Breck Eisner's remake of George Romero's The Crazies isn't the trainwreck I'd feared. It's a perfectly serviceable piece of hackwork, directed with the feel for small-town plains-state life you'd expect from the son of one of Hollywood's most powerful men. In many ways, except all the ones that count, it's a better piece of filmmaking than Romero's original: more gracefully shot, with firmly established (if utterly generic) characters and an unwavering point of view. And that right there is the problem.
Even Romero's admirers (of which I am unquestionably one) would be hard-pressed to call him a virtuosic filmmaker. His movies are rough and sometimes clumsy, the acting uneven and even indifferent. And yet somehow they're more powerful for being less quote-unquote professional, too busy tapping primal concerns to worry about piddling details of character and motivation. I haven't seen enough of Romero's '80s and '90s work to bear out the truth of this supposition, but my sense is that his movies got less interesting when he started working with more seasoned actors.
The Crazies, originally released in 1973, doesn't work in conventional terms, in the sense of providing readily identifiable protagonists with whose plight we can identify as they fight their way between the opposing forces of chemically crazed townies on one side and murderous government troops on the other. But Romero is less interested in the characters than the situation, which is to say that we identify with what's going on rather than who it's happening to.
In Eisner's version, small-town Iowa exists only as a placeholder for the middle of nowhere: a single main street out of a backlot Western, a series of vacant farmhouses and so on. But Romero lingers on the iconography of rural America (in his case, naturally, somewhere outside Pittsburgh), creating a portrait of a country that has been poisoned at its heart. In the movie's opening scene, a pair of farm kids discover their mother with her throat slit and run to their father for explanation, which he is unable to provide as he is busy setting their house on fire. Eisner vaguely replicates the scenario, but he shifts the point of view from confused and uncomprehending children to a worried mother protecting her son, which not only lessens the degree of terror but removes the element of baffled innocence. The children in Romero's version are doomed, in part, by their inability to realize that horrors happen at home.
Although Eisner's remake is partly underwritten by Participant Productions, who normally lend their finances to movies with progressive agendas, its generic account of the military wiping out a town sickened by a wayward biological agent has no teeth, and connects to nothing recognizable. Romero's Crazies, on the other hand, taps a vein of Vietnam-era horrors that resonate to this day. In essence, he transplants the guerilla war from southeast Asia to to western Pennsylvania, rewriting the terms so that Americans play both sides: the occupying power and the embattled population who can turn from humble townfolk to murderous savages without a hint of advance notice. In one memorable encounter, a hazmat-suited grunt searching a dimly lit house finds a kindly grandmother sitting along in her rocker, who smiles sweetly before plunging her knitting needles into his neck. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Romero's movie is terrifying in part because we're never encouraged to cast our lot with a charismatic protagonist. The soldiers are as terrified as the bewildered townspeople; they may have guns, but they have no idea where they are, and precious little what they are required to do. Instinctively or not, Romero denies us the comfort of settling into any single point of view for too long. How can we take sides when we don't know who we are?
