Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) [141 points/13 votes]
"Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter begins with a nightmare and, for two hours, sustains the accompanying sense of panic like no other movie I can recall. Nichols returns to similar sequences intermittently throughout the film, but they are merely crescendos in the anxiety-dominated life of their subject, Midwestern family-man Curtis Lafourche (Michael Shannon). Distraught over these apocalyptic visions, Curtis constantly contemplates whether they signal his inheritance of paranoid schizophrenia or the impending end of the world.
Nichols doesn’t offer any concrete answers to Curtis’ predicament and, as a result, the viewer is forced to try to get inside Curtis’ head to form an opinion -- to experience the frustration and fear right alongside him. More than making up one’s mind on whether Curtis is mentally ill or accurately prophesying the end of the world, the viewing experience is about understanding the man’s destructive fear of losing control -- the root of anxiety in today’s America. Thus, through this hyperbolic microcosm, one discovers an encapsulation of the zeitgeist.
For a film that is so precise in personifying an abstract theme, alternately entertaining each of the two answers to the central question in a calculated, perpetual yo-yo effect, Take Shelter is astoundingly human. In the lead, Michael Shannon’s anguish is palpable, evoking the viewer’s sympathy and, through their relation to the fear of losing control (if likely not Curtis’ specific predicament), empathy. Jessica Chastain is equally brilliant as his wife, Samantha; her strength, particularly in the final act, is the perfect vehicle for the film’s refreshing message that the American family remains a strong institution, no matter how tough times may be. Furthermore, Take Shelter never patronizes its Midwestern characters in depicting their plight -- a rarity in contemporary film.
Then there is the final scene -- haunting, assured, unforgettable. There are those who, adopting a highly literal interpretation, believe that it concretely answers the film’s central question. I couldn’t disagree more. Nichols ends the film in a manner that is designed not for scholarship, but post-viewing discussions that lead to further discourse on the entire piece. And what a special occasion this is -- a movie actually worth talking about once it’s over." - Danny Baldwin
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