The Vast of Night: a spoiler free...thing

Delicious, finally! Some good fucking movie.

I.                    “Delicious, finally! Some good fucking movie.” – Gordon Ramsay

Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night starts, like any good date, by making you work for it. You don’t realise the work is done until your back reaches a forward incline towards the screen that makes your neck twinge. There’s something in sky, for God's sake, and you need to know what it is. 

It is the November of 1958. Night has fallen in the small border town of Cayuga in New Mexico. At the local gym, a high school basketball game is about to begin. The entire town is turning out to watch. The Cayuga team and their cheerleaders (dressed in long-sleeved jerseys and skirts that give us the occasional, racy glimpse of ankle – it really is the 1950s), are warming up. The visiting team has arrived by bus. No one knows yet about the other visiting team, the one that will arrive by slightly more galactic transport.

We are introduced to Everett, a young, late-night radio jockey with endless quips and a brisk walking pace. Conversation takes off like sodium dropped in a beaker. Here is where the movie could lose the viewer – especially viewers like me who have a terrible ear for American accents. But something magical happens. We stop getting distracted by the dialogue, and by slow degrees, get sucked into character.

In the opening sequence, Everett wafts through the gym on a cloud of suaveness, instructing the game commentator on how to record sound and stealing someone’s trombone for their own good. Sixteen year old Fay Crocker, sensibly ponytailed and rocking a pair of cat eyeglasses (reader, be sure I surfed Lenskart right after the movie), calls out to him from the stands. She’s been waiting for Everett to teach her how to use her new tape recorder; she’s scared of breaking it. We immediately identify this brand of nerd: earnest, burdened by any possibility of imperfection. The two exit the bright-lit, noisy gym, and enter the cool dark of the parking lot. They start testing the gadget by conducting interviews on people headed in for the game. Everett is a smooth professional who knows how to get people to talk. Fay can’t talk into the recorder until Everett has made her forget it’s there, by asking her about automated cars. At the same time, she doesn’t appreciate Everett’s deceptions – watch her disappointment at the way his voice changes when he’s recording, or when he lies to abort a boring interview. This sequence lets us into Everett and Fay and their dynamic, where much of the heat of the movie is: something bristlier than friendship, but not quite the alchemy of romance. It also sets us up for the rest the film, which will rely on the instrument of the human voice, and people talking into crackling phone lines.

Everett drops Fay home and heads for the radio station. Fay, we learn, is a switchboard operator. She settles into her own routine, managing the cords with ease (the actress, Sierra Cormick, moved the switchboard into her hotel room to practise and ensure we saw this detail in her wrist movement). She turns on the radio for Everett’s segment when something odd happens. A strange humming noise drowns out Everett’s smooth patter. She then gets an SOS call from an unidentified woman, the same humming noise amid what sounds like furious winds and barking dogs. A hypnotic sequence follows: Fay starts a careful investigation, taking out the cord and replugging it with every line she dials, asking questions to anybody who’s not at the game, frowning when lines get mysteriously cut. (I could watch 20 straight hours of Fay doing this removal-and-replug.) She alerts Everett to the noise, and Everett, against his better judgement, plays a clip of it on his radio. A listener phones in, a former military man. He has heard this strange humming noise before, and he has a story to tell…

II.                  I am a mountain and this movie is a gorgeous Mohammed

Doing an actual review for the movie on Roger Ebert’s website, instead of vomiting her feelings and retrofitting structure, Sheila O’Malley writes:

In a way, the whole thing is alienating. It refuses to let you in. "The Vast of Night" doesn't come to you. You must go to it. You must submit to its rules, and once you do, it yields tremendous rewards.

Wonderfully put and true. The movie actually begins in daylight, not night. We zoom in on a vintage television set with rounded edges, playing the title track to a theatrical Twilight Zone-type anthology series. The Vast of Night is an episode within this series – we only begin the movie proper when the rounded edges snap and expand to the entire screen. Patterson starts with artificiality instead of depositing us inside action or character. He keeps cutting away to this vintage TV frame to remind us we’re an audience. Is it a gimmick? But when we do immerse, it feels sweeter for the effort it took to get there. (Students of Brecht, leave your thoughts in the comments.)  

Then there’s the darkness. All the action takes place at night. My sister and I paused the movie, and decided we had to shut the curtains and switch off the lights to continue watching. I can’t remember the last time that happened, that I cared about mood and setting not just within what I was watching, but the physical setting of where I was watching. I thought that particular nerve-end had been numbed by long hours of watching Netflix on a smudged phone screen.

Lastly, as I alluded to earlier, there’s the focus on voice and narration as something dramatic in and of itself, that needs only the barest of visual accompaniments. It reminds me of a line I overheard on a cooking show, that if you have good ingredients, then the process of cooking is a minor intervention. Perhaps if you have a good story to tell, film-making need only be a minor intervention. At its best, the story-telling sequences in The Vast of Night remind me of Laurie Metcalfe’s incredible and unbroken 9 minute monologue in Horace and Pete. You don’t need much camera work. We’re only looking at someone’s face. We’re only seeing their muscles move as they speak or react to what is being said. And it so utterly absorbing. Sometimes, there isn’t even that; there’s just a dark screen, and you’re compelled to close your eyes and focus all your senses into listening, like someone waiting for wartime dispatches in the hush of a quiet bunker.

III.                Not a minor intervention

The Vast of Night is about finding a UFO in a small town. We know this; it isn’t a spoiler. The movie knows we know this. So it gives us a gift. It takes our permission to go for the more difficult kill.

Ebert said there are some movies that are immune to spoilers, because to know the ending tells you nothing of how you got to the ending, and the getting there is the treat. I think this special immunity is a characteristic of all good movies, but especially of science fiction, which at its greatest is the perfect unfolding of a premise towards an inescapable logical conclusion. Now, I don’t think The Vast of Night is perfectly immune (which is for a separate post where I discuss my grievances with the ending, #no spoilers etc). But it nails the methodology: what if we treated a movie about a UFO with the craft of Richard Linklater and tension of All the President’s Men? What if a UFO interfered with signals and frequencies in a small town on a night where everyone was occupied at a basketball game? Who’d still be working that night? Who’d figure it out?

I’m kind of obsessed. It’s been a while since I tried taking apart a movie and seeing how it worked. When one reviewer suggested that the movie is a calling card, with a tracking shot sequence engineered to grab attention from big budget studios, I was surprised to find myself feeling defensive. Read Patterson talk about That Shot and its function as an audience jolt, how ‘great cinema is about managing people's attention span as much as anything’: he comes off as a smart and intentional director who understands story, not a slut for Hollywood. (The only slut here is me, for Patterson’s future filmography.) This movie makes me want to hold a reader’s attention and then make them go nuts. It makes me want to watch All the President’s Men and read War of the Worlds. It’s made me write all this and want to write more (how does a movie set in the 1950s but not about a social movement honour that the 1950s wasn’t a great time for a lot of people?), maybe even rewrite the ending as a personal project. Isn’t that cool, when a work of art can have such a generative effect? More of that, please. More of some delicious, good fucking movie.