Tracy Bennett
Oh, Arnold Schwarzenegger, how do we love you? Let me count the ways: Terminator, Predator-Killer-nator, Governator.
But Dad-o-nator?
It would be all too easy to make fun of Maggie, the new and gruesome postapocalyptic film in which Schwarzenegger plays Midwestern farmer Wade Vogel, the ever-loving father who refuses to stop hugging and protecting Maggie, his rapidly decaying flesh-eating zombie daughter. Even though she’s so lethal that, in one of the film’s most touching scenes, she approaches Arnie in the little sleep he allows himself and begins licking her diseased and infecting chops at the prospect of a tasty meal of Dad’s ample hams.
The film, directed by Henry Hobson, is now playing at Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street.
Maggie is not a movie that sends you to the refreshment stand. What keeps the easy jibes in check, however, is the film’s rigorous grimness — its tone, its morbidly colored photography, its total lack of light and hope. It is a kind of clinical cinema, as if the director were a first-year medical student using the zombie genre to dissect the body of society. What the film discovers about the relationship between the generations — just who is devouring whom — is, to say the least, upsetting.
The virus killing Maggie (Abigail Breslin) appears to be beyond the ability of the authorities to halt. It’s simply too big and too lethal. That means that despite nods to Schwarzenegger’s past superior powers, Wade is no longer in charge. In the movie’s opening scenes, Maggie, not Wade, dons the iconic sunglasses from the Terminator series. It’s a visual cue that Decay is going to triumph over Cure, that Death is in charge.
In another of the movie’s morbid triumphs, this is expressed not by terrorizing gruesomeness — although that stuff is in the film — but more by the nuances of the breakdown of family life. All Wade can offer Maggie is assurances of his eternal love and devotion. But it doesn’t go very far with a teen whose arm is turning into a gangrenous, horrible, black, suppurating pool of dead flesh.
The best he can do is promise that he won’t send her to the dreaded Quarantine, apparently a compound near Kansas City where the living dead are allowed to eat each other.
And it gets worse.
After Wade has to kill his neighbors, transformed into attacking cannibals that want some of the hunk, he adamantly refuses to let his daughter be picked up for Quarantine. His good friend, the grim small town doctor, tells him the horrors of that colony and offers him instead a lethal hypodermic to give to his daughter “when the time comes.” That moment will be when Maggie begins “to smell meat,” the telltale sign that she has become an out of control flesh eater. Dad promptly prepares a meaty breakfast of sausage and bacon, but, Maggie is picky; that kind of flesh is not what she wants.
But even the doctor himself has no faith in science. After he gives Wade the syringe he points to Wade’s nearby shotgun and says, “I’d use that instead.”
So the scariest part of the movie — and its success — is not the ghoulish black decay on the bodies of the walking dead, but ultimately Wade’s willingness to perform a mercy killing on his own child, which is society’s failure as well. For every close-up of Schwarzenegger’s face, browned and lined as an arroyo, there’s an ample long-distant shot of fields in flame and smoke, or burning cityscapes. Wade must burn his own fields, as apparently the viral breakout is related to an aberration in wheat. Normal life breaks down all around him. Escaped zombies haunt the forests and attack Wade as he stops for gas. All the doctors can say is that they are just learning about the disease and can do no curing, only containing.
I was reminded not of the recent outbreak of Ebola — which, in the end, despite the horrific casualties, is really a triumph for science — but rather my book-based visions of medieval Bubonic plague, a ravaging so horrendous that a third of Europe was decimated.
There is not a reassuring gesture in the film. Flight is the only medicine. All we can do, we adults who have made a total mess of the environment, is watch Wade’s stolid face, and wonder.
I’m not an aficionado of the postapocalyptic or the zombie genre and I don’t know how Maggie’s and others’ ghoulish behavior compares to, say, the zombies on The Walking Dead.
But this film has helped me understand what is hard to express, and only infrequently comes up in intergenerational conversation, yet is definitely upon us: The kids no longer can rely on the adults, because the kids know the adults have screwed up badly, that the world is indeed coming to an end, and much faster than anyone has expected. That’s why people in their 30s are writing memoirs. They have no faith in the future.
So in many ways, Wade is Schwarzenegger’s greatest role of all. In Maggie, he’s the Truth-onator. It’s hard to think of a sequel.
