Note: This review was partially written in July, when I screened The Wicker Man for the press junket, and partially on Friday, Sept. 1, after paying to view the movie again to see if anything had changed. There will be spoilers in this review.
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The Wicker Man is arguably one of the most controversial genre remakes of recent years. In my opinion, the 1973 original suffers from an exceedingly slow first half, cluttered with flowery folk songs and peppered with random nudity set to musical numbers that are straight out of an x-rated fetish-fantasy as imagined by Walt Disney. However, it does have excellent, if somewhat stiff, performances by Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. And of course the shocking, bleak ending will always be indelible.
Since I do not hold the original in a place of reverence, the fact that Neil LaBute is a director known for static, dialogue-driven films based on plays and not at all for horror and suspense, didn't faze me a bit. In fact, I thought he might bring a wholly different and innovate view to the table. The fact that he's never directed a music video was an added bonus. I also heard there wouldn't be any silly songs or a proliferation of pulchritude in The Wicker Man remake -- so far, so good.
Then I saw the movie.
The Wicker Mangled... er, The Wicker Man starts off by showing us a strange and horrifying incident involving a little girl that completely reshapes the psyche of Officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage). Sometime later he is still paralyzed by what happened, hooked on pills, plagued by hallucinations, and teetering on the precipice of unemployment. Then a letter comes, addressed to him but not postmarked, from an old girlfriend named Willow (Kate Beahan) who jilted him at the altar years ago. Her letter is a desperate plea for him to find her missing daughter -- in this letter he sees the opportunity to rectify past events and save a little girl's life.
The letter leads him to the remote and primitive island of Summersisle, where a colony of people live in old-fashioned bliss with no motor vehicles, no telephones, no TV, and no visitors from the outside world. So when Edward shows up looking for the little girl called Rowan, he's met with closed arms and even more closed mouths.
When the locals do talk to him, they deny the existence of the child and imply that Willow's whacky. Some things are obviously wrong at a glance -- there's a great imbalance of the sexes, with women quite overtly running the show. Dressed in 19th century clothing, devoid of makeup and wearing their hair in long, flat plaits, the ladies range from foxy (Leelee Sobiesky as Sister Honey) to frumpy (Diane Delano as Sister Beech). They all love hives and honey. As luck would have it, Edward is allergic to the buzzy things, and he likes his tea sweet. In short, the bee spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e for the defective detective. Talk about a buzz kill.
Enter the local school marm, Sister Rose (Molly Parker) whose tongue is almost as sharp as her pointer. When questioned by Edward to whether she ever had a student named Rowan, Sister Rose shows only her thorns. In case you don’t get it, there is a snake wrapped around an egg on the front door of the country school room; phallic symbols abound, and there is William Blake poetry on the blackboard. Following an animal-cruelty scene similar to the one in the original (but not as effective), Edward runs off and looks for another brick wall to question.
As it turns out, these ladies are evil pagans, and they are all busily preparing for May Day, where they will don masks and animal costumes and offer up a sacrifice to the Goddess -- a frantic Edward becomes convinced it is Rowan who will burn for their sins.
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