Not So Special
Midnight Special / directed by Jeff Nichols
Midnight Special starts off tight and fast, much like the primer-grey muscle car in which its protagonists initially rumble through a dark Texas night. Two men, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton), are on the run; a young child in goggles and headphones seems to be their cargo. But though scenes of a TV news broadcast identify this trio as two kidnappers and their victim, it’s clear the men are getting the boy away from danger and to a place of safety. The circumstances grow eerie real fast - we learn they’ve taken the boy, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), away from a religious cult headed by his adoptive father, Calvin (Sam Shepherd); we also learn Calvin has worked the boy’s unearthly input into the basis of his sermonizing. It seems that Alton channels data from government satellites, numbers and coordinates and other such arcane information, which is why the FBI is now raiding the cult’s compound in search of the boy. These opening scenes are jam-packed with pieces of plot in motion, yet for all the tension, it’s mostly assuredly low-key: the FBI’s appearance isn’t accompanied by flash-bang grenades and gunfire, but by a man holding a warrant; the fast-moving muscle car is clearly trying to get away, but there are no actual car chases.
Fifteen minutes in, we’ve been swept into an understated filmic universe in which new questions are raised as quickly as we’re given answers, even as it’s also clearly a genre descendent of movies like E.T., Starman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and perhaps The Fury. Why can’t Alton be exposed to sunlight (which necessitates covering the windows of whatever house or hotel room they’re staying in)? What is this experience that people are said to have had with Alton by looking into his eyes, which early on we see sometimes radiate an unearthly blue glow? There’s apocalyptic talk around Alton’s power; the matter of fact way this idea is presented, in combination with the film’s tight competence, gives it an unsettling plausibility - you sense the film could go there, even if you don’t know how yet.
For all its sci-fi trappings, though, the relationship between Alton’s biological parents and their son is the core of this story. Roy is fiercely protective of his child despite a palpable sense that his own flesh and blood is beyond his ken; there is something deeply moving in a parent who is forced to confront the fact that his kid might not be human, might not even be meant to live on this world, but loves him unreservedly nonetheless. Alton’s mother Sarah (Kristen Dunst) appears about halfway through the movie, and brings still more depth to the sense of parental selflessness in the face of the unknown.
Nichols’ style here, as in his previous films, is unflashy and arguably not very aesthetically interesting or exciting. But he continues to get top-notch performances out of his actors; Shannon, Dunst, Edgerton, and Lieberher all do fine work here. Ultimately, though, Midnight Special isn’t able to bear the weight of its sci-fi premise, or at least to bring it to a satisfying conclusion, and the tension of the first half gives way to a draggy middle and a disappointing conclusion. The explanation of Alton’s true nature is hokier than transcendent, and a fateful directorial decision to make manifest suggestions of another reality parallel to our own founder on its static, overly literal vision, not to mention unfortunately rendered alien others. And a final suggestion that Roy may still have some psychic connection to his son seems at cross purposes with the powerful melancholy of parent-child separation that’s so much a part of the film’s final act.