This film mocks us with its own superficiality at every opportunity--including the title. So what is it exactly that lies beneath? What lurks under our consciousness, ready to pounce upon us if we only let it out?

Apparently, nothing.

In order for there to be something underneath our consciousness, we would have to be capable of thought that occurs on some more superficial level than the subconscious. Unfortunately, however, the fact that films like these are made and that tickets to them are sold clearly demonstrates that we as a species are incapable of thought on any level--superficial or otherwise.

What Lies Beneath is one of those movies, the kind with the terribly awkward scene in which the protagonist (Michelle Pfeiffer) happens to walk by a lab assistant as he explains the properties of a drug that the viewer immediately understands will play a critical role later in the film. Like the old James Bond movies or the Adam West Batman series, this is the kind of putrid melodrama that calls for the villain to make his confession to his victim while the victim is in a position of relative helplessness. But since moviegoers are sick unto death of watching the bad guy spill the beans to the good guy while the good guy is tied to the railroad tracks or the operating table, What Lies Beneath introduces a drug that will enable the evil Dr. Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford)to answer all of the audience's nagging questions while his seemingly doomed wife Claire gazes at him cataleptically.

Listen, I'm an open-minded person. And when I say that I don't have patience for ghost stories, it's not because I consider myself to be too old for them. It's because I consider my civilization to be too old for them. I understand that even intelligent people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were able to enjoy gothic novels back in the early nineteenth-century; and I'm happy for people who can still get a kick out of such tales today. But when directors try to tackle the paranormal, I don't think I'm an unfair representative of twenty-first-century thought when I insist that such things be handled in imaginative or compelling ways.

There is nothing the least bit imaginative or compelling about Zemeckis' handling of ghosts in What Lies Beneath. Somewhere between Zemeckis' decision to imitate the uncertainty of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and his temptation to emulate Shirley Jackson's belligerently unsophisticated The Haunting, Zemeckis must have reached the following inspired conclusion: "Hey, sure, everybody likes ghosts!"

What Lies Beneath features everything that we have come to associate with Hollywood thrillers. We start with some meticulous character sketches (of the Spencers), inject something poignant (their only child's recent departure for college), focus on a complete red herring (their neighbors) for a while, and conclude with a clumsy demystification concerning skeletons long shrouded in a closet, a revelation that leads into a seemingly interminable final chase scene.

Even more annoying than Zemeckis' reliance on the supernatural is Dr. Norman Spencer's motivation for perpetrating the murder that he committed before the film began. He's a university research scientist who apparently became romantically involved with one of his students. For some reason, he becomes convinced that if he is found out, he will lose not only his wife and his job, but set medical science back by a few centuries.

I can understand how being implicated in an affair with a student could hurt his relationship with his wife, but I'm having a little trouble seeing how it would cost him his job or set back medical science. Even if you're famous enough to occupy the DuPont Chair of Medical Research (as Spencer does), I don't think you come under quite as much scrutiny as, say, the president of the United States. And last I checked, Monica Lewinsky neither wrecked Bill Clinton's personal life nor cost him his job. So I guess I'm saying it's just a teency bit difficult for me to swallow the premise that a brilliant doctor's solution to an unwanted romantic entanglement is to murder the entangler.

But that's not quite as hard to swallow as the final chase scene. After the ghost 'rescues' Claire Spencer by frightening the evil doctor into cutting himself on broken glass and knocking himself unconscious, he eventually revives to the point of being just barely able to raise himself to the level of the bathtub in which Claire is supposed to be drowning. As nearly as I can tell, however, he lacks the strength to finish Claire off, and seems to collapse on the floor beside the bathtub. But then I guess he crawls downstairs to collapse on the floor of the living room, where he apparently stumbles onto an important medical discovery:

The more copiously we bleed, the more quickly our strength returns to us.

Not five minutes later, he manages to maneuver, despite his wife's erratic driving, from boat trailer to pick-up bed and through the rear window of the pick-up into the cab, where he is able to overpower his wife. While it's true that she has fully recovered from the magical cataleptic drug at this point, she's obviously no match for her husband, since she hasn't lost any blood.

Why do we watch films like this one? I don't think it's for the acting. Although she has the body type of a lot of terrible actresses, I don't think that Michelle Pfeiffer is terrible. For that matter, I don't even think Harrison Ford is all bad. But there's something funny about actors like these. The best way I know to explain Ford's acting is to say that even when he is convincing, he still isn't what I would call good. In order to see what I mean, pay attention to the scene in which Claire wakes up her husband in the middle of the night to have him look out the window. He wakes up exactly like a man who is fast asleep and concerned for his wife but confused by her panic. It's dead on, but there's nothing about it that makes the action belong to Dr. Norman Vincent. It's just a guy waking up in the middle of the night, rather similar to the way Tom Cruise delivers lines like a character delivering lines and not like an actor who has found his way inside the character he is portraying.

I'm also pretty certain that we don't watch movies like this for the writing, since the story behind What Lies Beneath has doubtless been filmed half a dozen times in the time that it took me to write this review.

So why do we watch films like this? I can only guess it's because we want to encourage Hollywood to make more. Apparently it's less important to us to be entertained than it is to leave our grandchildren a legacy that will demonstrate how monumentally shallow we were. To watch films like this is to scream, "Hey, I'm shallow too. I belong!" into the great void of history. Well, I watched it. I belong. I feel so close to the rest of you right now.






Recommended: No