RATING Out of 100

68

COLD ANALYSIS

ATMOSPHERE

GORE

HUMOR

SCARES

TENSION

Part Three:

And those battles are carried out by a masterful group of actors. As a result of the second rung of the cast being whittled down in part two, Judith Ivey's Cathy Kramer, who was all but ignored in the middle section, is given more attention here. She's presented as a woman who holds gentle faith in God, though it may not result in direct benefit or reward, and the very existence of her character is a knock to the popular but incorrect notion that Stephen King's filmed works overly utilize religious fanaticism as a plot device. Ivey, though, is just one among a cast that is still top notch. Of particular note are Julian Sands, who continues to be wonderfully low-key, even through some rather sardonic comments, and Matt Ross, who gives an amazing performance in a role that could have easily--so, so easily--descended into parody.

And what of the hopes and expectations I put forth in my review of the first night's show? Well, I have to say that things didn't turn out how I had anticipated. I thought Rose Red's plot would either be predictable or sublimely subversive, but somewhere along the line, it took a turn I hadn't expected, and I wound up being wrong. Hey, I can admit it. Hints that appeared in part one were dealt with only subtly, and I think that is to King's credit; comments about "sisters" in past and present were fulfilled, but in a tangential way that couldn't have been easily predicted. The finale threw some plot surprises at me that I found myself not caring about (in my opinion, we didn't have enough connection with Ellen Rimbauer to care that much about her). There were also some twists which I'd hoped the plot would take, but it didn't. Just consider for a moment that Joyce Reardon's ideas of who was powering Rose Red were wrong altogether? The idea is touched upon, but not in a way that might have been really effective. Or perhaps that would have been predictable too. It's hard to tell, isn't it?

Since I ended my reviews of the previous nights with a summary, I'll follow suit here. I think I'd have to watch the miniseries all at once in order to get a feel for how the three episodes meld together, which is why the grade at the top is merely an average of my grades for the three episodes. However, I think three-and-a-half stars is just about right. This is an enjoyable work, well worth watching, and possessing something to offer. The basic plot is pretty standard, a melding of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting, Richard Matheson's Hell House with elements of The Shining. Yet director Craig R. Baxley and everyone involved with creating the sets make Rose Red its own entity; its atmosphere, a kind of dusty, airy claustrophobia in a house that can be simultaneously comforting and dangerous, is unique. All that said, Rose Red's greatest strength lies in its characters, in the way they're written and acted. The way King increased the tension in the story and yet kept each character true to their personalities is nothing short of incredible, and the acting in each role was pitch-perfect. To make a long story short (far too late, after three reviews totalling nineteen hundred words), it wasn't perfect, but I enjoyed a great many things about Rose Red. I look forward to visiting the house again.

Part Two:

The second portion of Rose Red has none of the derivativeness of its predecessor. Now that our characters are inside the haunted house, King is freed from setting up the story and can concentrate on imbuing the house with strangeness and supernature. And he does; King and director Craig R. Baxley (with whom I'm becoming more impressed as this series moves along) have created a haunting that is at times oddly lyrical. At other times, however, the author's excesses take over. In the dedication for Firestarter, King praised Shirley Jackson as an author "who never needed to raise her voice." He's also freely admitted that despite his best efforts to the contrary, he's found his own writing style to be more akin to shouting.

The second part of Rose Red speaks a little loudly at times. The scariest haunted house movies are able to accomplish two things: not only do they make us empathize with the characters, but they trick our subconscious into believing that we are in the characters' place. Rose Red's middle part is capable with the former, but not always with the latter. In one sequence, a character experiences great fear when he thinks a statue is coming to life. I understood how that would affect him, but me, well, I was sitting in my comfy home at the end of an unseasonably warm January day, eating pizza, and cozying up with my wife. I knew the statue wasn't going to be chasing anyone, even if its eyes opened and its arm moved. It was just going to stay there and do nothing, which would be terrifying to someone seeing it in real life, but isn't scary to someone watching it on TV. On the other hand, scenes with Matt Ross's Emery Waterman again work well. Despite the leathery-looking skeleton with the obviously fake hand (nice touch with the nail polish, though), Ross's reactions and Baxley's directing had me frightened. They were able to play on my uncertainties and fear as to what was going to be waiting for Waterman when he finally opened his eyes after one of his fits of chanting, "There's nothing there. Nothing there. Nothing there."

Though some of them, like Judith Ivey's Cathy Kramer, are ignored for long stretches, a good many of the characters develop nicely in the middle part of Rose Red, partially through Stephen King's incisive writing and partially through the still top-notch acting. Both Julian Sands's Nick Hardaway and Matt Keeslar's Steven Rimbauer develop distinct and interesting relationships with Kimberly J. Brown's Annie Wheaton, Hardaway as a mentor and Rimbauer as a friend. Melanie Lynskey's subtlety gives us glimpses of Rachel's personality beyond her role as sister/mother, and Julia Campbell has a mildly disturbing flashback as Rose Red's late matriarch. Most interestingly, Joyce Reardon's (Nancy Travis) obsession with the phenomena at Rose Red, which has only been indicated before, starts to become subtly but powerfully evident. It's becoming possible that Reardon is a great deal less stable than previously thought, and this could cause great trouble for our characters in part three.

Part two of Rose Red seems to have developed the characters but let the plot wander a little. Thursday's finale may well prove me wrong, but I found myself wishing that the miniseries had either been condensed into four hours, to keep events moving, or expanded into eight, to allow the audience to really submerge itself in the atmosphere. In all, part two seems to exist to do little more than whet our appetite for the finale. The groundwork has been laid and the bottom floors built, but it remains to be seen how magnificent Rose Red will really be.

Part One:

Call it The Haunting of Stephen King's Hell House. In the first of three parts of Rose Red, King brings out plenty of the ideas that were utilized by Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House and by Richard Matheson in his Hell House, dusts them off, and puts them out for display. For starters, the film begins with rocks inexplicably raining down on a house, which is straight out of Jackson (and which King also used in Carrie, if I'm not mistaken). We move into the main plot, which involves parapsychologist preparing a team of psychics to investigate a haunted house in which another investigating team perished twenty years before (Matheson). In the team is a member of the family that owns the house (Jackson again) and a child whose psychic powers may unleash the power inherent in the house (King's own Shining).

In Rose Red's Official Site, King states the following: "if [audience members] believe they know how things are going to turn out, they're going to be very surprised." I certainly hope he's right, because I have some definite ideas on how Rose Red might turn out. The script drops so many clues as to the story's destination that I practically had to shoo them away. I'm hoping that everything isn't as it seems. That maybe our characters are reincarnations of the house's past owners, but not the characters we think. That perhaps we're being misled about who is pulling the strings, and why they're doing so. I have faith that this will be so--that my expectations will be confounded. King is a wily storyteller, and I'm going to follow one of his own character's advice in expecting the unexpected.

That faith doesn't exist in a vacuum; Rose Red has given me reason to keep to it. For one thing, the characters are excellent; each one has been deftly established and holds their own as a separate entity, and that's not always easy to do in a story of this type. The character of Emery Waterman especially stands out--his blasé and almost contemptuous attitude toward sudden supernatural manifestations, no doubt engendered by years of dealing with them, is a refreshing poke at the conventions of the genre. Much to their credit, King and director Craig R. Baxley may invoke haunted house clichés, but they let most of the characters take a lightly mocking attitude toward them. And as for the actors playing those characters, well, I applaud the casting. King's movies aren't always the best-acted (I shudder when I think of Elliott Gould chewing the scenery in 1997's The Shining), but the cast of Rose Red is excellent.

A summary of my opinions on part one: Rose Red is well on its way to becoming one of two things: it's either going to be a movie that will be predictable by using every haunted house tradition (call them clichés if you'd like) in the book, or it's going to be a movie that zigs when we think it's going to zag and subverts those traditions. The characters are solidly written and acted, the atmosphere is good, and there's just the right touch of humor. No matter what, I love the characters, I'm having a great time, and I can't wait until nine o'clock tonight.