Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose
Nov. 4th, 2020 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scioscribeAs a deliberate interruption to all the news-reading, browser-refreshing, worrying, hoping, and waiting, rachelmanija and I have been watching some movies. And yesterday, we watched Audrey Rose.
Audrey Rose is not necessarily a good movie to watch to bolster your sense of sanity, but it’s a great movie to watch if you want to spend two hours thinking of something other than the election. Specifically, you’ll be thinking “WTF?” and “THIS POOR KID.” I don’t recommend this movie at all, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating—and diverting—clusterfuck of offensiveness, wasted potential, and bizarre decision-making. I was tricked into believing this would be good because it was directed by Robert Wise and made in the seventies, two factors that are usually pluses for me, but alas.
This is a movie that begins with a great setup of ambiguity and creeping dread. The Templetons are an upper-crust Manhattan family who live in a luxurious apartment with, as it turns out, ill-advisedly specific décor. Lately, a man has been following them—in particular, following them when they’re with their young daughter, Ivy, who is eleven. He calls their home when Ivy misses school, wanting to see that she’s all right. He manages to slip a gift to her. The Templetons have no legal recourse against this kind of stalking, so naturally when the man—Elliott Hoover, played by Anthony Hopkins—calls them up and asks them to have dinner with him, they say yes.
Wait, what? No, Templetons! You do not naturally say yes to this! You stay as far away from this guy as possible! He’s stalking your eleven-year-old daughter and he’s played by Anthony Hopkins, who exudes a hyper-intense sense of vague menace at all times! Use some common sense! You’re rich white people in Manhattan, just insulate yourselves from this a little more! You can afford private security!
But the Templetons—Bill and Janice—meet with Hoover anyway, Because Reasons. Hoover then explains the plot of the movie to them: their daughter is in the reincarnation of his daughter, Audrey Rose Hoover, who horrifically burned to death while trapped in a car when she was six. Hoover was gradually convinced of this by some psychics, who provided him with enough specific details about the Templetons’ apartment that he was able to track them down. (Protect yourself from psychics; redo everything in greige.) At first, there’s something unsettling and desperate and sympathetic about Hoover, who is, after all, a grieving father who has been spun up into believing that he can recover his lost daughter. The movie would be best if it could maintain this ambiguity—maybe Hoover’s right, maybe he isn’t, but either way, the prospect is unsettling to the Templetons, especially to Janice, and it’s disturbing to Ivy. The movie could even survive the turn it takes, where Hoover is basically unequivocally right about everything.
It cannot, however, survive the immensely irritating way it takes that turn, as everything collapses into increasingly off-the-wall choices and smug speechifying about how Hoover visited India and used it as his personal inspiration porn. The movie has zero interest in India as an actual country—it’s just portrayed as a place for tourists to achieve spiritual enlightenment while asking the really important religious questions like, “If this concept is real, and if I ripped it completely out-of-context, how would it affect a bunch of rich white people?” The camera zooms in on Hopkins’s So Enlightened, You Guys expression and then adds in a bunch of second-unit footage of a heavily-orange-filtered India before pulling back to show Hopkins’s intense serenity again, like he’s somehow a vessel for this exoticized essence of India. Oh boy.
Hoover gets ample time to make speeches about all this, too. Once he shows up in her life, Ivy’s once-or-twice-a-year nightmares change to a regular occurrence, but somehow the movie breezes past that to focus on how Hoover can calm her from her night terrors by showing up and saying, nine hundred times, “Audrey Rose! Audrey, Audrey! Audrey Rose! Audrey Rose, it’s Daddy! It’s Dada! Audrey Rose! Audrey Rose! It’s Dada!”
I’d say you could make a hell of a drinking game out of every time Hopkins says “Audrey Rose,” “Daddy,” or “Dada,” but you’d probably end up unconscious way too quickly.
Anyway, Ivy starts developing phantom burns—again, something that never happened before Hoover charmingly showed up in her life and forced her to remember a horrific past-life death—and Janice concludes that this is basically enough evidence for her, so she lets Hoover up into the apartment during one of these fits so he can calm Ivy down. Hoover responds to this extraordinary amount of trust by locking the Templetons out of their own apartment, first shutting himself inside with Ivy and then kidnapping her, taking her to an apartment he’d sublet in their building without them knowing about it, and initially refusing to let them or the police in because “she’s his daughter.” The police, though strangely blasé about this Upper West Side child’s kidnapping, eventually agree that hey, maybe something should be done about this, and Hoover is arrested, whereupon—
The movie turns into the world’s weirdest, dumbest courtroom drama, because Hoover’s defense against the kidnapping charges hinges on the claim that Ivy Templeton is his daughter, the dead Audrey Rose (Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, Audrey, Audrey, Audrey Rose) Hoover. The law doesn’t care about whether or not reincarnation is a legitimate spiritual belief, it’s not going to let this guy abduct a child—from, again, well-off white people—because he believes her soul is the same as his daughter’s soul. That’s not how legal identity works! Why am I being subjected to this? This poor jury!
The transition to the courtroom drama part of the movie is shot like a jump scare, by the way. It’s just—BAM. Partway through a trial!
Ivy is sent to a Catholic boarding school to try to keep her away from the fact that she’s become the center of a media firestorm, but of course the information leaks in anyway. She responds to it by staring into the mirror and saying, “Audrey Rose? Audrey Rose? Audrey Rose?” over and over again; then she tries to walk into a fire pit. Isn’t a great thing that Hoover showed up to bring all this back? Yet somehow, the movie seems to not want you to care about this, because Janice and Hoover both keep harping on the idea that Hoover can somehow “save” Ivy from… the memories that she was only struggling with once a year or so before he turned up on the scene?
Bill Templeton, the skeptic who at this point should just kidnap his own daughter and flee the country, requests that Ivy be hypnotized as part of the case, thinking that somehow the hypnosis will prove she’s not Audrey (Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, it’s Daddy, it’s Dada, Audrey Rose). Except you can’t prove a negative, and Bill is the one person in the movie who seems smart enough to know this, but eh, never mind. Ivy gets hypnotized and is taken back to her memories until she flashes back to “before she was born,” whereupon she relives burning alive, a very cheerful experience. Hoover, who is allowed to watch this for some inexplicable reason, does his usual shtick—“Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose!”—and breaks through the one-way glass to get to her. Since the real Audrey Rose died trying futilely to beak out of the burning car, this is supposed to be poignant, but I refused to feel anything about it even though I normally cry at everything. Hoover is annoying and careless and I hate that his meddling in this family’s life was validated by the narrative.
Ivy/Audrey Rose dies of the mental/emotional trauma, but that’s okay because it’s really Bill-the-skeptic’s fault because, hey, he’s the one who insisted on the hypnosis. The film’s dreamy epilogue involves Janice writing a teary letter to Hoover thanking him for taking Ivy’s ashes to India (COME THE FUCK ON) and doing what he has to to “ensure the peace of our daughter’s soul.” I look forward to an account of Janice and Hoover teaming up to stalk some other girl. I assume Bill Templeton develops a drinking problem.
An actually good version of all this would have at least recognized that even if Hoover is right, his presence in Ivy’s life is clearly upsetting to her specifically because he’s forcing her to remember the hideous end of her previous life, but this movie never quite gets its act together enough to realize how insidious Hoover is. It doesn’t want him to be a genuinely tragic hero, it just wants him to be an ethereal one, right and saintly and doomed. And poor Ivy, as Ivy, gets lost in the process—she dies being called Audrey Rose, and it’s as Audrey Rose that she gets memorialized in the title. Never mind that she lived five more years as Ivy than she ever did as Audrey and that she had parents who loved her in her own right. It’s all about Hoover and his pain and his correctness, with no compassion or attention for anyone else.
Also:
AUDREY. AUDREY ROSE. AUDREY ROSE. AUDREY ROSE, IT’S DADDY. AUDREY ROSE! IT’S DADA. AUDREY, AUDREY, AUDREY ROSE, IT’S DADA.
rachelmanija and I have been watching some movies. And yesterday, we watched Audrey Rose.Audrey Rose is not necessarily a good movie to watch to bolster your sense of sanity, but it’s a great movie to watch if you want to spend two hours thinking of something other than the election. Specifically, you’ll be thinking “WTF?” and “THIS POOR KID.” I don’t recommend this movie at all, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating—and diverting—clusterfuck of offensiveness, wasted potential, and bizarre decision-making. I was tricked into believing this would be good because it was directed by Robert Wise and made in the seventies, two factors that are usually pluses for me, but alas.
This is a movie that begins with a great setup of ambiguity and creeping dread. The Templetons are an upper-crust Manhattan family who live in a luxurious apartment with, as it turns out, ill-advisedly specific décor. Lately, a man has been following them—in particular, following them when they’re with their young daughter, Ivy, who is eleven. He calls their home when Ivy misses school, wanting to see that she’s all right. He manages to slip a gift to her. The Templetons have no legal recourse against this kind of stalking, so naturally when the man—Elliott Hoover, played by Anthony Hopkins—calls them up and asks them to have dinner with him, they say yes.
Wait, what? No, Templetons! You do not naturally say yes to this! You stay as far away from this guy as possible! He’s stalking your eleven-year-old daughter and he’s played by Anthony Hopkins, who exudes a hyper-intense sense of vague menace at all times! Use some common sense! You’re rich white people in Manhattan, just insulate yourselves from this a little more! You can afford private security!
But the Templetons—Bill and Janice—meet with Hoover anyway, Because Reasons. Hoover then explains the plot of the movie to them: their daughter is in the reincarnation of his daughter, Audrey Rose Hoover, who horrifically burned to death while trapped in a car when she was six. Hoover was gradually convinced of this by some psychics, who provided him with enough specific details about the Templetons’ apartment that he was able to track them down. (Protect yourself from psychics; redo everything in greige.) At first, there’s something unsettling and desperate and sympathetic about Hoover, who is, after all, a grieving father who has been spun up into believing that he can recover his lost daughter. The movie would be best if it could maintain this ambiguity—maybe Hoover’s right, maybe he isn’t, but either way, the prospect is unsettling to the Templetons, especially to Janice, and it’s disturbing to Ivy. The movie could even survive the turn it takes, where Hoover is basically unequivocally right about everything.
It cannot, however, survive the immensely irritating way it takes that turn, as everything collapses into increasingly off-the-wall choices and smug speechifying about how Hoover visited India and used it as his personal inspiration porn. The movie has zero interest in India as an actual country—it’s just portrayed as a place for tourists to achieve spiritual enlightenment while asking the really important religious questions like, “If this concept is real, and if I ripped it completely out-of-context, how would it affect a bunch of rich white people?” The camera zooms in on Hopkins’s So Enlightened, You Guys expression and then adds in a bunch of second-unit footage of a heavily-orange-filtered India before pulling back to show Hopkins’s intense serenity again, like he’s somehow a vessel for this exoticized essence of India. Oh boy.
Hoover gets ample time to make speeches about all this, too. Once he shows up in her life, Ivy’s once-or-twice-a-year nightmares change to a regular occurrence, but somehow the movie breezes past that to focus on how Hoover can calm her from her night terrors by showing up and saying, nine hundred times, “Audrey Rose! Audrey, Audrey! Audrey Rose! Audrey Rose, it’s Daddy! It’s Dada! Audrey Rose! Audrey Rose! It’s Dada!”
I’d say you could make a hell of a drinking game out of every time Hopkins says “Audrey Rose,” “Daddy,” or “Dada,” but you’d probably end up unconscious way too quickly.
Anyway, Ivy starts developing phantom burns—again, something that never happened before Hoover charmingly showed up in her life and forced her to remember a horrific past-life death—and Janice concludes that this is basically enough evidence for her, so she lets Hoover up into the apartment during one of these fits so he can calm Ivy down. Hoover responds to this extraordinary amount of trust by locking the Templetons out of their own apartment, first shutting himself inside with Ivy and then kidnapping her, taking her to an apartment he’d sublet in their building without them knowing about it, and initially refusing to let them or the police in because “she’s his daughter.” The police, though strangely blasé about this Upper West Side child’s kidnapping, eventually agree that hey, maybe something should be done about this, and Hoover is arrested, whereupon—
The movie turns into the world’s weirdest, dumbest courtroom drama, because Hoover’s defense against the kidnapping charges hinges on the claim that Ivy Templeton is his daughter, the dead Audrey Rose (Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, Audrey, Audrey, Audrey Rose) Hoover. The law doesn’t care about whether or not reincarnation is a legitimate spiritual belief, it’s not going to let this guy abduct a child—from, again, well-off white people—because he believes her soul is the same as his daughter’s soul. That’s not how legal identity works! Why am I being subjected to this? This poor jury!
The transition to the courtroom drama part of the movie is shot like a jump scare, by the way. It’s just—BAM. Partway through a trial!
Ivy is sent to a Catholic boarding school to try to keep her away from the fact that she’s become the center of a media firestorm, but of course the information leaks in anyway. She responds to it by staring into the mirror and saying, “Audrey Rose? Audrey Rose? Audrey Rose?” over and over again; then she tries to walk into a fire pit. Isn’t a great thing that Hoover showed up to bring all this back? Yet somehow, the movie seems to not want you to care about this, because Janice and Hoover both keep harping on the idea that Hoover can somehow “save” Ivy from… the memories that she was only struggling with once a year or so before he turned up on the scene?
Bill Templeton, the skeptic who at this point should just kidnap his own daughter and flee the country, requests that Ivy be hypnotized as part of the case, thinking that somehow the hypnosis will prove she’s not Audrey (Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, it’s Daddy, it’s Dada, Audrey Rose). Except you can’t prove a negative, and Bill is the one person in the movie who seems smart enough to know this, but eh, never mind. Ivy gets hypnotized and is taken back to her memories until she flashes back to “before she was born,” whereupon she relives burning alive, a very cheerful experience. Hoover, who is allowed to watch this for some inexplicable reason, does his usual shtick—“Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose, Audrey Rose!”—and breaks through the one-way glass to get to her. Since the real Audrey Rose died trying futilely to beak out of the burning car, this is supposed to be poignant, but I refused to feel anything about it even though I normally cry at everything. Hoover is annoying and careless and I hate that his meddling in this family’s life was validated by the narrative.
Ivy/Audrey Rose dies of the mental/emotional trauma, but that’s okay because it’s really Bill-the-skeptic’s fault because, hey, he’s the one who insisted on the hypnosis. The film’s dreamy epilogue involves Janice writing a teary letter to Hoover thanking him for taking Ivy’s ashes to India (COME THE FUCK ON) and doing what he has to to “ensure the peace of our daughter’s soul.” I look forward to an account of Janice and Hoover teaming up to stalk some other girl. I assume Bill Templeton develops a drinking problem.
An actually good version of all this would have at least recognized that even if Hoover is right, his presence in Ivy’s life is clearly upsetting to her specifically because he’s forcing her to remember the hideous end of her previous life, but this movie never quite gets its act together enough to realize how insidious Hoover is. It doesn’t want him to be a genuinely tragic hero, it just wants him to be an ethereal one, right and saintly and doomed. And poor Ivy, as Ivy, gets lost in the process—she dies being called Audrey Rose, and it’s as Audrey Rose that she gets memorialized in the title. Never mind that she lived five more years as Ivy than she ever did as Audrey and that she had parents who loved her in her own right. It’s all about Hoover and his pain and his correctness, with no compassion or attention for anyone else.
Also:
AUDREY. AUDREY ROSE. AUDREY ROSE. AUDREY ROSE, IT’S DADDY. AUDREY ROSE! IT’S DADA. AUDREY, AUDREY, AUDREY ROSE, IT’S DADA.