Take Shelter

  Picture this: a film opens with a shot of a man in his thirties standing in the gravel driveway of his perfectly average house looking up towards an ominous sky.  Thunder rolls and rain begins to fall.  The man opens his hand and notices that the afternoon storm is dumping very abnormal caramel-colored rain.  Then we see what he sees: a dark, rolling storm cell off in the distance.  The camera sits on the ground behind the man and captures a view of the back of his wet clothes and drenched hair with a terrifying cloud formation beyond.  Then it cuts quickly to him in the shower and we realize that the moments prior to this weren't spent outside in the rain at all - they were spent asleep, in his bed, wrapped in a dream.  The dreams increase in frequency and intensity as the man begins to slip into what he thinks may be the early stages of schizophrenia, a disease that runs in his family.  As his mind becomes less and less reliable, he feels the need to build a better storm shelter in the event that his dreams become a reality.  He loses his job, his friends, his place in the community.  But his shelter is perfect.    
  It took me a while to write about Take Shelter not because I didn't like it, but rather because I liked it so much I wanted to see it twice.  I've heard a lot of good things about this movie and I am pleased to say that it lived up to the hype.  Michael Shannon delivers a powerhouse performance as Curtis, a 35 year old blue-collar everyman who lives and works in rural Ohio.  He has a patient wife, a beautiful daughter, and a loyal dog named Red.  His best friend and shift partner, Dewart, explains to Curtis that he has an enviable life - a life that every man would be lucky to have.  This, as far as we can tell, is true.  Everything about his life seems perfectly content to me.  It isn't a life of spectacular highs and devastating lows; it isn't a life of tremendous wealth and fabulous possessions; it isn't a life worth writing a story about but it also isn't a life worth complaining about either.  His is a life that I imagine to be perfect for a man his age. 
   What I loved most about this story (and also what scared me the most about this story) was how everything in Curtis' perfect life comes crashing down so unbelievably fast.  The timeline of the movie is very brief, so we get to see how it all unravels from beginning to end.  Life has the potential to change so much so quickly. 
  His wife, played beautifully by the very busy Jessica Chastain, is a lot like a hundred other women I have known in my life.  She is a loving wife who has breakfast on the table in the morning.  She attends conferences for her daughter at school.  She gets upset when something bothers her and she laughs when something is funny.  The way she talks is very believable; very normal.  There isn't a line of dialogue that seems out of place.  Not one false moment.  She handles her husband's rapid breakdown in an extremely plausible way.  She is deeply in love with her husband and he is in love with her.  This is a love story that I could latch onto. 
  Originally, I had much more written in this post.  I began to outline the plot points further, but then I realized that the movie is like a fable and I only wanted to write about two things: first is the potential for even a perfectly satisfactory life to crumble so suddenly; second is the ending.  As the movie reached its climax, I felt that there were two points that would have made a fantastic ending, but it didn't stop there.  Much to my delight, the film's coda blew me away.  I walked away from this movie with a sense of great satisfaction about what I just witnessed.  What a brilliant ending.  Of course, I won't spoil it, but I will say that you are sure to engage in conversation as the credits roll.