Premonition

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Premonition a sort of hybrid genre of family drama, tearjerker, and supernatural thriller. Oh yeah, a puzzle picture too.

The Story has Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) a very-happy wife of a very-happy husband with two cute adorable little girls. Well, maybe things aren’t so happy because one day Linda wakes up to hear a phone message from her husband who’s off on a business trip. Then at the door there’s a cop telling her that her husband is dead in a car accident.

Linda has to go through the whole day, not believing, barely able to cope with the news. Good thing her mother is there to help with the kids. Linda finally goes to sleep … and wakes up next to her husband. She passes a whole day in which her husband is alive … next day he is dead … next day he’s alive … next day he’s dead…

The tale is one of her recurring premonitions of the future all of which are true and not true, so it’s kind of impossible to pull everything out of it. The DVD has a commentary track with the director and Bullock which undoubtedly explains it all, and if you watch a second time I bet you get a lot more out of it, puzzle-wise. In the end (after the midpoint, when Linda figures out what has been happening) she makes a calendar and tries to work out what happened or will happen on what days.

Something similar would have helped us too in the audience. Why didn’t they give us one? I think there are two reasons:

1. They want us to share her dislocation and confusion and her sense of horror. There’s a way to pitch this script as a horror movie, and it was undoubtedly pitched that way at least once. Maybe it would have been more successful as straight horror.
2. More interesting though: if they had given us titles, like ‘Monday’ ‘Thursday’ ‘Tuesday’ ‘Saturday’ ‘previous Sunday’ it would have seemed as though Linda was really going through time, which isn’t what is happening, even though it seems like it.

In fact, what we have is a flashback/flashforward structure in this picture, only the heroine goes through it in movie-time just like we do. She is half in the audience herself in a weird way. She only knows and experiences each day based on her knowledge of the previous day and the day before that, in this jump-ahead, jump-back pattern.

They change her outfit every time she wakes up, which helps, and there’s a lot of Hitchcock-style glance-object cutting, along with a bunch of hyper-realistic moviemaking. Which kind of bugged me, it was too much.

At first Linda is increasingly upset and confused at what’s going on. She meets people who know her but they are strangers to her, because she met them in the past – their past, not hers, because she has skipped that day (in her dreams or premonitions which seem to come at night and begin with her waking and then living through an entire day). So there is a double dislocation which comes from this: not only does Linda not know what happened on the intervening days, but the premonition is false when it comes to her, and true when it comes to everybody else. What I mean is that in her premonitions she sees what other people will do, what will happen to them, but she is reacting as she would from the past and not as she will react when she actually lives through that day. So on Saturday, the day of the funeral, Linda in her premonition doesn’t believe her husband is dead, causes a scene – several – and ends up being committed by a psychiatrist – all because she is foreseeing this Saturday from Tuesday, or Monday, or Sunday night before, before her husband’s death, before she figures out these are premonitions. But then when Saturday does come, will she think he’s still alive, after she turns out to have been on the scene and witnessed his death on Wednesday?

And yet the final scene is some months after her husband’s death. And her daughter still has scars, from running through a glass door, which she does in part because Linda is screaming to her in a distraught state, because at this point Linda is in a premonition or suffering the dislocation of having been seeing future.

I think this sort of puzzle makes the movie hard to grasp emotionally. There is a double set of emotional reactions we have. First there are the feelings of strangeness and fear and alienation we share as we follow Linda through the fractured time, knowing only a little more than she does, what is going on. Then there are the feelings of what she is going through: learning her husband might be, is, is considering, sleeping with the hot blonde at work, feeling that he really is more of a roommate than a lover, and finally coming to terms with this and loving him anyway, trying to save him from the accident she knows is coming.

Of course, part of the reason the picture fails to satisfy is that she can’t forestall the future she has seen. Her daughter does get cut running through the glass doors, which seems to set up a possibility in reverse way, that Linda might save her husband. (Yeah, that sounds irrational, but I’m thinking not in real terms but in movie-goer terms: because she couldn’t stop her daughter’s accident, she will be motivated to try very hard to stop her husband’s accident; because she fails to prevent one, we are being forewarned that the husband’s accident is not forestallable, which would make for a very happy twist if she could forestall her husband’s accident – see?)

There is a priest who talks like a scientist and when Linda tells him of these crazy dreams, actually can pull out right away a book where he has marked all the pages of historical incidents where people had visions of the future that came true.

I sense a lot of different cooks messing with this stew. There are several production houses involved, and two studios, Tristar and MGM (MGM outside the Bond franchise is an almost sure sign that a movie is going to have problems these days), and even though there is only the one screenwriter credited, I wonder mightily if this script hasn’t gone through a few incarnations, one of which was the straight Lions Gate or Dimension Films horror movie, then Sandra Bullock got involved, she’s not doing a cheap horror movie, now the premise can be re-envisioned and look at the wider implications of knowing the future; as Linda asks after finding out her husband was getting interested in the blonde, ‘If I let Jim die, is it the same as killing him?’

Then there is a big strained reach after this bit of added meaning: when the priest explains his way of thinking on all this, he tells her that faith is not religion or God or Catholicism, but instead just having something outside yourself you’re willing to fight for. Linda answers, ‘I don’t know what to fight for.’

Oh yeah, here’s the climax: she knows that her husband died at mile marker 220 on the highway. She drives after him on the fateful Wednesday morning, talking to him on cell phone. He’s about to tell her about the blonde, she says she already knows all about her; he says he didn’t want that any more, he now wants to make a fresh start with her (and the picture commits the fatal flaw of telling us that he hasn’t gone through with boning the blonde yet; a rather stupid way of trying to redeem him a little). This makes Linda smile. She gets him to pull over off the highway, he does, then she notices that it’s mile marker 220. She tells him to turn around, he does, then he almost collides with a car coming the other way. His car is sitting in the middle of the highway. He tries to start it, the engine is flooded. Along comes an oil tanker truck (just so we can get a big spectacular explosion, which is more hyper-realism and a cheap, though very expensive, way to end things) and totally destroys him. Right in front of her eyes.

The final scene has her waking one last time. Her daughters come in, and we learn it’s moving day. Even as we opened the picture seeing how the husband surprised Linda with this house, buying it without telling her, we close on her moving out. The cut daughter’s face is healing well, it looks like there will be no scars. And when Linda rises to go out to meet the movers, we see she is pregnant in a shot that seems added on, it’s so poorly designed – as though a few cooks got messing with the stew even in postproduction, and wanted to give her something good to come out of all this, too.

(28 April 2009)