The Vast of Night, made in 2019, up on Amazon Prime just the end of last month, has received enthusiastic reviews in publications as intellectually (if not physically) far apart as The New York Times and The New York Post. As usual, I don't quite agree with them. And though my disagreement is usually I think a film or TV series is much better than the carping reviews, in this case it's somewhat the opposite: though The Vast of Night had its moments, I didn't think it was quite that much.
The story is about aliens from outer space over New Mexico in the 1950s, whom we never see. That is, we see their ship but not them. We're told about them through a black-and-white television show called Paradox Theater, which comes with a Rod Serling-like introduction, Twilight Zone intonation and all. So this means that what we're seeing is not true. Or, to be clear, all works of fiction are not true, or at least not thoroughly true, stories. But the Paradox Theater framing of The Vast of Night makes it doubly untrue. And not, I think, in a way that this statement, "this lie is a lie," may be true. Or in the way that everything I say is a lie is almost paradoxical but is really just a lie. In the case of The Vast of Night, The Paradox Theater set-up is just permission to take the story less seriously.
Which is too bad, because I actually liked the story well enough. Fay the teenage telephone operator and Everett the teenage DJ, well played by Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz, are a good couple of friends or colleagues in investigation of the people in the sky. And I liked the way both struggled to use the technologies of their day - Fay the cabled telephone switchboard, Everett the clunky reel-to-reel tape recorder, deftly listening to and replacing one tape with another as he feverishly searches for the tape recording he needs. And the music, which is excellent, adds to the tension and fright.
But I would have preferred just the story not the story in the story. Why dilute a scenically evocative tale with, I don't know, a tongue in cheek? Or is the real story maybe that The Twilight Zone was a vehicle for telling us true stories disguised as fiction? If so, that would have been daring, but should have been made much more clear.
But it's a debut film, so it's reasonable to hope for some truly pathbreaking movies from Andrew Patterson in the future. The Vast of Night, though worth watching, isn't it.
Jack Thorne does a fine job bringing it to the screen in 2018, greatly assisted by Timothy Spall whose Ed has one of those quintessentially British faces. His "Willoughby" is "Macon Heights," a stop on a train line that doesn't quite exist - literally. So here the "real or not real" thread is woven around a town, replete with a diner that serves great pie, which, when you add in the attractive, talkative waitress, also resonates with another real-or-not multiple reality classic, Twin Peaks. David Lynch, Rod Serling, and Philip K. Dick do have a lot of uncommon in common.
"Lunch with Rod Serling" - that's what Megan's director was said to be having, when she interrupted him with a request to re-read a part, and the Rod Serling mention was very apt, since this episode of Mad Men - 7.3 - was even more like a Twilight Zone episode than most in this frequently surreal series.
