Coraline
Directed by Henry Selick. Written by Henry Selick, based on the book by Neil Gaiman. With Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Keith David, John Hodgman, and Ian McShane. (PG)
Quick—name the director of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Tim Burton, you say? Of course it is; after all, his name is even in the title. Except that he’s not. While Burton is unquestionably the heart and soul of that film—his odd and gentle darkness shows up in every frame—the nuts and bolts of actually making his story into a film fell to someone whose name is decidedly less a household word: Henry Selick. Coraline, whose marketers have the good sense to ram home Selick’s pedigree at every turn, aims to remedy that misconception.
Based on a book by the prolific Neil Gaiman, Coraline is the kind of children’s story that keeps kids reading, then won’t let them sleep. It’s familiar territory for Gaiman: best known for his Sandman series of comic books, he’s at home imagining a world where dreams and reality intermingle, sometimes with terrifying consequences. Selick, whose sensibility is perhaps a bit less gloomy, makes a perfect partner.
Their heroine here is the young girl who gives the film its title. When the story begins, 11-year-old Coraline (Dakota Fanning) has just moved into the Pink Palace, a rundown boarding house in the middle of a dun-colored countryside. Her writer parents are too busy to pay much attention to her—Selick nails the constant, low-level desperation of the freelancer—which leaves Coraline free to explore the ramshackle house and introduce herself to her fellow boarders: the boisterous Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), a Russian gymnast and would-be mouse-circus impresario; and the musical theater has-beens Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, who created the bawdy British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, and bring a similar theatricality to their performances here).
During one of her exploratory expeditions, Coraline stumbles across a small, papered-over door that, once she pries it open, leads to an alternate world where the drab surroundings of her life are recreated in glorious, magical color. In this world, her parents are her playmates, cakes decorate themselves, and cotton candy shoots from cannons at the Mouse Circus. The only off notes are the shiny black buttons stitched in where her parents’ eyes should be. If Coraline wants to stay, she’ll have to stitch in a pair of her own.
Coraline’s struggle to escape her “Other Mother” and save her real family are the stuff of any number of children’s stories. What make this film something more than its cousins are the eye-popping visuals that, like a dream, shift us easily from wonder to fear. (The slightly jerky stop-motion animation adds to the otherworldly feel, calling to mind the work of the Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, who, like Selick, made great use of the inherent blankness of dolls and the existential dread that is its human corollary.) In Coraline, a garden comes to life only to have its flowers attack, a mirror reveals itself to be a prison, and a button-cute mouse becomes a rat that bleeds sawdust and sand.
In those moments, Selick moves beyond Burton, who for all his Gothic tendencies rarely does anything truly creepy. Coraline, by contrast, has the lingering feel of a fever dream, one whose images are likely to reappear in that twilight just before sleep—especially if you happen to be a child the first time you see it.
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Also this week: According to Amnesty International, roughly two million girls suffer female genital mutilation every year—that’s 6,000 young women every day. Sometimes referred to by the more innocuous sounding term “female circumcision,” it is a traditional practice widely considered to be outdated and based on falsehoods, and one that causes long-lasting damage—physical and emotional—to the young women who are forced to endure it. Only in recent years has the practice surged to the forefront of the world stage as groups from the World Health Organization to UNICEF have called for an end to the procedure.
The Secret Pain, showing in a free screening Friday, Feb. 13 at 7 p.m. at Northampton’s Media Education Foundation, is a film about the lasting scars of the tradition. The documentary tells the story of Kate Kendel, who, after growing up in Denmark with her missionary foster parents, was returned to her native Sierra Leone to visit her biological family. Once there, the 16-year-old Kendel was kidnapped and genitally mutilated by the Bundu Society, a collection of women (“digbas”) who perform the circumcisions.
Now a social worker living in Denmark, Kendel is working to abolish what she calls a “brutal practice.”
On the difficulty of achieving that goal, Kendel writes: “Tradition is extremely difficult to break even among people who have been educated abroad; politicians are not willing to pass laws toward abolishment as this could jeopardize their position; chiefs or district officials issue permits to the powerful midwives. Circumcision ceremonies represent a day of joy and pride for the parents, family and the neighbors. However, this event is costly for families and it scars and traumatizes young girls for life.”
And in a country where 90 percent of the female population has undergone the procedure, Kendel notes, the health threats can be grave, including “infertility, or death from HIV, Hepatitis B, tetanus or other infections, due to the use of unsterilized instruments and lack of hygiene.”
Particularly interesting is that Kendel sees the region’s high poverty rate as a main reason the practice continues to flourish. Without it, the digbas would have little means of earning money, and Kendel hopes the film’s success will not only shine a light on their current occupation, but provide an opportunity to explore alternate ways for them to earn a living. It’s that concern, where so many would be able to find only scorn, that makes her film unique.
Screening this week at Amherst College is The Edge of Heaven, a gripping film from Turkish-German director Fatih Akin. A story told in segments, it resembles—in form if not tone—the great short-story work of Raymond Carver, where a consistent tone of melancholy and isolation is the thread that ties together a web of separate stories. Akin is a confident filmmaker, ready to give us what we need, even if it’s not what we thought we wanted; though his characters might drift into each other’s orbits, it’s often only we, the audience, who are privy to the larger story of their interconnected lives.
This is a haunting, and haunted, film: death and longing—for a missing mother, an estranged father, or simply a friend—form its beating heart. Yet by keeping the underlying motives so elemental, Akin is able to make his wide-ranging story, full of coincidences and unlikely twists of fate, seem quiet and natural, and, most important of all, human.
The Edge of Heaven screens Thursday, Feb. 12 at 4 and 7:30 p.m. in Stirn Auditorium at Amherst College as part of the school’s German Film Series. Featuring a wide range of film styles, the ongoing series is a welcome and too-often overlooked reminder of the Valley’s robust culture of film appreciation.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
