Minnie Driver's Ana is all stillness and poise, but there is something tentative
about the depths of her eyes, the cool, sad look of a person who can see the cloud
of tragedy overtake her. She is balanced on the edge of a blade.
In Charles Oliver's terminally bleak Take -- a crime victim's tale about a mother's
worst nightmare, the violent murder of her young child in the heat and confusion
of a supermarket holdup and her obsession with confronting the murderer -- the smell
of desperation pervades the emotion of the film like a third character. In spite of
the sadness that befalls Ana over the course of this sorrowful film, Driver maintains
Ana as a regal presence in this kingdom of gloom. When Ana objects to her son, Jesse's
(Bobby Coleman) grade school principal informing Ana that her son will be shipped out
to a special school and is told after her protests, "I am sorry, but you no longer
have a choice in the matter," it is almost as if an underling is defying the Virgin
Queen.
Ana's counterpart is the hapless killer Saul (Jeremy Renner), her spiritual twin.
Saul inhabits the same blighted landscape of crumbling, worn-out homes, deadening
strip malls, and fetid rust, but Saul is weak and is buffeted by the forces of evil
and unable to cling to his dignity. His old, used car is infested by fast food wrappers
and cups -- the throwaway debris that is Saul's life. Inevitably, Saul is sucked
into a desperate robbery where he fatally confronts Ana and her beloved Jesse. The
tragedy that results shatters them both.
Oliver holds onto a melancholy, decimated atmosphere employing jagged flashbacks.
The color palette is desaturated, the colors of this world finally reduced to weak
duotones as the lives intersect at Saul's robbery. With a controlled cinematic style,
Oliver constructs the lives of his characters with inserts of objects and facial expressions,
pieces of captured time that tell the stories. As a formal exercise in pent-up and
unleashed emotion, Take is intense and difficult to watch. In particular is the climactic
robbery that the film leads up to, which is harrowing, stark, and surprising in its
unchained violence.
As a writer, though, Oliver lets the movie down. Saul's establishing scenes are pure
movie clich�s (the inciting point has a lowlife come to collect $2,000 from Saul
and is warned "If you can't pay, you can't pay" like a Neville Brand gangster from
a '50s film noir). Most egregious of all are a series of flashbacks with Saul (who is
awaiting his execution) and a well-meaning priest. The characters argue philosophical
points ("How does God chose who gets what plan?") as if the film suddenly becomes
an episode of the old Sunday morning religious show The Christophers. And please, let's not talk
about Minnie Driver's alternate-career music bleating out sporadically in the landscape.
The songs are as incongruous as Judy Garland singing "The Theme to Judgment at Nuremberg."
To make matters worse, the concluding confrontation between Ana and Saul comes across as
too pat and unconvincing, given the pure hell that Oliver has put his two characters
through before this moment.
Distractions these may be, but the film still retains power. Driver holds the film
together with her modulated intensity. When she pleads, after the horrific robbery,
insisting someone do something about her son, her control crumbles and she screams
to anyone who will listen, "But he's my son! He's my little boy" with all the powerless
desperation she can muster.
And Oliver, in a single brilliant shot, manages to capture the wretchedness of these
lives that is emblematic of the film itself. Shot looking out from the seedy storage
rental company where Saul works and looking out at Saul's dumpy car, the phone rings m
onotonously and unanswered in the office while Saul, in his car, keeps turning his
key in the ignition trying to get the battery to turn over. Finally giving up, Saul
leaves the car, slams the door, and smashes the window -- Saul taking out the dead-end fe
elings of his annihilated life on his dead-end car.
Eh, you can keep her.
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