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Black List Script #4: Prisoners by Aaron Guzikowski

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Comically Long Logline (provided by The Black List): “After his six-year-old daughter and her friend are kidnapped, a small town carpenter butts heads with a young, brash detective in charge of the investigation. Feeling failed by the law, he captures the man he believes responsible, holding him captive in a desperate attempt to find out what he did with the girls, whom he’s convinced are still alive. But the further he’s forced to go to get the man to confess, the closer he comes to losing his soul.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

KELLER DOVER (37, a well-built carpenter) takes his son, RALPH (15), hunting. Ralph bags his first deer. They drive back home, to a sleepy blue-collar town in Massachusetts. Along the way, they listen to the Bible on cassette and Keller explains the importance of preparation for whatever’s on the horizon. When Ralph talks about buying a used car, Keller gripes about money. Ralph asks why Keller doesn’t fix up Keller’s father’s old apartment house and rent it out. Keller says it’d cost too much to fix. Keller and Ralph arrive at home, where wife GRACE and daughter ANNA (6) wait. They go across the street to the home of their friends/neighbors, the Birches (FRANKLIN, 36 and soft-spoken; NANCY, 32 and tough; and daughters ELIZA, 15, and JOY, 7). The women prepare the deer while the kids go outside, walking around together. Ralph and Eliza flirt, ignoring Joy and Anna. The younger girls see an old, disgusting RV parked in front of an empty house and start playing around it. Ralph and Eliza pull the girls away; nobody notices a shadow lurking inside.

After a nice Thanksgiving meal, Anna asks Grace if she can take Joy back to their house to look for her long lost red whistle. Grace okays it, but only if Ralph and Eliza go with. However, Anna and Joy don’t ask Ralph and Eliza. Before long, Grace realizes she can’t find the girls. Keller goes back to the Dover house, but they’re gone. Both families wander around the neighborhood in search of the girls. They find nothing, but Ralph realizes the RV is now gone. Meanwhile, DETECTIVE LOKI (33) gets an Amber Alert call — the RV was spotted at a nearby rest stop. Loki and other police get to the RV and arrest ALEX JONES (34, disheveled). Loki doesn’t get any answers from Jones, who is spaced-out and seems more like a 10-year-old than an adult. He goes to Jones’s aunt HOLLY’s house, which is where Jones usually parks his RV. He pokes around but finds nothing. Holly offers to sell him her husband’s Trans Am. She explains that her husband disappeared five years ago, after a fight. She takes care of Jones because his parents died in a car accident when he was six. Forensics examines the RV and finds nothing. Keller, Franklin, and their families form search parties to try to find the girls.

Loki drops by to explain to the Dovers where he’s at with the case. Grace is optimistic — legend has it that Loki has solved every case he’s worked — but Keller is frustrated when he finds out they have to let Jones go. Loki promises to keep him in custody, but his captain, O’MALLEY, is having none of it. They have nothing to charge Jones with, so they have to let him go. Loki decides to interview local sex offenders. At St. Ann’s Church, FATHER DUNN — a convicted child molester — lets Loki search the premises. Loki notices a refrigerator has been moved, positioned in front of the door. He pulls it out of the way. Inside the door is a basement with no stairs leading into it. An old corpse with a maze-like pendant hanging around his neck is tied to a chair, surrounded by statues of saints. Loki immediately arrests Dunn, who claims he doesn’t know who the man was. He says the man came to the church years ago, bragging that he’d killed 16 children and intended to kill more. Dunn felt the only solution was to kill the man.

The next morning, Keller is infuriated when he hears on the radio that Jones is being released. He goes to the police station as Jones is being released and confronts him. Under the din of reporters, Jones whispers, “They didn’t cry. Not until I left them.” Keller takes this to O’Malley, but neither he nor Loki exactly believe Keller. Loki says he’ll talk to him, which isn’t good enough for Keller, but it’ll have to do. Jones clams up when Loki talks to him, seeming confused and disoriented. Loki gives Keller the bad news. After being confronted with Grace’s anger and Ralph’s sadness, Keller decides to take matters into his own hands. He follows Jones, who’s walking his dog, and when he hears Jones whispering “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” — the very song the girls had been singing the night they disappeared — Keller threatens Jones at gunpoint. The dog wanders off.

Keller picks up Franklin, who has been instructed to pack a change of clothes. Franklin wants to know why, so Keller shows him: he has Jones chained up in the abandoned apartment house he conveniently owns. Franklin’s horrified, but Keller reminds him that this animal has their daughters, who may still be alive. Meanwhile, Loki discovers the church corpse is still unidentified, and the priest is sticking to his story. He finds a newspaper article dated 1982, describing a boy who went missing — who happened to live at the address of the empty house in front of which the RV was parked. He visits the Milland family, who moved a few years ago, after neighbors kept complaining about the matriarch going after their children. They’re cooperative, but it’s evident that the disappearance of young Eddie has destroyed MRS. MILLAND. Her adult children, KIM (37) and SCOTT (35), show Loki around. Scott explains more about the incidents that drove them to move — it’s all pretty innocent. Mrs. Milland is a drunk who can’t get over her son’s disappearance.

After a night of interrogating Jones, Keller and Franklin are surprised by how disoriented he remains. He won’t say a word. Keller starts beating on him, but it has no effect. As he attends a candlelight vigil, the emotional toll of keeping Jones locked up catches up with Franklin, who behaves strangely. In the crowd, Eliza notices someone leering at the Birches. The following day, Holly’s dog turns up dead, hit by a car. This leads Loki to find out Jones has been missing and was last seen taking the dog for a walk. Loki interviews a department store clerk with a tip. She describes a man similar to the one leering at the vigil and says he keeps buying kids’ clothes, all different sizes, and was recently fondling child-sized mannequins. Meanwhile, Franklin ends up spilling everything to Nancy. They go to the apartment, where Nancy demands to see Jones. She unties him and shows him drawings from Joy. Jones attacks her, begging for help. Keller and Franklin struggle to subdue him.

Keller decides to build a creepy cell he built to house Jones, hidden behind a false wooden wall. Their only connection to him is through a PVC pipe. Keller shows Franklin and Nancy the contraption, and they’re horrified. They try to pry the wood away when Jones grabs at Franklin. Instead, he and Nancy leave. Keller boards him back up. Later that night, a mysterious intruder moves through the Birch house (where Franklin and Nancy are discussing whether or not to call the police on Keller — ultimately, they decide not to). They hear noises and fear Eliza’s missing — but she’s not, and the intruder leaves before anyone really knows he was there. He moves on to the Dovers’ house, where Grace — who’s developed a Xanax-popping habit in the wake of Anna’s disappearance — finds a window hanging open and becomes convinced Anna has come back. Ralph makes her call the police. Loki takes notes. Grace shows him the basement, and Loki’s disturbed by the scope of the emergency provisions. He also notices a half-used bag of lye, at which point he becomes a little disconcerted that Keller isn’t around. Loki begins following Keller, but Keller catches on to him and drives in circles until he reaches a liquor store. He confronts Loki, who demands to know what he’s been up to. Keller makes a convincing case that he’s been drinking and driving around in circles, and it’s too embarrassing to share with Grace, so he’s convinced her that he’s helping with search efforts.

Inspired by his trip to the liquor store, Keller gets bombed and has a dream that Anna found her red whistle — at the bottom of their neighbors’ pool. Keller leaps out of bed and storms to the home of the BREWERS. They’re baffled by him leaping into their semi-frozen pool in the dead of winter. He finds nothing at the bottom. Loki finds an article about Keller’s dad, who committed suicide in the old apartment building. He takes a drive out there and realizes somebody’s inside. He tries to get in, but Keller hears him. Just before Loki can enter and find out what’s really going on, Keller intercepts him on the first floor landing, feigning a hangover. Loki grills him about Alex Jones and the survivalist gear in the basement, but Keller denies everything. Before Loki can get too thorough, he gets a call from the department store clerk — the guy came back, and this time she got plate numbers. Loki tracks them to a man named BOB TAYLOR. Bob wants so much to keep Loki out of the house that he slams the door hard enough to break Loki’s foot. Loki pursues Bob through the house, where there are mazes all over the place. He finds a small room containing 16 steamer trunks. He breaks one of the locks and finds a bunch of bloody kids’ clothes — and snakes. Same deal with all ther other trunks — except the last one, which has a homemade maze book.

Loki calls Keller down to the station. He says that, while Bob confessed and the Birches positively identified some of Joy’s clothes, they didn’t find any bodies. Keller flips out on Loki, accusing him of wasting time stalking Keller instead of finding Anna’s kidnapper. Keller goes home, where he finds Ralph has learned everything from Eliza. Keller insists that Anna is still out there, and he’s going to find her. Bob draws Loki a map to the bodies, but it’s an impenetrable maze. Pissed, Loki starts beating on him. Uniformed officers try to pull him off, and Bob gets one of their guns. Rather than shooting any of them, he kills himself. Nancy tries to convince Keller to end his torment of Jones. She gives him some syringes she uses at her animal clinic to euthanize animals. Alone, Keller contemplates it. Just as he’s about to put Jones out of his misery, Jones whispers that “they’re in the maze.” Keller demands to know what that means, but Jones clams up again.

Keller visits Holly Jones. He claims that he feels bad — partly responsible for Jones “disappearing,” and she invites him in. He subtly lays out clues, testing Holly’s reactions. More importantly, he’s looking for a weakness to get to Jones, and she reveals one: snakes. Before he leaves, Keller notices a newspaper article reporting Bob’s suicide. He’s pissed. Meanwhile, nobody at the police station can figure out the maze — until Loki realizes the pendant on the church corpse was the exact same pattern. Forensics tells Loki all the blood at Bob’s house was from a pig, all the clothes (except those identified by the Dovers and Birches) were brand new, and that more evidence they uncovered suggests Bob was oddly “playacting,” based on a book written by an ex-FBI agent. Forensics also matches up the map to a supposedly unsolvable maze in the agent’s book.

Friction in both the Birch and Dover households lead both Ralph and Eliza to get away from their families for a little while. They run into Loki, creeping around outside the Dover house. He’s found footprints and one of Anna’s socks — evidence of Bob being the “intruder” not-quite-seen earlier. At the apartment house, Keller torments Jones by sliding live snakes he bought at a pet store into the PVC pipe. Terrified, Jones tries to claw his way out and starts saying something. Keller stops his torment and listens, but Jones gives no relevant information and pretty much blanks out.

Meanwhile, inside a mystery room, Joy and Anna are still alive. They’re being drugged and kept by someone seen only in silhouette, forced to solve a variation on the homemade maze book seen in Bob’s home. As the Keeper comes in to check on them, they pretend to be asleep — and they run out past her. They hear the Keeper following them, and as Anna lags behind, Joy realizes she’s disappeared. Undaunted, Joy keeps running until she reaches a busy street, where she’s found. Grace hears the news and yells for Keller and Ralph (neither of whom are home) before storming out of the house, where Keller is arriving. She explains what happened and said Joy is at the hospital. They go down there, and Loki lets them through the police cordon. Grace demands to speak to Joy immediately, but she’s too drugged to be coherent. Keller starts shouting at her, demanding to know where she was being held, when Joy stops her cold by saying, “You were there.” Keller rushes off — to Holly’s house.

Still claiming to feel bad about everything, Keller offers to do any home improvements Holly wants. She invites him into the house — and promptly holds a gun on him. She forces him to drink the same drugged grape-aid she gave to the girls and leads him out to the backyard. As she leads him to the load Trans Am, Holly unspools the entire story: she and her husband kidnapped Alex — he was their first — and they did it not so much to kill as to “declare war on God” — the disappearances shatter the faith of those who are taken as well as everyone their lives touched. They also kidnapped Bob, which she claims to have forgotten about until reading about him in the paper. She complains that she’s had to slow down since her husband’s disappearance. Alex had nothing to do with kidnapping them — he just wanted to give them a ride. Holly forces Keller into the car, has him drive a few feet forward, which reveals a deep, grave-like hole in the ground, filled with children’s skeletons and snakes. She forces Keller into the hole by shooting him in the thigh. Keller sees Anna’s red whistle in the hole with him. Holly covers the hole, then backs the Trans Am over it again.

Ralph and Eliza go to the apartment house. When they find broken syringes and hear noises, Ralph assumes it’s a drug addict and goes in deeper to shoo him away. They find the cell, hear the movement inside, and see a picture of Anna and Joy. They leap to the conclusion that this is where the girls are being kept and immediately dial 911 — but they pull away the wood and discover Jones. Holly watches a news report unraveling Keller’s role in imprisoning Jones, and she’s livid. O’Malley demands that Loki notify Holly of what happened before he makes any effort to find Keller.

As Loki arrives at Holly’s house, Holly readies to finish off Anna while Keller figures out a way out of the hole. Keller rushes into the back entrance of the house and finds Anna — but it’s all a drug-induced hallucination. He’s never left the hole. Loki moves through the house, seeing a photo of Holly’s husband, who wears the same maze pendant as the church corpse. Loki confronts Holly, but not before she injects Anna with Keller’s own syringes. Loki and Holly fire at the same time; he kills her, but ends up with a missing eye. Nevertheless, Loki grabs Anna and drives her frantically to the emergency room. Some time later, Anna — who was saved thanks to Loki’s courage — and Grace greet Loki in his hospital bed. They share a moment of silent connection. Loki looks at a newspaper that announces Eddie Milland (a.k.a. Alex Jones) has finally been reunited with his family — but Keller remains missing. Anna has a new red whistle. Grace dismisses her so she and Loki can talk. She insists she hasn’t heard from Keller. Loki claims he believes her. Grace tells him, whether Keller’s found and sent to prison or not, she believes he’s a good man.

Some time late, a bandaged, cane-carrying Loki surveys the crime scene at Holly’s house. The Trans Am has been gutted but not moved. The lab techs say the frozen ground will slow their progress. The techs leave for the night, but Loki stays behind to look around. In the silence, he eventually hears something coming from the Trans Am, a noise — a whistle. Faintly, but it’s real. Loki rushes in the direction of the Trans Am.

Notes

But fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poniard just as she flatted on the top note of the “Bell Song” from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingénue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flatfeet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on.
     —Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

As Mr. Chandler argued in his 1944 essay, the chief problem with the popular British whodunits of the day came as a direct result of focusing on the what and the how and not the gut-wrenching why — which, if the authors addressed it at all, usually ended up a half-assed afterthought. He then observes that Dashiell Hammett led a wave of hardboiled pioneers who “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

Granted, murder doesn’t drive the mystery in Prisoners (it’s more of an unfortunate byproduct), but it contains the same sort of structuring that’s predicated entirely on convoluted plotting instead of why people do the things they do. “We’re Satanists who want people to lose faith in God” simply isn’t good enough, even when Guzikowski injects a lot of haughty, ill-fitting religious symbolism into the script. It reminded me a little of Law-Abiding Citizen, which is most certainly not a compliment, in the way it layered the rich sauce of pretension over a fairly schlocky locked-room procedural that would have fared much better had Guzikowski simply embraced the ridiculousness and gone ahead full bore.

Because, at the end of the day, it makes no real effort to define these characters as anything beyond constructs of a dense plot. Every moment in the script feels like a frustrating, arm’s-length calculation designed to further the plot without doing much to make the characters feel like real people doing things for believable reasons. The script is just a series of “seeming” red herrings that add up to a goofy denouement. The corpse at the church and the over-the-top weirdness of Bob seem to be nothing but dead ends, yet Roger Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters (not to mention my Law of Economy of Goofy Procedural Storylines) tell us well in advance that this will all mean something. Somehow, I managed to shake myself loose from the edge of my seat and find myself annoyed that the more I learned about the plot, the less I seemed to know (or care) about the characters involved in the plot.

What could have been a fractured morality tale in the vein of Gone Baby Gone ends up a cheap, pulpy thriller that, ironically, gives pulp detective novels a bad name. As I mentioned, Guzikowski ladles a soupçon of religious symbolism onto this script, but it never quite adds up to more than vaguely creepy moments and bland, ineffectual character traits. So Keller’s fond of listening to the Bible on tape. Is this supposed to imply some sort of moral righteousness that allows him to do vile things to Jones while Franklin cowers? If so, that never comes through as a motivating factor in anything Keller does. It’s really just a conclusion I’m jumping to in order to give it a semblance of meaning. Otherwise, I’d just have to say it’s another plot device — gotta show the Dovers are Christians so audiences don’t assume they’re Satanists, which would negate Holly’s master plan. I don’t want to say that. Please don’t make that be the real explanation. For the love of God…so to speak.

In a script where a detective is given the laughably unsubtle name “Loki” (I’m surprised the captain wasn’t named Odin) and Keller is a carpenter in the world’s laziest homage to Jesus, it’s hard to accept that the proliferation of Christian-themed moments can simply exist to serve the plot. Then again, I can’t exactly figure out how a Norse trickster god figures into this story in any symbolic or literal way, so maybe Keller’s just a carpenter for the plot-based reason that he has to be good at building stuff ‘cause eventually he builds a prison cell. And while I’m bagging on the half-assed attempts at “deep” symbolism, I give Guzikowski some points for not using “chess” as the world’s laziest metaphor for the thrilling game of cat-and-mouse (like the aforementioned Law-Abiding Citizen, among thousands of others). However, I deduct points for choosing a maze motif, which may not be as popular but is equally cheap.

Ignoring the characters and their general lack of humanity for a second, let’s focus on the story. Prisoners has a tight plot in a theoretical way — everything adds up in the end, Guzikowski doesn’t ignore a single loose end, and the script moves from one setpiece to another with relative ease. But when the relative ease comes from the fact that this feels less like a tightly plotted story than a series of loosely connected “cool moments” in a movie, the end result is an empty, frustrating experience — and that, my friends, all comes back to the characters. Without anything to hang our hats on, how can anyone expect us to go along for the ride?

To recap: how does any single character in this script feel about the things that are happening at any given time? Other than, let’s say, “confused and/or angry”? Guzikowski answers that question by largely ignoring anyone other than Keller and Loki, but he also gives these two characters the short shrift. “I have to find my daughter”/”I’m a master detective”/”Get off my plane!” — it’s all so trite, and the lack of any real depth on these two characters in particular (and the menagerie of supporting players in general) takes a moderately interesting concept and flushes it down the toilet. When Holly makes her eye-rolling, Bond-villain confession, what little goodwill anyone has left for this story will drain out completely.

The Bottom Line

In other words, this is the Black List I remembered. At the risk of sounding like a total prick, I don’t see much hope for this creatively without abandoning the cheesy “twisty thriller” elements and grounding everything in something resembling believability. To paraphrase Mr. Chandler, Guzikowski needs to give kidnapping back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons. Otherwise, it’s going to remain like that crappy Poirot story where the guy has already committed a murder and rigs a room so that furniture will crash and a crazy pig-noise toy will imitate the sound of a scream to create the impression that the murder actually occurred when he was not on the premises. That’s not a good thing, guys. Not at all.

Tags: Aaron Guzikowski, Black List, Black List 2009, coverage, Prisoners, screenplays

Posted by Stan on December 17, 2009 5:13 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Reviews | Digg It