Review: "IT", Chapters 1 & 2

MUSCHIETTI, Andy (Dir.), “IT”, New Line Cinema/Vertigo Entertainment/Lin Pictures/Katzsmith, 2017.

MUSCHIETTI, Andy (Dir.), “IT – Chapter Two”, New Line Cinema/Double Dream/Vertigo Entertainment/Rideback, 2019.

It took me ages to finally finish Wuthering Heights.

It’s nothing to do with the writing style or the length of this classic “Victorian triple-decker”; it’s simply the fact that it falls into two discrete halves: it feels like two different books. I always hit the mid-point then had the uphill experience of having to do everything all over again, like starting from the beginning. That’s what this thing is like too.

Stephen King’s IT partakes from the same poison chalice: just when everything’s done and dusted - the monster has been vanquished and the kids are victorious – we jump ahead 27 years to see how they turned out as adults and, essentially, we start again from scratch. At this point, my eyes glaze over and I start to think of other things. Of course, there are other issues as well:

The problem with setting up a story where the protagonists have to overcome their worst fears, in order to conquer the thing that feeds off and manipulates those fears, is that you have to show each of those phobias in play and then have a scene where those fears are overcome. For this story, that means that we need to have seven establishment scenes where each kid’s worst nightmare is shown, and then have a scene where they challenge themselves and the menacing agent in order to overcome those fears. That’s 14 scenes where each kid goes one-on-one against the antagonist with the audience watching, before we get any kind of narrative traction. That’s a lot. And then, we have the same thing happen again in the second film. Add to this that we have at least one scene each where the character’s day-to-day routine is shown to us, in both films, that’s 42 scenes devoted simply to character establishment across two movies. Sure, this breakdown isn’t followed didactically – there’s some compression and conflation here and there; we never get to see Richie Tozier’s home life for instance – but it’s still a lot. And it’s more when you insert the same sorts of scenes to cover Henry Bowers, the villainous child whom Pennywise grooms across both movies. I can see why they conveniently have Stanley Uris commit suicide at the start of the second film.

I must confess that I haven’t read the novel – the sheer, cow-stunning bulk of the thing always put me off. Even before attempting it, my instincts told me what I could expect so my only thoughts about it were along the lines of “well done Stephen – over 1,400 pages of writing. That’s a lot of trees.” There was the TV series of 1990 with Tim Curry where, like most people I suspect, I watched the early episodes with Pennywise in the drain then forgot to tune in for the second half. Wuthering Heights all over again.

Essentially, it seemed to me that King had merely made a rod for his own back. If the Losers’ Club had been just four kids, it would have worked much better, narratively and cinematically, saving time and getting on with stuff, rather than having to push everything into a second film (or a 1,400-page doorstop). Whatever the medium, fewer kids would have eased the pain somewhat. The exercise feels a lot like grandstanding…

If – as I have just done – you sit down and watch the two films back-to-back, there are some benefits to be taken away; but there are also downsides. The main negative is that, early on in the second film, we are told that all of the, now grown-up, kids have conveniently forgotten everything that happened in their home town in 1989 because “that’s what people do”. Forget alien horrors that camp out in their home town, devouring children by the truckload? I don’t think so. It seems simply to be a convenient ruse for the filmmakers to go over all the preceding material in order to refresh the audience’s memories in case they – heaven forbid! – may have missed the previous instalment. Having the grown-up iterations of the characters boggle at seeing evil clowns and ominous red balloons, even though they saw all this stuff many times as children, stretches credulity to say the least.

Which brings me to the other problem. All of the adults in these movies fall into two camps – oblivious ciphers, or actively evil beings. There’s no halfway here. The Losers’ Club members get beaten up, chewed on, drenched in gallons of twisted ick, have initials carved into their flesh, have limbs broken and rocks bounced off their heads – do any adults notice? No, because they’re all oblivious ciphers. Only evil entities like Beverley’s dad or Eddie’s mum notice anything, and even then, they interpret what they see for their own ends. Kids stories often make use of the Unaware Adults trope in order to facilitate the action, and it’s obviously in play here, but it absolutely pushes the credibility to the utter limits. And then, when everybody is all grown up, it continues to play this game, and the other adults still fail to comprehend what’s happening with our adult heroes!

In a sense this story follows the M.R. James dictum of creating a normal environment and then letting the evil being cut loose within it for dramatic effect. The town of Derry, in Maine, is King heartland – as bucolic and Bradbury as you can get. It’s sold to us as a perfect place to raise kids, where all the unpleasantness is well hidden behind clapboard exteriors and the community celebrates with picnics and marching bands. We saw it in ‘Salem’s Lot and in practically every other Stephen King novel. Here though, the focus is a bit more intimate, because we get introduced to seven children within the town and are made privy to the minutia of their lives. We get set up to grow close to the Losers’ Club members and to despair when they suffer setbacks and losses. It’s clear what’s being done here – that this is the trick of it – but often the handling is a little on the heavy side and it steps grandly across the line into maudlin sentimentality. The love triangle between Billy, Beverley and Ben (with convenient initialing!) is completely unnecessary and Richie’s homosexuality feels tacked on and pointless. In fact, given that, in the second film, the Losers are sent out to find “tokens” representing their lives in Derry, the reveal of Richie’s inclinations resolves with him gaining a gaming token from an abandoned pinball parlour – a token for a token character.

In fact, the set up for the entire group is a little on the nose. There are actually only four characters in the ‘Club – Billy, Eddie, Richie and – possibly - Ben. They are ‘real’ in the sense that they have more than single note complexities to their personae. Beverley, Mike and Stanley are all stereotypes defined by a single defining trait: femaleness; blackness; and Jewishness. Their struggles are all obvious and are instances of well-trodden ground in terms of expectations: outsider issues; measuring-up issues; culture clashes; lifestyle variations. In fact, Ben, since he’s really only there to give injections of historical information and to complicate the romantic sub-plot between Billy and Beverley, can almost be relegated to the status of cipher as well. It’s as if he’s been written in as a kind of glue to hold the plot together. This kind of paint-by-numbers character creation might have flown back in 1986 when the book was written, but it feels a little tone-deaf nowadays. In fact, the strong similarities between this story and “Stand By Me” are so marked that it feels like one was surely the seed for the other.

The first film is driven by Billy’s need to discover the truth about his missing brother, Georgie (eaten by Pennywise). To this end he subtly convinces the Club to explore the sewer networks as part of their summer adventuring and leaps upon new pieces of information forming clues to the real nature of the evil clown. The group hangs together because of the shared outsider status of all the individuals and the movie rolls along naturally as a result. In the second movie, Mike calls all the ‘Club members back to Derry by reminding them of their promise to re-convene if the strange events begin to happen once more – despite the fact that each one of them has completely forgotten what those incidents were! Billy, Eddie, Richie and Ben are all revealed as successful creators and business-people (because White and Male, obviously), while the others are portrayed somewhat deprecatingly as grown-up failures: Beverley is trapped in endless cycles repeating her parental abuse (which, apparently, she can only ever resolve by bashing her oppressors on the head); Stanley and Eddie are both dominated by their partners and Stanley chooses death before confrontation. Even Mike is condescendingly treated for having stayed in Derry to monitor events, and his sanity for so doing is called into question. Despite deciding to leave after foregathering for a trip down memory lane, they all – randomly – decide to stick around and partake in some specious and vaguely-defined Native American-ish mumbo-jumbo called the “Ritual of Chud”. As you do! Essentially, you are left wondering what’s driving the second film because it’s hazy and poorly spelled out – compared to the first movie, it’s a mess. And James McAvoy’s manic eyebrow twisting is just distracting…

At the end of the day, this is another instance of a typical Stephen King horror novel – blowzy, overblown, over-cooked and overwrought.

So, what’s to like?

Go into these movies with the fact firmly in mind that the production crews and thespians have been saddled with a crappy premise and are doing the best they can with what they’ve been handed. You’ll see some really outstanding performances and be witness to some lovely camerawork, location dressing and sound engineering – visually, these movies are quite stunning and the actors – even Stephen King in a cameo role – are first rate. The other thing you’ll get – and I suspect this is the only gold to be had in this murky concept, the thing that keeps bringing it back to TV and to the movies – is Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

Tim Curry was great as the evil clown back in 1990; Bill Skarsgård in these two films is fantastic. The character design is inspired – if you don’t have coulrophobia before seeing this, you will afterwards. The gleeful childish excitement teamed up with insatiable hunger in his portrayal is pitch perfect and the evil deeds he accomplishes will leave you gasping: tearing Georgie’s arm off before killing him, then using his corpse as a sock puppet to lure Billy into the basement; biting the face off the girl with the birthmark under the bleachers; ripping a child to shreds on the other side of a pane of glass from grown-up Billy in a mirror-maze – it’s full-on. The freedom to innovate and play with the creature design is evident every time he appears on screen, rocketing out of projector screens, leaping onto coffins and, of course, loitering down drains. There is a sense that he’s being reined in against the Losers’ Club children – he definitely ups the ante in the pitched battles with their adult incarnations – but you can choose to ignore that. Between him and the banality of evil that percolates through the everyday citizenry of Derry ME, you’ll be checking over your shoulder as you leave the theatre and wondering what the cinema hands actually do while preparing the popcorn.

It’s just a pity about the story.