In It to Win It
By Greg Cwik
Send Help
Dir. Sam Raimi, U.S., 20th Century Studios
Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) works in a cubicle in an office full of people who don't like her, if they notice her at all. She eats tuna sandwiches and doesn’t wear makeup. She shares an apartment with a bird named Sweetie, her bookshelves are full of survival manuals, and around her tiny modest place are photos of her in nature, smile big and lustrous. Her favorite show is Survivor, for which she once unsuccessfully auditioned. Men steal credit for her adroit work, and her new boss, Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), the son of the company’s late CEO, who had recognized her value and promised her a promotion, hates her with the kind of vitriol only the rich and resentful can summon. He has to go to a business meeting in Bangkok and brings Linda along so he can purloin her work and then give her the boot. But the plane crashes, stranding the long-suffering Linda and her boss on a verdant island, wreathed by impenetrable blue ocean smashing, persistently, its white-laced waves into the curvature of sandy shore. They are alone, lost, far from civilization among treacherous plant life and vicious boars, that big endless sky baking them with its mirthless heat. Linda is right at home.
The films of Sam Raimi depict, with delirious gusto, the plights of outcasts and weirdos, people out of their element, in over their heads, reckoning with the perils of a world governed by threats of often comical nature. It began with the astoundingly scrappy The Evil Dead, in which a unibrowed everyman must deal with his friends transmutating into demons in a remote cabin, then again, slapstick-silly, in the sequel, and sillier still in Army of Darkness, now in a medieval realm far from the rules of reality. A man searching for an artificial skin in Darkman is blown up by odious thugs, rendered horrifically disfigured, and takes revenge against the villains (and the white-collar creep for whom they work) like a superheroic wraith. Of course there's Peter Parker, a geeky high school outcast who gains the powers of a spider, using his abilities to help people and fight diabolical villains, thwarting dangers of ridiculous proportions. Even James Franco's confidence man in Oz the Great and Powerful is, like Ash, yanked from his reality and hurled into another, as is Doctor Strange. In his newest, Send Help, Linda and Bradley are torn from the familiar comfort of normal life and tossed violently into the immense secluded unknown, but Linda, the outcast, fits in better here than in that neat and tidy world of corporate flimflammers and nepotism. There, she’s a freak; here, she’s in charge. The only thing that scares her is the possibility of being rescued.
McAdams’s Linda has a notable relationship to her role in De Palma’s superbly lecherous Passion, starring Noomi Rapace as an employee at an advertising agency in Germany and McAdams as the mentor who turns out to be a duplicitous careerist who pilfers her ideas, humiliates her protégé, and ruins her life. McAdams is particularly skilled at subtly, dynamically, and believably evincing the inner contemplations of a modern woman at the far end of a power dynamic, from the variations of her radiant smile, wickedly scheming or innocent and trying to remain hopeful, to the tone with which she asks and responds to questions with inferiors and superiors, knowing more than she lets on, knowing less than she thinks, lying, being lied to. As the vindictive boss or put-upon employee, she never seems to be straining. These two eccentric, highly stylized films display her range of emotions and juxtaposition of inner morality: cruel and kind, craven and magnanimous, villainous and likable, and, in both films, capable of evil.
Screenwriters Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who wrote the jubilantly garish, fan-satisfying Freddy vs. Jason, make a good pair for Raimi here, with another film about a mano-a-mano battle. When Linda goes on the hunt for a boar, the kerfuffle leads to the spouting and spewing and spurting of blood and snot, the howling screams of fear and anger and triumph, a clash made epic through hyperbolic filmmaking and computer effects (the CGI is better here than in most of his movies), a preview of scrimmages to come. And the climatic fight between Linda and Bradley, with scalp tearing and eye gouging and choking and body slamming and stabbing, is fiendishly slapstick yet also gruesome, as Bradley yanks a swath of skin and hair from Linda's skull or thrusts a thumb into her eye socket. It's intense and fun, a kind of confident vulgar escapism the studios tend to shy away from.
Send Help is Raimi's first R-rated movie since the somber, disquieting The Gift in 2000, and it affords him the freedom to ravage human (and animal) bodies and keep us on edge. Violence is always possible, the threat—and promise—of gleefully outlandish bloodspilling lingers there like a flirtation. There is also, slyly permeating the film with slowly increasing potency, a different flirtation: a suggestion of prurience to Linda and Bradley's interactions, in Linda's tending to Bradley's injuries, her stalwart smile in a situation which would make most people feel hopeless, the nature of her newfound power and how she uses it. There is even a scene of feigned castration that further entices and obscures what Linda's true feelings are, have been, and will be. Her motivations become murky. And all throughout, the promise of violence hovers.
Send Help is more aesthetically restrained than the histrionic Drag Me to Hell, his last original work, from 2009, but it is the spiritual kin of that film. Like Lohman's cursed bank teller, Linda is screwed out of a promotion by a less-qualified ass-kissing guy, but it works out for Linda. Both films are, in that way specific to genre fiction, thorny, ticklish morality tales in which our heroines are not so much revealed to be less virtuous than we initially thought as they are revealed to be capable of and willing to resort to unforeseen amorality to get what they want. And yet we understand why they do what they do, and we root for them. Raimi makes us question, perhaps betray, our own notions of morality. What would we do in these situations? There is a twist at the end of Send Help that may be “unrealistic,” but it is perfectly reasonable, in the context of the hyper-real style Raimi has sustained the whole film. Raimi’s regular editor Bob Murawski does another marvelous job at balancing tones: we sink into the rhythm of the Castaway-like survivalism scenes of wood chopping and rope tying and fish catching and fire sparking, the character-driven existential conversations, and then surreally spirited violence. It all occurs with the seamlessness of inevitability.
The irony of the film—cynically faux-tender—is that soon, the world, the real world, the one that rejected her, will welcome her as a hero. The outcast beat the odds. The survivalism and outdoorsmanship that seemed like weird quirks now seem to everyone her greatest qualities. Ultimately, Raimi leads Linda to the place where she belongs, through an ordeal that, in the eyes of the public, makes her matter, gives her meaning. Though what, exactly, her meaning is—the one appointed to her by such an unbelievable situation and her equally unbelievable triumph, and the one she herself wants—poses existential questions Raimi does not answer. Linda wanted to be a survivor—be on Survivor. What she gets is even better, or rather what we the viewers get is better: a jaundiced “happy” ending, more enticing in its derangement than a traditionally unhappy one.