Reel Politique: Directors Project: Lucky McKee
Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.
Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. As with Sarris’s book, titles will be in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, The Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Less Than Meets the Eye, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.
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Lucky McKee
Ranking: The Near Side of Paradise
All Cheerleaders Die (2001, also writer); May (2002, also writer, music supervisor); “Sick Girl” (episode of Masters of Horror, 2006); The Woods (2006); Roman (2006, writer-producer-actor only); Red (2007)
In a different generation, Lucky McKee might have been a Douglas Sirk or a George Cukor. His focus and areas of sympathy lie wholly with women, their loneliness, and their suffering, especially those with an inability to fit in. He also has a fascination with lesbians, whom he incorporates into his films on a equal footing with his other characters. The times being what they are, though, McKee dwells in the realm of relatively low budget horror. But though he may have a visual affinity for the genre (and his movies are almost always visually polished despite their budgets), essentially McKee uses the flexibility of the horror film to explore the facets of women and their sociology.
His signature film remains May , an unrelenting profile of female oddity that tests even the viewer’s inherent sympathy. It could easily have been a Takashi Miike tale as it follows a woman (Angela Bettis) deeper into strangeness. McKee wittily includes in the narrative a horror film buff (Jeremy Sisio) who finds much more than he bargained for when he slips into a relationship with May, and who is then confronted with true horror. Though posters on the wall of the horror buff’s house suggest that Dario Argento is a premiere influence on McKee, his films actually link back more closely to ’60s and ’70s “closed house” horror films, from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane to The Mother.
Roman flips the paradigm. Though it is written by and stars McKee in the lead role, it is directed (on digital video) by Angela Bettis, his otherwise cinematic muse, and the film privileges a lonely male with a dull job and a hopeless crush on a neighbor (the always great Kristin Bell). Roman has the feel of an early script resurrected; it doesn’t have enough story for its 92 minutes.
“Sick Girl” blends the arch humor of the whole Masters of Horror series with the agony of modern dating (in this case a lesbian first date). If May was a veterinarian with strange fantasies, then “Sick Girl”’s Ida Teeter (Bettis again) is an oddball etymologist with an odd Jane Hathaway demeanor who at least enjoys a short period of happiness, at least until her new girlfriend (Erin Brown) is taken over by an “aggressive” insect that Ida receives in the mail.
The Woods expands McKee’s palette while remaining consistent with his fixation on lonely troubled women. Like the near-simultaneous The Covenant, The Woods is an “old dark school” tale in which a young woman Heather (Agnes Bruckner) is farmed out to an exclusive yet mysterious school where she is dropped among her mirror images. As a pyro, Heather of course also has red hair, which earns her the sobriquet “firecrotch” from the school’s “mean girl,” Samantha (Rachel Nichols). The Woods takes place in a vaguely 1960s world, with Bruce Campbell as the dad and lush romantic ’60s tunes on the car radio. Though less visually exhaustive than his previous films, The Woods broadens the context out of which his women emerge (Heather’s mother is a vain harridan) and through which they must arise (a closed matriarchal society). As in May, Heather manages to attract a sole friend, Marcie Turner (Lauren Birkell) who is really the May equivalent; Heather is too much the independent rebel and smart mouth. Eventually the school is shown to have huge (if uninteresting) secrets of its own, and its narrative resolves itself down a path that links it to Neil LaBute’s take on The Wicker Man and its secret society of outsider women. Fine as it is, The Woods’s narrative eventually seems to get out of hand, and it’s possible that McKee is more successful with a smaller tableau.
Few directors have imposed on themselves such a constricted vein to mine, yet on the surface McKee’s films don’t feel obsessive or narrow. Perhaps that is because thus far McKee has managed to maintain his integrity as a writer/director. His second tier obsessions — watching, and voyeurism from within the cocoon of imposed societal isolation — make McKee eminently worthy of obsession on the part of film fans themselves, who should be able to relate to his sensitivity to that emotional state. At some point, McKee will make a more mainstream seeming hit, and his name will cease to be an oddity among horror directors.