Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2018 June 01 • Friday

While sampling take-out from the new Halal Chinese restaurant that just opened up a block away we threw on this movie that we found in the mailbox the same day.

Both were good but the movie, Of Unknown Origin, was something special.

The shortest possible description would be human versus rat, but there seems to be so much more going on. If you enjoy Freudian interpretations of movies you could have a field day with this movie and its numerous subtextual possibilities, from Oedipus and Elektra to representations of the id and the subconscious, imagery both phallic and vaginal, the fact that the story is a about a male human versus a female rat and also a father versus a mother.

This is hardly my area of expertise but I'm certain you could go nuts with that approach if you wanted to. The main character has a replica of his house in the basement of his own house, for instance. Freud could have written a whole book about something like that.

More interesting to me are the movie parts of the movie. The camerawork is exquisite, precise and beautiful, taking a cue from classics like the original Cat People to introduce the threat and horror with shadows and reflections of shadows, letting us know that an unknown menace is lurking before our protagonist is aware of anything wrong.

The sound design plays a crucial role in the development and eventual deployment of this threat, as does Ken Wannberg's brilliantly effective and perfectly modulated score.

The camera frequently uses eye-catching angles and movements to increase suspense and tension and there are a few bravura shots, such as one that begins with star Peter Weller sitting and then, after the camera moves around his house, ends with him in bed in a different room, disorienting the viewer both in time and space as Weller's character himself is.

Weller is crucial to the success of the movie, in particular his fixed gaze and intense yet often placid face. It's hard to imagine what other actor could pull this off as Weller has to carry quite a bit of this movie. Christopher Walken could have done it, too, perhaps, but Weller is absolutely perfect and crucially less eccentric than Walken.

From the point of view of a movie-goer today, watching a movie like this, which relies on writing, acting, camerawork, music and sound to create an intense and immersive experience, and has no CGI at all, is almost like going to a museum. All the elements mentioned above are there to be appreciated and marveled at. They hardly exist in genre movies today except perhaps in moments. It's rare to see a movie so well constructed and thoughtful as this one.

Back in 1983 it didn't seem like a big deal. Predictably the New York Times dismissed it, with its critic writing that it was "rather terrible" and "mysteriously titled".

If he meant that he didn't know why it was called Of Unknown Origin, a reason is in the film itself; though, to be fair, you actually have watch the movie to catch that. It might not have been in the press kit.

One obvious way to look at the story is as an exploration of a "man versus nature" theme, and at one point Peter Weller's character—"Bart", which contains the letters for "rat"—watches the film adaption of The Old Man and the Sea on television.

Bart becomes obsessed with his rodent opponent, though, calling to mind another famous tale about a man and an aquatic enemy. And so when Bart pounds a book on the ceiling in the spot where he hears the rat moving around, the book is Moby Dick.

There's also the theme of gentrification. In 1983 we would have understood that Bart was a yuppie, working in finance while living in NYC's Lower East Side, in a brownstone that he bought cheap because it needed a ton of work. He's done all this work himself, with his own hands, declaring at one point that no machine touched the beautiful wood floors.

And now his home is invaded. But is it his home just because he bought it and claimed it? Was the rat there first? Is this particular kind of change, essentially money moving into poor neighborhoods good, bad or neither? Or is it impossible to generalize about such things? The movie doesn't get into it but it's yet another thing to consider.

(The fact that the movie is filmed in Montreal and not NYC is a tiny bit of a letdown, but they do a great job making it look like New York.)

Speaking of invaders, there's also a subtle reference to another story of a moneyed arriviste snapping up an old house in a strange, new place and finding that a non-human presence wants to drive him out. The reference is to The Uninvited, the movie whose score gave the world "Stella by Starlight", and in one scene Bart is whistling that song while inspecting his house to see if he's succeeded in expelling the monster rat that haunts him.

Bart's job is an important part of the movie. He's been given an extremely important assignment and it's sink or swim time. This happens all the time in movies, this kind of unfortunate timing, because it acts as a stressor for characters and makes their extreme actions more plausible.

Everybody at the office is terrified of the boss. This is shown quite neatly in just a few seconds as an otherwise unseen employee quickly gets his feet off the desk when he sees the CEO approaching.

Shots and angles that show Bart literally close to the edge of the building, and the vertiginous drop below, suggest how precarious his position is. Dog eat dog, a rat race.

The woman on the right is his secretary, who cares for him and wants to help him succeed. Another effective set-up shows her reflection as the angel on his shoulder while the reflection of his nemesis in the company, is the devil on his other shoulder.

The rat race part of his work life is suggested by a stunning shot of Bart walking across the front doors of the building, suggesting a tunnel or part of a maze while the door constantly open and close and his fellow rats zip in and out in their manic fight for better position, more resources, a chance to undercut a co-worker and usurp their position.

Interestingly Bart's approach to his assignment, reorganizing bank branches, goes against the grain of how the company has traditionally done business. His idea is admitrably progressive, at least for a bank.

In that scene he describes what the bank intended to do and what he intends to reverse, to take care of the people in "retired minority areas" instead of the moneyed professionals that the people in this big city bank actually know. Out of sight, out of mind, unless you actually look at the books and realize who the better customers are.

The movie's biggest flaw is that this storyline, what he's doing at work, is dropped at the end. It was interesting enough and developed enough, and the other people from his work real and convincing, that I was engaged by this parallel track and wanted to know what woud happen there.

At the end of the day, though, it is a movie about a guy fighting a giant rat. And it's a pretty great movie about a guy fighting a giant rat!