The title is the movie: Snakes on a Plane. In fact, the title is also the marketing: the name alone generated so much interest in the movie that it received millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity on the net and elsewhere as fans fervently speculated about it. Yet it’s hard to see what they had to say about it, because the title is also the review: it’s about snakes on a plane.
Samuel L Jackson is an FBI agent transporting a young man (Nathan Phillips) to Los Angeles to testify against a crime lord who’s on trial. The crime lord, with some imagination and flair, decides that the best way to get rid of this witness is to arrange for a whole lot of very poisonous snakes to invade the relevant aeroplane while it’s in midair.
And so it comes to pass. The rest is of course predictable, with lots of people getting bitten and so forth, and much fighting back against the snakes. What more is there to be said about the movie? Not much. The snakes are truly scary, presumably aided in their hideousness by the latest in computer-generated imaging, though there perhaps the makers go rather beyond the bounds of realism: the way some of the snakes sort of bare their teeth and hiss threateningly is more canine than serpentine.
But no matter. The point of Snakes on a Plane is to provide the viewer with a major gril — that special mixture of horror and thrill. In that it certainly succeeds. It’s like a sophisticated, very well executed version of those creepy-crawly Fear Factor challenges, plus plot, and with a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek excessiveness that simply makes you laugh.
At entirely the other end of the movie spectrum is Robert Altman’s latest movie, A Prairie Home Companion. It is as relaxed as Snakes on a Plane is frantic; it is practically plotless, more interested in quirks of character and the small oddnesses of life than in making any particular point about anything.
Altman being 81, he had to be shadowed on set by a stand-by director, in this case Paul Thomas Anderson, who with Boogie Nights and Magnolia proved himself to be a great filmmaker in the Altmanesque mould. One wonders what he’d have done with the material had Altman been unable to complete the movie; it feels as though only Altman would have the easy-going tolerance to let the film ramble the way it does.
A Prairie Home Companion is built around a radio show presented over many years by Garrison Keillor — a half-spoof show including old-style fake ads, corny old songs and the like. Here it is reinvented as a radio show being broadcast live from a theatre, with Keillor himself presenting (and having written the script). The whole idea is very much in the style of the original radio show itself: endearingly eccentric and an unapologetic throwback to another era.
As usual, Altman gathers a great cast, with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin playing singing sisters, Kevin Kline as a sort of gumshoe beamed in from another era and Tommy Lee Jones popping up briefly as the villain of the piece — he’s the theatre’s owner, and he’s closing the show down so he can demolish the building.
In that respect, the film is about endings, about death. This is not the death-as-spectacle in which Snakes on a Plane revels, but death as something inward, a process of winding down that nonetheless takes pleasure in the final act. I think the word is “elegiac”, though the film is not sad. The precise antithesis of the gril-driven screech that is Snakes on a Plane, A Prairie Home Companion is a wry shrug of a movie.