Knowing (2009)
Directed by Alex Proyas
Written by Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White
Starring Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Liam Hemsworth, Ben Mendelsohn
Release Date March 20th, 2009
Published March 20th, 2009
I feel I may owe Nicholas Cage a modest apology. In rereading a few past reviews of his films I find that I have spent an inordinate amount of time commenting on his hair. In my defense, Cage's hair has seemed like a separate entity all its own in many of Cage's films. That receding, patchy fro from in Adaptation, the wild out of control hairline from Bangkok Dangerous, and the utterly criminal use of extensions and plugs in various Cage efforts. The man's hair is often as memorable as the movie he's in.
That said, Cage's personal appearance is a matter for his stylist not a review of the quality of the film he is in. Of course, makeup and hair are departments on a film set. Awards are given for great designs in both fields. When you think about it; actresses are constantly judged by their looks in movies whether consciously or otherwise.
Why should Nic Cage be excused? Why should he have a separate standard? Just because he has chosen to look so utterly bizarre on screen I as a critic of film am supposed to pretend I don't notice? How is that at all fair? You know what? Modest apology rescinded. In Knowing, Nicholas Cage's unyieldingly bizarre hairline comes second to the bizarre plotting of director Alex Proyas in a biblio-scientific melodrama about the end of existence.
Knowing stars Nicholas Cage as an MIT professor whose son brings home a piece of paper that had been buried underground for 50 years. The long ago students at his son's primary school buried the time capsules filled with their visions of the future some 50 years ago. When it was opened and his son was given a particular drawing from the capsule, all it had on it was a series of numbers.
Bored and slightly drunk, Cage begins examining the numbers and thinks he sees a pattern. The number 091101 2388 happens to correspond to the date of the World Trade Center attack and the number of people who died that day. Further investigation finds that most of the numbers are also dated and the number dead in every tragedy for the past 50 years.
Worse yet are numbers that correspond to future dates including several in the near future. The idea of determinism vs randomness has been the professor's field for a very long time and his conflict is well founded until he begins trying to alter the future and finds nothing but futility. Rose Byrne plays the daughter of the woman who wrote the numbers 50 years earlier. She now has a daughter who, like her grandmother, is hearing strange voices and numbered warnings. Strangely, Cage's son is also hearing these warnings and eventually unconsciously scribbling numbered warnings.
Director Alex Proyas is a master of this kind of supernatural oddity. His Dark City and The Crow are underrated epics of the macabre and dangerous. Head trips into the souls of people whose souls are questionable at best. Unfortunately, with Knowing he has found his M. Night Shyamalan-The Happening moment.
Ok, Knowing isn't nearly the abomination that The Happening was, but in the context of the two filmmakers, the parallel of the visionary artist finding his absolute nadir, the comparison is apt. Proyas's commitment to the absolute oddity of tone and utter lack of interest in crafting a competent narrative perfectly mirrors Shyamalan's unbelievable commitment to his bizarre meta-environmental parable.
Knowing's milieu is the kind of end of the world prophecy that the religious right oriented Left Behind movies have cultivated for years. Except, replace god with aliens. Yes, ET is somehow woven into this plot along with theology, numerology, Cosmology and even cosmetology as once again Cage's follicles cry out for attention as they hold on for dear life at that place he wishes were his real hairline.
As goofball plots go, Knowing is a doozy of goofball elements from aliens to car chases to the end of the world to moments of family reunion hokum. Director Proyas throws a whole hell of a lot of stuff at the screen. Not much sticks. There is an almost joy in the film's heedlessness of convention and willingness to be so earnestly cheeseball. The appreciation fades however in the final hockey moments.
Knowing is a disaster for director Proyas and yet another bizarre signpost in the career of Nicholas Cage. Add Knowing to Bangkok Dangerous to Next to The Wicker Man and you actually begin to see a pattern of complete disregard for convention that makes Knowing seem perfectly logical for Cage, even as it is a disaster for director, co-stars, producers and subsequent audience.
