Prisoners

The title of Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners obviously refers to the two abducted little girls. More significantly, the other major characters are themselves imprisoned by their own weakness/strength, especially their righteousness. Their faith in their own vision makes them morally weak and dangerous.

In a Georgia city a professional, black family, the Birches, have befriended the less comfortable family of the construction worker Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman). This is Obama’s America, where the old race lines have been altered. The John Birch society has given way to the affluent and accepted Franklin Birch family. But when the Birches, who know better, go along with the white man’s sadistic schemes even the new liberal couple are morally compromised. 

The names are significant. Your Birch is a thin fragile white tree, paradoxically. Jackman’s character combines the Dover of white cliffs with the dark cellar (Keller) where he prepares for some future catastrophe and where he ends up whistling in the dark. Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) seems a low-key contrast to Dover. He bears the name of a Norse god who’s a shape-shifter with associations with snakes and an old woman (anticipating the plot’s resolution).  Clearly this is a thriller with point. Grace Dover (Maria Bello) may seem to have the saving grace of her drugged stupor but she’s as self-absorbed in her retreat as the others are in their deadly righteousness.

The older Jones couple used to be evangelists until their son’s death by cancer cast them from believers into -- not disbelievers, but killers waging war against God. You have to believe in God to wage war against Him; you just believe in your own vision more. By abducting and killing children they intend to drive their victims‘ families away from their faith. The drunken priest Loki interrogates is another fallen believer, an alcoholic sex predator who killed the ex-evangelist to prevent his taking other children. That is, all the religious characters have become vigilantes, killing under the authority of their own judgment but presuming to a higher authority.  

We start with the Dover lads’ perspective as they kill a deer in the winter forest. We meet Detective Loki in a Chinese restaurant, eating alone on Thanksgiving, working through the Chinese horoscope. The tattoos on his neck and knuckles suggest his backstory. An orphan who came out of an institution, he too sought some system of religious belief or cult to give his life order and meaning, like that horoscope. He seems to have matured into a shrewd, disciplined and successful cop. 

Dover seems Loki’s opposite in temperament, a devoted family man who raises his son to kill deer. He prays before killing, to put his evil in God’s service. He hangs crosses and plays Christian radio in his car. But his temper and violence are most unChristian, especially when he unleashes them upon the pathetic man Alex Jones (Paul Dano) with his 10-year-old’s mind. But Loki discovers he is more like Dover than he realized. He erupts at his suspect, enabling him to grab his revolver and kill himself. Both men’s violence imperils the little girls’ survival, not to mention their own soul -- and legal standing. In the last scene, Loki is on the ground and Dover buried in it, an image of a striated unity. Keller Dover is Loki's suppressed Id. We don't hear Loki's first name because he's wholly invested in his social role, Inspector.

Like the religious figures with their sense of mission, Dover is driven by his righteousness. He has absolute confidence in his intuition. That’s how he justifies torturing the helpless Jones . When Loki’s violence erupts he also shows Dover’s dependence upon intuition, which also proves wrong. Thinking he is heading off Dover, Loki races to Dover’s father’s ruined apartment, where he finds the imprisoned Jones. But Dover has discovered Holly Jones’s (Melissa Leo) guilt and has sped there instead. Both men’s righteousness imperils their cause and proves unjust and disastrous. The case is solved despite -- not because of -- the two central male characters‘ different confidence in their respective visions.  

The mazes relate to the righteousness theme because they promise a path, however tortuous, that will lead either in to the center or out to freedom. But the maze on the corpse’s medallion offers no successful path. To get to the center you have to ignore the path -- that is, logic, law, social system, ethical imperatives -- and just leap to the center. That’s the emblem of the righteous. They don’t need to go through or to respect ordinary processes. They have their inner vision and they know they are right. Here that’s the route to disaster -- something like the Tea Party “hearing the people” and shutting down the government, as it happens. (Remember, this is Obama’s America, as viewed by a brilliant Quebec director.) As the maze drawings resemble the snake drawings the cases of snakes evoke the shallow righteousness that  cost man Eden. Out of respect for the maze there are two (obligatory) car chases but the only crash is the van in the forest.

Dover’s motto is “Pray for the best, prepare for the worst.” That seems sensible, but in his practice he places his own intuition -- aka guesswork -- ahead of any moral or legal consideration. That’s more like Satan’s Chaos than Eden. If we don’t see him rescued at the end it’s because his real imprisonment is within his own arrogant will, not in the Jones pit.

After Polytechnique and Incendies, Prisoners confirms that Villeneuve is a brilliant director whose intellectual thrillers anatomize the complexities of contemporary evil.