The Possession Blu-ray Review
What possessed them to make this?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 7, 2013
It's finally happened: my extremely rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew has paid off. Instead of struggling to haltingly
follow along in the chanted liturgy on High Holy Days, or stumbling through various Biblical passages to see what they
really are talking about, I am able to offer translations of the menu options on
The Possession, which
some extremely clever disc author has offered in Hebrew until you select each individual entry, at which point they
magically transform into English (see the last screenshot accompanying this review). Well, okay, confession time: I can
transliterate
the Hebrew, but my wife, who
had a much more thorough education in Hebrew than I ever did, had to provide the actual translations. But here's the
salient point about all of this: I was the child of a so-called "mixed marriage", and wasn't raised Jewish, with only the
slightest inkling of my Jewish heritage until I spent time with my Jewish relatives in New York City when I was a teen.
That experience really fostered an extreme interest in that side of my genetic history, but without "formal" education
really available to me, or frankly the desire to attend regular services, I turned instead to folklore and some of the really
interesting mystical writings that populate Jewish tradition to further my own self-directed education. Since I was also
a budding musician,
one of the first
folktales that caught my eye was one that none other than Leonard Bernstein adapted into a ballet in the mid-
seventies, choreographed by his longtime collaborator Jerome Robbins. The ballet was based on a 1914 play in Yiddish
appropriately called
The Dybbuk by a playwright who became known as S. Ansky (the "S" stands for the
somewhat unwieldy Shloyme-Zanvl). Dybbuks are malevolent spirits which possess people and they have long been a
part of Jewish "ghost stories" and are at least somewhat related to very famous myths like that of the succubus Lilith.
But
back to the Hebrew on the disc menu: while whoever included Hebrew in the main menu options may have been
clever, they weren't quite
clever
enough. While the Hebrew here is more or less straightforward translations of the English words like
"Play Movie" and the like, there are some
issues, shall we say. As many of you who don't even have a
smattering of knowledge about any Semitic languages
will probably know, Hebrew is written and read right to left (as opposed to our language's left to right procedure), but
whoever translated the menu choices into English kept the Hebrew in an incorrect (and actually kind of laughable) left
to right formulation. My wife and I first became aware of this because Hebrew has several letters which take different
forms when they become the final letter of any given word. Those final forms should obviously be found on the
left of their attendant Hebrew word, since the left side is the end of the word. On the menu options we were
initially confused as to why these "finals", as they're called, were on the
right side of the words, which really
should be the beginning. So not to pun horribly given the kind of Satanic element of
The Possession, but as
they
say the devil's in the details. Or, perhaps, maybe the devil made the disc author do it. Either way it's a fitting metaphor
for how wrong headed this often silly film is.
Movies featuring the important sounding imprimatur "Based on a True Story" or the like would seem to have a higher
threshold to meet in
terms of their storytelling, but the fact is, these films are often as fictional as any offering made up from scratch.
Actually not all that long
after I first
became enamored of Bernstein's version of
The Dybbuk, in fact, I went to the Jessica Lange film
Frances,
ostensibly about
long
ago actress Frances Farmer, and, like
The Possession, containing the "Based on a true story" statement.
Frances viscerally
affected me, to the point where my first real impact in film scholarship circles was my decades long quest to sort out fact
from fiction, not just
in
terms of the film but its source elements (you can read a summary of my research
here—not a quick read, but if I do say so myself,
one that's quite
indicative of the unbelievable lengths people will go to to "fictionalize" the truth). Ever since
Frances, I've had a
decidedly less naïve
response to seeing things like "Based on a true story", but
The Possession is
so far fetched and outlandish that
probably some will
not
even be tempted to slightly believe that it is based on anything other than the fanciful imagination of a screenwriter (or
in this instance, a
pair of screenwriters).
I frankly don't know what's funnier, the fact that this film was based on a story about an eBay auction for a haunted
wine case (AKA the
infamous "dibbuk box", to follow the film's spelling), or the fact that someone auctioned this item on eBay. Considering
the regularly
hyperbolic tripe that populates any given eBay auction (my personal favorite:
Rare!! The Sound of Music
Soundtrack LP!!), it's hard
to
even imagine what the auction stated. Something like "ugly old mahogany wine storage unit that comes haunted with
its own malevolent
spirit"? But that's the general set up of
The Possession. Oh, yes, lest I forget, we have actual human interest
in the film,
supposedly generated by a recently divorced couple played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick (evidently trying
to recoup some of
her money that Bernie Madoff made off with), as well as their two emotionally roiled daughters who are not responding
well to Mommy and
Daddy splitting up. When Dad stops at a yard sale and younger daughter Em (Natasha Calis) falls in love with an
ornate carved wooden
box we've already seen not "behaving" normally in the film's opening sequence, we know we're in for trouble with a
capital T.
What ensues is a perfectly rote example of exactly what you'd expect about any film that follows in the formidable wake
of
The Exorcist (and whose director makes
no bones about
having been deeply influenced by the Friedkin film). A sweet little suburban girl gets taken over by demonic spirits and
begins doing
really weird stuff. That's it. Mom and Dad forget they're divorced and attempt to figure out what's going on, at
least until Mom
thinks Dad is abusing little Em, but you just know in your heart of hearts that after a few long, doleful looks, she'll
forgive him and come to
her senses.
What potentially sets
The Possession apart, but which actually is fodder for some rather arch and unexpected
humor, is its Jewish
setting. If
The Exorcist tried to frame everything within the arcane liturgy of the Catholic Church,
The
Possession tries to do
the same thing, rather ineptly it must be stated, with Orthodox Judaism (I'm assuming the Jews on display here are
Lubavitchers, but of
course the film never really makes anything very clear). Anyone who has ever attended a Lubavitcher service will
probably break out
laughing at the depiction of a "minyan" gasping in unison when the box is mentioned and (even worse, heaven forfend)
they find out it's
been opened! It's just patently ridiculous, an insult to both folklore
and religion in one fell swoop.
That said, director Ole Bornedal has a fine, if too precious, visual sense. Bornedal repeatedly uses an aerial
establishing device which he
freely admits in his commentary is supposed to give the viewer the idea that "someone—or something—is watching us",
and while that's
kind of silly, there are some genuine scares scattered throughout the film, usually dependent on good old devices like
jump cuts or tracking
shots where something suddenly juts out from the side of the frame unexpectedly. But like the Hebrew on the disc's
menu, too much of this
film is, to coin a phrase, Bass-ackwards.
