Greta (2018)
Although the film is called Greta (originally titled, The Widow), Chloe Grace Moretz’s character, a young waitress named Frances McCullen, is the one we follow most, newly relocated to New York City from Boston (though you’d think, given her naivete when it comes to protecting yourself in a big city, that she came from Mayberry) after losing her beloved mother. Frances is perhaps a little too nice and accommodating for her roommate Erica’s (Monroe) tastes to not get taken advantage of by the worst the Big Apple has to offer. That niceness comes into play when Frances finds a lost purse sitting on a seat in her subway car, prompting her to return it its rightful owner, a mature Parisian widow living in Brooklyn named Greta Hideg (foreshadow: ‘Hideg’, in Hungarian, means ‘cold, icy, or chilling’). The two become friends, filling a niche in each other’s lives, with Frances finding a surrogate for her mother in her time of grief, and Greta a surrogate daughter for the one that is no longer in her vicinity. Frances says she’s like chewing gum – she tends to stick around – which is music to Greta’s ears. However, something feels amiss in the relationship that causes Frances to try to end it, and the less-than-stable Greta doesn’t seem to be taking the separation well.
Neil Jordan takes the director’s chair for the first time in seven years (writing books and working on a couple of TV shows in the interim), capturing more of those themes he enjoys in many films, from seclusion, isolation, personal disconnect, and unspoken desires, with a special emphasis on non-traditional companionship. This one explores the darker side of those feelings, when two of those lonely people finally make a strong connection, and then one of those individuals becomes so repulsed with the other, and the other can’t seem to let go without getting that feeling they’ve longed for back.
The semi-novelty in this exploration into the terrifying example of stalking is that the stalker of the woman is another woman, sort of like the relationship between the two women in the Judi Dench/Cate Blanchett drama Notes on a Scandal, but taking the genre more into the realm of a thriller bordering on black comedy-horror, a la Hitchcock’s Psycho, which also featured the theme of an unstable and suffocating mother who doesn’t want to share or let her offspring go. There have been other films about female stalkers, from Play Misty for Me to Fatal Attraction to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and at least a dozen or two others over the last several decades. Many of them are stalking due to being in an affair with a married man, but females can even obsess over other females, either rivals or object of envy, such as in Single White Female or the more comedic Ingrid Goes West. Greta plays in a familiar playground and tries to find new nooks and crannies to explore, but the distinction between art and artifice is too pronounced in seeing how far the genre can be pushed, and the tension and intrigue begin to suffer as a result.
It’s in that exploration of a mother figure that Jordan tries to find the repulsion. Mothers are supposed to be caring, nurturing, and givers of life, but the mother figure in Greta grows dependent on the symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter, to the point where she can’t handle the thought of rejection and isolation again after experiencing a certain closeness, especially when she knows that Frances is what she needs, and that she is also what Frances has been yearning for as well.
Neil Jordan made changes to Ray Wright’s original script, once a more standard chiller in which Greta was to be an older woman, an immigrant from Hungary, and without much that might initially attract a young woman like Frances, except as someone she felt sorry for. When Huppert signed on for the role, Jordan rewrote the character to try to play more toward certain qualities he felt she could uniquely evoke, including a taste in fashion, food, wine, and music that would be more of the kind of persona of a sophisticated Parisian (with a Hungarian twist) that Greta may have either had all along, or had been trying to evoke artificially by passing off as something she really had not ever been, something she could use to essentially seduce a much younger woman to want to trust in and perhaps try to emulate. As presented, however, the story goes too far into making Greta into a borderline witch figure as you might find in an old fairy tale (a la Bluebeard) than as someone you could legitimately encounter in the real world of New York City.
There is a sense of the familiar in the story, with cinematic sources beyond the macabre fairy tale leanings. Les Diaboliques is a an example of the tone Jordan seems to be striving to maintain, along with Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (with its illness occurring inside an apartment). You can toss in plot elements of Hitchcock’s Psycho (especially in its theme of motherhood and captivity), and 1988’s Dutch chiller, The Vanishing (involving a trap and a climax involving severe claustrophobia). In the end, we learn that the darkest side of love leads to confinement – of wanting to always possess the other, even if it requires taking sinister steps to achieve that possession – and if not possession, then destruction. Along those lines, Jordan and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey do a wonderful job in showing the progression of that confinement, starting off with expansive shots of the city, clear and free, while Frances’ personal space seems to get smaller around her as the film progresses. The colors and lighting also changes from more realistic in appearance to more dark and baroque as the story goes full tilt toward the grotesque.
The problem with setting up Greta as a modern thriller is that Neil Jordan, as a filmmaker, is inherently classical in his approach, far more reverent to movies made around the mid-20th century than he is of most of what has come out in the genre within the last forty years, and certainly isn’t at all concerned about what everyone else is doing today. Not that he needs to, but by trying to be relevant and chic to audiences that are of Chloe Grace Moretz or Maika Monroe’s generation, and still trying to play in the same sandbox crafted by the likes of Hitchcock, Clouzot, or Polanski, the tone is a little off, until it finally breaks down when its narrative finally bites off more than it can chew in terms of exploring its titular character’s methods and madness. By the end, we’re left with a feeling of not knowing what to feel about this movie that wants us to explore these themes seriously, while also trying to take it as a fun time exploring genre. The result is camp rather than terror, due to its absurdity, and yet the build-up never establishes its little pocket universe early on as a place where such absurdity can and will happen. This b-movie with arthouse sensibilities ends up akin to watching the chef prepare what looks like will be an incredible filet mignon and then what’s actually served is more like a sloppy joe.
The music in the film gives some of the clues as to Greta’s state of mind. Before we really meet her, we’re listening to a song on the soundtrack, a 1963 cover song from Julie London called, “Where Are You?”, giving us an eerie clue that there is a search for someone involved, though we don’t know who or why just yet. When Greta plays the piano, she pays allegiance to a certain heritage by choosing a Hungarian composer, Frank Liszt, rolling out, “Liebestraume No. 3”, which means, “Dreams of Love”, fitting in nicely with a theme of the film. Greta is an exotic, but also a mixed-up fraud, adding layers to her personality that repulses the ingenue Frances, who thinks she’s found something real, only to realize that she has no idea what she’s getting into and wants out. She’s like the person who has been single for so long because they have nothing inherently attractive about themselves, so they concoct and adopt a slew of interests and talents they don’t naturally possess in order for someone to get close enough to them emotionally to, hopefully, not care that they’ve only been pretending to be that alluring and exciting person long enough for the object of their desires to not be about to easily disentangle themselves later.
The use of the phone does serve as an interesting narrative device, as it is both a way to stay disconnected to the people around you, while also an easy way to stay connected with people you want to maintain a connection to, even if it is a connection that aren’t exactly personal in a physical proximity kind of way. For Greta, she uses that phone in order to make an early connection with Frances by pretending she doesn’t really know how to use it, which the helpful Frances can only feel obliged to assist with. However, it also is a means of further isolation, as there isn’t the touch, or the free conversation, or the eye contact; even those with lots of friends on social media can feel completely isolated from the world at large without access to the phone they’ve come to regard as a pacifier for their own feelings of loneliness, especially when everyone around them is also looking into their own phone for their own connections, making them, at least during those times while out in public, seem unapproachable. Greta is keenly aware of this, in a key scene in which she becomes a customer in the restaurant that Frances is working in, knowing that Frances cannot hide from her there, and must even have to have a conversation – a personal connection, even if an awkward one.
After some reveals that Greta is a fraud and a bit off her rocker, all of a sudden, we have some very smart people doing some very dumb things, culminating in lots of stalking and attempts to lure into a trap, with Greta hopping on to Frances’ stolen cell phone to try to maintain contact with her friends and family in ways that would raise a red flag before too long. By the end of the film, the climax evokes another Hitchcock film, Rope, complete with a wooden box containing a body, a piano, and a metronome to add tension. Neil Jordan go-to actor Stephen Rea comes sniffing around like detective, Milton Arbogast, in Psycho, and we all know what happened to him (he is a friend of Frances’ family, and yet his disappearance does not alert any more visitors to the house). The finale of the movie, without spoiling it, is absolutely preposterous to believe for a variety of reasons, dissolving any shred of credibility that Jordan had carefully been cultivating through the first half of the film into meaninglessness.
As there’s really little surprise as to where it’s all going go, all we can do to keep ourselves interested is to observe the performance from Huppert, which may be enough for some critics to give a recommendation to the film. For those who’ve never really been exposed to Huppert, it might seem like a lackluster performance and not worthy of accolades, but, giving her the benefit of the doubt, one should remember that her character is herself acting, while also speaking in a language not her own twice over, so any awkwardness of delivery can be attributed to this facet. If you’re a Huppert connoisseur, you won’t be surprised at seeing her unhinged, as she’s done it before, and done it better, exposed far more vulnerably and raw in The Piano Teacher (to which Greta echoes by actually have her teach piano), and more menacingly in another recent film in her Academy Award-nominated role in Elle.
While it is a film rife with potential themes, where Greta errs is in trying to have its cookies and eat them too. Jordan sets the story in the perceptible real world, and then tries to build this campy fable on top of it, while also trying to make a film that is both artistic as well as a commercial hit. Unfortunately, these are all great tastes that don’t taste great together if the recipe isn’t right, and while Jordan has made his share of notable and acclaimed films in the past, his grasp on what it takes to “play audiences like a piano” falls significantly short of Hitchcock (who created art in the techniques for which he created his entertainment), regardless of how many times the ‘piano teacher’ within the film tries to show Frances how. Jordan either needs to embrace the madness, or dissect it, but he fumbles rather than juggles the too-many balls he’s launched into the air. Greta is spelled G-R-E-T-A; it initially looks like it could be great (G-R-E-A-T), but goes in the opposite direction of where it should toward the end. As Greta herself might say, like the Chablis in a key restaurant scene, “It promises a lot, then disappoints.” We deserve better.
Qwipster’s rating: C
MPAA Rated: R for some violence and disturbing images
Running time: 99 min.
Cast: Chloe Grace Moretz, Isabelle Huppert, Maika Monroe, Colm Feore, Jeff Hiller, Stephen Rea
Director: Neil Jordan
Screenplay: Ray Wright, Neil Jordan