was NOT crazy but was getting glimpses into this storm. And people have said the storm didn't even look that big as the character had warned earlier. To me...two giant tornadoes and a tsunami is pretty big. He never said end of the world type storm did he?

So it's in my humble opinion that the storm in the end was in fact really happening and he was not crazy. But a lot of people believed this was a dream, and that's cool too! That's the beauty about a film like this, the ending can be whatever you want it to be! You aren't wrong anyway you go. When it comes down to it, Take Shelter is a gem of a film and I loved every moment of it, I was so thrilled by how it all turned out! It's a must see movie for snobs like me!