In the past director Robert Zemeckis has brought us excellent films such as Back to the Future and Forrest Gump which featured both innovative filmmaking techniques and heartwarming characters that we could easily identify with. But apparently with his new film What Lies Beneath, Zemeckis was too busy to produce anything more than a by-the-numbers thriller that deceives you into thinking it's actually a decent movie, until you leave the theater and try to remember what you might have liked about it.
The plot of the film focuses on a college professor (Harrison Ford) and his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer). After their daughter goes off to college, Ford begins spending late nights at the office, leaving Pfeiffer alone in an nest which she soon comes to suspect might not be as empty as she thinks. A series of strange incidents, such as doors opening by themselves and picture frames falling off shelves suddenly, lead Pfeiffer to believe that the house is haunted.
In a plot derivative of Rear Window, Pfeiffer at first begins to suspect that her neighbor has killed his wife and that it is her ghost that has come to reside in their house. But this Hitchcock rip-off goes nowhere fast and is quickly abandoned in favor of a story involving a student Ford had an affair with who mysteriously went missing a year ago. This new story element is very slow to develop; it takes almost an hour for us to reach this point even though the trailers for the film reveal it in less than thirty seconds, leaving the audience slightly bored and wondering what the point is.
The rest of the plot remains underdeveloped as elements raised in the first half have no pay-off afterwards. A subplot about the death of Ford's father is brought up briefly but never goes anywhere. Pfeiffer begins seeing a psychiatrist early in the movie, but he appears in all of two scenes before he disappears. The neighbors too exist only to be a red herring, and Pfeiffer's daughter only seems to be in this movie so that she can move away.
Conversely other elements of the plot are much too predictable. If something mentioned in the first half of the movie seems extraneous, such as some random facts provided about a cell phone's range or a chemical used to put mice to sleep, that information will probably be used in some way in the final scenes of the film. The way the film called attention to such things was much too blatant, and it only served to cheapen the ending when those elements did finally resurface.
The dialogue too was quite awkward in several scenes, coming out sounding stilted and fake. Pfeiffer's best friend in the film had some really awful dialogue that was designed to be kooky and fun, but ended up just sounding phony. Also most of the scenes involving arguments between Ford and Pfeiffer were very unrealistic, as if the screenwriters were trying to force the conflict to come through. Thus the acting in most scenes seemed dishonest and lacking real emotion. Ford for the most part was unenthusiastic about his lines, while Pfeiffer was just bad. A quick glance at a scene highlights in the trailers, in which Pfeiffer actually becomes possessed by the ghost, proves my point that the cheesy dialogue made it impossible for either of these A-list actors to work to their fullest potential.
But the script alone was not the only problem this movie had. Zemeckis' directing too was quite uninspired, and his shoddy filmmaking only added to the film's predictability. In scenes when Pfeiffer stands close to the camera on the left with a large portion of the screen empty, it's obvious that something in the background in the right will be important moments later. Sure enough, the camera soon switches focus and we see Pfeiffer's discarded cello or a ghostly reflection in the water of a bathtub. Such moments lose any "shock value" because they can be seen coming a mile away. Bad blocking also adds to the hackneyed directing, as in several shots when we're supposed to be seeing a close-up of Pfeiffer and we see Ford's back instead.
What Lies Beneath is a deceptively bad movie with a few honest scares towards the beginning and at the end, but with little in-between to hold it together. Ford and Pfeiffer's halfhearted attempts at acting cannot save this movie from a script chockfull of cliched plot elements we've seen millions of times before and dialogue that feels forced. Robert Zemeckis has another film coming out this Christmas (Castaway, starring Tom Hanks), and by working on both films at the same time, Zemeckis has stretched himself too thin. If this film is any indication, he might not end up having a very happy holidays.
