Zemeckis’ Latest Thriller Suffers Only From

Poor Advertising Strategies

Let’s be honest. Can any movie starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer and directed by Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And the Back to the Future series) be that bad? No, of course not… and don’t let anyone tell you differently. Actually, What Lies Beneath, the summer hit starrting the above superstars, is not a classic, but it is an entertaining movie, mainly because it’s a departure for the two leads and a lark for director Zemeckis (who filmed this movie while on a one-year break from his other, perhaps more “important” project, Cast Away, with Tom Hanks).

What Lies Beneath is basically Zemeckis’ homage to legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. If moviegoers go into the film with that knowledge, they might better enjoy the film they will ultimately see. In fact, the two Hitchcock films you should have in the forefront of your mind are Psycho and Rear Window.

Pfeiffer stars as Claire Spencer, a wife and mother who is struggling as her only daughter leaves home to go to college. Everyone, including all her friends and husband, Norman (Ford), are concerned for her and seem to be worried about her apparently fragile state of mind: they all talk vaguely about the “accident” that took place only a year ago.

To keep her mind off her daughter, Claire becomes obsessed with her new neighbors, a passionate couple who seems to be either arguing vehemently or making up amorously. When the wife suddenly disappears, Claire suspects foul play (think Rear Window), unpacks her binoculars and begins to spy on the husband next door.

Pfeiffer is really the star of this film, as she is asked to carry the bulk of the movie’s weight under the shoulders of her delicate character. Is Claire going crazy? Is she seeing things? Is something truly afoul in the house across the way.

Pfeiffer has to walk that thin line of letting us want to believe her, to want to sympathize wit her, yet also question whether or not she is completely reliable. But also, a parallel begins to emerge with that other famous Hitchcock film mentioned earlier, Psycho.

What is the most memorable scene of that film? It’s the shower scene, of course. Yet it’s not the climax of Psycho. Rather it sits in the middle of the movie, and the shock of that scene (and the fact that the main character up to that point has just met her demise) flips the whole enterprise on its head. Audiences are left spinning, wondering where in the world is the film going now?

That is the effect Zemeckis is presumably after with What Lies Beneath, but thanks to the marketing geniuses at the film’s studio, audiences knew more about where Zemeckis’ film was going than where it starts… and that is truly a shame.

Would Survivor have engrossed the nation as it did if CBS had told us in the first hour which of its contestants would emerge victorious? Would The Crying Game have become suck a hit if the studio had revealed the key plot twist in the middle of director Neil Jordan’s film? Then why is it that Dreamworks, the studio established by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, would seek to undercut What Lies Beneath with an all-too-revealing marketing campaign?

To be fair, Zemeckis’ thriller hasn’t exactly lacked for audiences (it has made approximately $140 million thus far), but I can’t help feeling one’s actual moviegoing experience has been compromised by the advertising strategy of the movie studio. Let me put it this way: the PR guys are certainly smiling all the way to the bank, but something is rotten in what they’ve done, and it stinks worse than the surprise in the basement of the Bates home.

What Lies Beneath, rated PG-13 for language and adult themes, is not really gory, but might more appropriately be labeled “spooky.”