48th NYFF 2010: Joe Dante’s The Hole

Joe Dante is one of my heroes. I grew up on his films. I even devoted my first blog to Rick Ducommon, one of the stars of one of my favorites of all time: The ‘Burbs. Dante owned the “coming-of-age in suburban America, with something darker lurking beneath the surface” genre. In a weird way, he shares many traits with David Lynch, even though their films could not come from and end up in more different worlds.

I don’t think it would be accurate to call The Hole a “return to form” for Dante, because as sporadic as his career has been since the mid-90s, it’s not like he’s made any really bad movies. I even enjoyed Looney Tunes, despite acknowledging it as an awful idea from inception. It’s more that Dante really has his style, and Hollywood, probably the public too, stopped wanting it. He doesn’t seem interested in getting into other genres. So The Hole isn’t really new territory for Dante, but it’s a return to Dante for us.

Spielberg tried to turn DJ Caruso into the next Joe Dante with Disturbia, which actually did really well. The Hole is like a younger-skewing version of Disturbia that lives in supernatural territory, instead of explaining everything empirically. Thing is, audiences don’t look for the supernatural anymore. They still want fantasy, but they want it to be at least hypothetically attainable. You hear it over and over again, the cinema as escapism. We used to love traveling to far away lands, and ghost stories, but this year, even though Avatar was the most profitable film of all time, stories circled about suicide pacts due to audience members’ depression over not being able to actually live in Pandora, the world of Avatar. For real.

So what this does is give us a landscape where people want to have a realistic idealism they can bring home, rather than one that begins at FADE IN: and ends at FADE OUT:. They want to actually be able to go to sleep aspiring to go on shopping sprees like Carrie Bradshaw, fuck models like Vincent Chase, or command power like Tony Soprano—yes, HBO “has their finger to the pulse” if you will.

2009 Venice Film Festival selected The Hole is full circle in more ways than just the production. It’s such a Dante film. The suburban setting is there, kids going on an adventure that their parents or any grownups can’t understand nor find out about, a beautiful girl next door, magical realism or just straight up fantasy, coming-of-age, finding your grounding at home, and most importantly that darkness lurking beneath the surface—as literally as possible in this installment.

The Hole is the kind of film I want to take my 13-year-old brother to see — at some point when it gets distribution. Fans of Dante and Corman will be thrilled to see Dick Miller make a short cameo as a pizza delivery man, keeping the streak up of him being in every single Joe Dante film.  The always fantastic Bruce Dern has a few scenes as well, basically playing the Christopher Lloyd part at this point, and he owns every frame he’s in.  I still feel his performance in Dante’s ‘Burbs was his best role ever. The second half does lag a whole lot though, and every member of the audience would have preferred not knowing what the hole really was. The big problem though, is this is a throwback that isn’t good enough to bring back the genre, and nobody is really looking for the genre at this point. So it’s a tough sell, and I’m not surprised it’s had a tough time getting distribution. When it does though, if you’re a fan of movies like ‘Burbs or Gremlins, go check this out. There’s nothing else like it out there, and at the very least, it does this kid of nostalgia a whole lot better than the competition out there.

Check out my interview with the man himself, Joe Dante, done the morning after his screening at NYFF, the first 3D ever at the festival or at Walter Reade Theater. Wait until the end where I finally go off the rails and gush uncontrollably to one of my idols.