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The Wicker Man Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for disturbing images and violence, language and thematic issues) Genre: Horror Theater release: September 01, 2006 by Warner Bros. Directed by: Neil LaBute Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes Cast: Nicolas Cage (Edward Malus), Ellen Burstyn (Sister Summersisle), Kate Beahan (Sister Willow), Molly Parker (Sister Rose/Sister Thorn), Frances Conroy (Dr. Moss), Leelee Sobieski (Sister Honey), Diane Delano (Sister Beech) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Devoted fans of 1973's The Wicker Man make claims about the film's cinematic greatness, claims which are probably exaggerated—that's what makes them fans. Critics will no doubt massacre this new version, starring Nicolas Cage, but they are probably overly critical of the film's flaws—that's why they're called critics. When it comes down to it, this remake of this oddly chilling curiosity is neither a Big Deal nor a Big Bust. It's just a movie. And that's a real disappointment.

Director Neil LaBute has penned his own adaptation of the intelligent and troubling Anthony Schaffer screenplay, and it's obviously a labor of love. Offered a role in the remake, lead actor Edward Woodward (not to be confused with Ed Wood) politely declined, but remarked that the new script was surprisingly good. So LaBute settles for renaming the missing girl "Rowan Woodward." Nice touch.

Not only the overall arc of the story remains the same—a conventional cop travels to a secluded island to search for a missing child, and comes to suspect that the secretive, cultish residents know more about the girl's fate than they are admitting—but entire scenes are carried straight over into the new film, the dialogue virtually unchanged. The arrival by seaplane and the policeman's bar-pounding lawman-righteous speech at the pub are taken straight from the original, as is the wonderful confrontation with the school-teacher and her classroom full of eerily complicit students. Only it's William Blake on the blackboard rather than quasi-wiccan wisdom: "Toadstone preserves the newly born from the weird woman, the hagstone preserves people from nightmare" is replaced with a so-apt-as-to-be-prophetic passage from "The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell":

Nicolas Cage as Edward Malus and Kate Beahan as Sister Willow

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow.
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

The problem with the new film is that there's less of both heaven and hell, and while the man's path is strewn with plenty of new (and superfluous) perils, he's no longer particularly just.

Like his identical twin Peter (note the eerie profusion of twins in LaBute's isolated island community—another deft tip of the hat), writer Anthony Schaffer is fascinated with the collision between conventional law-and-order Christianity and wilder, more primal religious and creative forces. In The Wicker Man, Schaffer tackles preoccupations that his brother will later take up in Equus and Amadeus.

In the 1973 version, the investigating officer is a devout-to-the-point-of-priggishness Christian. On Summerisle, he encounters not only pre-Christian (even anti-Christian) religious practices, but also a darkly tinged and blatant sexuality that not only offends but also tempts him. These are the tensions that give the original film its charge: we see the islanders through the Christian copper's eyes, and while we can't help but recoil at the cruelties and crudities we glimpse, we're uneasy with the reactive, judgmental self-righteousness he struts around town. Both the sensuality and the spirituality are absolutely essential to the film's power, not only aesthetically but also spiritually. His (self)righteousness and virginity—he is engaged to be married to a nice Scottish Presbyterian girl—is essential to the story, held in painful tension with the morality and sexual license of the islanders (a carnality memorably incarnated by Britt Eckland in the '73 version).

Ellen Burstyn gets ethereal as Sister Summersisle

In this version, director LaBute, for all his Mormon background, astonishingly guts the story of both these crucial elements—a perverse and ironic prudery, as if too much (or too real) sex or religion just wouldn't be acceptable. His policeman (Cage) travels to the island community in response to a letter from Willow (Kate Beahan), who turns out to have been his fiancée—so of course it's taken for granted that they've slept together. So much for the whole virgin thing. And if it makes dramatic sense to give the investigator a stronger personal link to the case, it makes no sense to tame the story's thematic polarities. Much is made of the mainlander's Christian faith in the original script, and if he comes across as something of a judgmental prig, it also lends real power when he cries out to God in that film's stunning climax. Here, when Cage gets in a similar scrape, he's got Nobody to call on.

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