Let me begin by saying that The Purge, starring Ethan Hawke and Lena "House of Lannister" Hedley is not a movie for everyone. My mother, for example, would hate this movie from the outset. So my comments are really for those who might like this movie, if this is the type of movie one is inclined to like. Who is that, exactly? I'm not sure writer and director James DeMonaco knows exactly.
On the one hand, it's part home invasion thriller. So, you know, all of the typical testosterone-filled 18-35-year-old males who go in for those movies might be the intended audience. On the other hand, it's kind of an intelligent dystopian future political commentary, the kind that might be based on a book you had to read your junior year of high school if you had a progressive English teacher who also assigned Animal Farm and Brave New World. Except this isn't based on a book. So the intended audience might be the intellectual type who call movies "films" and think the NSA poses a serious threat to civil rights.
I guess the problem is that the type of film that appeals to both of these groups isn't likely to be the same film and The Purge probably falls a little short with both groups. (See what I did there? I called it a "film.") In fact, I might be just the perfect intended audience member for this movie, because I like both home invasion thrillers and dystopian political commentary, but it kind of doesn't work for me either.
Briefly: the story is set in 2022 and there has been some sort of political upheaval leading to a "nation reborn." Once a year for a twelve-hour period, all law is suspended, and many citizens go on a "hunt" - wreaking havoc and murdering others with impunity. The net result is that crime at other times is exceptionally low and the economy is thriving. Our supposed protagonist, James Sandin (Hawke), has benefitted considerably from the purge by selling very expensive home security systems to wealthy families. The movie begins just an hour before the 7:00 P.M. start of the bloodletting, with Sandin arriving home to his wife (Hedley), a teenage daughter who has a boyfriend the parents don't approve of, and a misfit younger son who is luckily precocious with robots and hiding. Two potential sources of story conflict begin when a. the boyfriend sneaks into the home just prior to the security system being armed and b. the junior Sandin, possessed of scruples of unknown origin, disarms the security system to let in a homeless man who is being hunted by a mob of entitled ivy-league collegians, dressed in school blazers, khakis, and creepy masks. Learning that their prey has found refuge chez Sandlin, they come knocking.
As a premise, I think it's pretty brilliant. Yet it comes apart in execution.
<Spoilers ahead>
I'm guessing it's in the interest of time, but DeMonaco gives short shrift to world building. We're looking at a U.S. just nine years in the future and no real explanation is given about the events that led to the "nation reborn." It strains credulity to watch the Sandins' neighbors proceed to deliver cookies, chant government mantras, and mutilate teenagers in Stepfordesque complicity. DeMonaco seems to believe that the wealthy would happily populate the world he has created with nary a thought to the psychic repercussions of murder. Strangely, the Sandins seem to be the only ones in the neighborhood who are troubled by the practice at all, in spite of the fact that their wealth is built on the purge. I have no doubt that wealth may create the amoral zombies that we see in the movie, I just think it might take more than a decade. Perhaps if the setting were 2042 instead of 2022 . . . I don't know.
What the film does best, in my opinion, is work Edwin Hodge's character, the target of the hunt. Hodge plays the role close the reality that we see on a daily basis in this country. We truly feel his fear as he is hunted, first in the street and later in the house. Even as we watch him attack the family, our sympathies are with him: what else could someone backed into such a desperate corner, literally and figuratively, possibly do?
At those moments, the film's central thesis comes through clearest: poverty is violence. In a world where even our personal security is dependent upon wealth, the poor are victims of the larger culture. Poverty is an assault on one's personhood, an idea given an exclamation point by DeMonaco's refusal to give Hodge's character a name. At the movie's denouement, Mrs. Sandin is left at her dining table saying goodbye to the neighbors who have terrorized her, calling them by their names. She doesn't invite the homeless man to stay, or even inquire as to his name, even though he has saved her life and the lives of her children. He is instead left to return to the streets where the purge is just a particularly nightmarish episode in a life of daily terrors.
(Aside: Bravo to DeMonaco for making the homeless man almost the only black face we see in the movie. Although the film is tackling poverty, the subtext of racial inequality is given a human face through Hodge.)
On this level, the movie should work, addressing poverty, along with the country's obsession with guns, our desensitization to violence, and the sometimes sinister roles of media and government. Yet it doesn't work, not really.
The main fault of the film is that it spends fairly substantial screen time engaging in just the sort of violent voyeurism that DeMonaco seemed to set in his sights. We get sprays of automatic weapon fire into various torsos, axes buried into backs and skulls, and the leader of the hunting party glibly blowing off the head of a cohort. The audience is left reacting precisely as they would in any other home invasion thriller, not only hoping the Sandins make it through the night but cheering wildly when the bad guys get their bloody comeuppance. In the theater where I watched, the audience of mostly white twenty-somethings only really seemed to come alive when someone was being butchered. This was made easier by the fact that the hunters themselves were dehumanized, not only through their inexplicably unconscionable acts, but also because most of them remained masked throughout the movie. In short, DeMonaco seems to be offering a critique of the way the poor are dehumanized and then provides an alternative: dehumanize the rich instead.
Now, I'm rarely a critic of movie violence. While I am given occasional pause considering its effects on the very young, I believe that Bowdlerized stories lead us to imagine that violence is not real. The problem with The Purge is that its use of violence is to the detriment of the central point of the film. Just as the audience is beginning to consider the brutal reality of poverty, they are given an out through escapist fantasy.
I really wanted to like this movie, but it was ultimately unsatisfying. Maybe if there is a remake in a few years, they'll get it right. In the meantime, I hope we see more art that wrestles with this uncomfortable issue in American life.
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