February 5-6: Take Shelter

    (USA, 2011. 120mins.) Rated: R (language)

    A Film by Jeff Nichols

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5U4TtYpKIc

"Take Shelter offers little refuge; instead, it holds up a mean mirror to our times. It is a disturbing, jittery, powerful portrait of now. See it." -Tom Long, The Detroit News

Curtis LaForche lives in a small Ohio town with his wife Samantha and six-year-old daughter Hannah, who is deaf. Money is tight, and navigating Hannah's healthcare and special needs education is a constant struggle. Despite that, Curtis and Samantha are very much in love and their family is a happy one. Then Curtis begins having terrifying dreams about an encroaching, apocalyptic storm. He chooses to keep the disturbance to himself, channeling his anxiety into the obsessive building of a storm shelter in their backyard. But the resulting strain on his marriage and tension within the community doesn't compare to Curtis' private fear of what his dreams may truly signify. Faced with the proposition that his disturbing visions signal disaster of one kind or another, Curtis confides in Samantha, testing the power of their bond against the highest possible stakes.
 

REVIEW: by Tom Long, from The Detroit News:

There's a strong, unsettling sense of disease that runs through "Take Shelter," the best drama of the year so far.
It's a mix of paranoia — earned and imagined — and dread that permeates both the social and personal. There's a jumpy fear of fear itself that feels creepily familiar to anyone paying attention in the modern world. The movie is strained and scary. So is life outside the movie.

Michael Shannon turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as Curtis, a blue-collar working man in Ohio, married to the lovely Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and father to a deaf daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). Life is good for Curtis — Hannah is even set to have an operation to restore her hearing — when out of nowhere he begins having visions. Great storm clouds appear in the sky; oil seems to rain down in fat droplets. He dreams that his dog has gone vicious, then imagines his wife on the attack. Part of him thinks that the schizophrenia that ruined the life of his mother (Kathy Baker) has now found root in his own psyche. But another part of him believes what he sees. So he sets out to build a huge underground shelter in his backyard, straining the family finances, endangering his job (and Hannah's operation) and building a reputation as the town kook.

Writer-director Jeff Nichols, who previously worked with Shannon on "Shotgun Stories," has made a film that feels remarkably organic; he establishes a tone and then never lets it go, no matter what. Shannon, Oscar-nominated for "Revolutionary Road," walks the line between madness and common-man concern like no other actor alive. And Chastain is utterly believable as a wife straining to understand the husband who is drifting away. But this is the rare film in which all parts great and small come together to form a whole. And that whole is a reflection on contemporary anxiety that sears through the skin.

http://detnews.com/article/20111028/ENT02/110280320#ixzz1f1TM8Hfp
 

Cast: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, Shea Whigham

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