What's in "The Box"? Maybe nothing, but a bizarre chain letter and moral challenge

Back in the early 1980s there was a black comedy called “Basket Case” that had the great script line “What’s in the basket?” (A millstone.) And I recall an HR meeting back in the middle 1990s when I carried some papers in a cardboard box, closed, and the HR woman asked, “what’s in the box?”

For a young couple, with a nice middle school son, in Richmond VA (played by James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) that was a good question. It starts off innocently enough on a cold rainy morning after Thanksgiving when they find a package on the doorstep in their suburban Richmond home. Okay, Mom is a prep school English literature teacher , and Dad is an engineer at Langley which, in Hampton VA (beyond Williamsburg and Ft. Eustis) is a 60 mile commute. And no matter that Richmond usually wouldn’t have much snow by early December.

This sets up, as moviegoers say, a good story, for Richard Kelly’s latest excursion into existential thrillers, “The Box.” He opens his movie with some CIA teletypes about a guy that has gotten out of a burn unit and is delivering bizarre presents to private home, apparently with the intention of creating bizarre chain letter. The man is Arlington Steward, played by a creepy but assertive Frank Langella, with part of his face burned away. “I am not a monster” he reassures Norma. No, a freak accident with lightning may have made him an extraterrestrial deity.

This is all back in late 1976, when Arthur is an engineer on the Viking Mars landing, which you think will fit into the bizarre plot. Probably most readers now have heard about the moral puzzle: press the button, you get one million dollars, and someone you don’t know will die. You can see how that can set up the illegal chain letter – but only when frivolous wives take the challenge. Husband and wife here will be confronted with their own moral challenges, with a new kind of Catholic complementarity.

In form, the movie becomes a bizarre treasure hunt (rather like "Vertigo"), with lots of foreshadowing and clues, with an imagination for how technology would go viewed from 1976. It’s interesting to see all this without the Internet or social media figuring into the story.

The Richmond location looks good (we see Broad Street in snow), and imdb shows that Kelly himself is a young man (about 34) from the Old Dominion -- previously known for “Donnie Darko” (naming his production company -- the longer director's cut is what you should see now) and “Southland Tales” (which epilated Justin Timberlake). Kelly wrote the screenplay based on a short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson (there is a red button on the Box). This time, the movie has big studio distribution (Warner Brothers). The moral tone of the movie is indeed conservative, and fits the results of the latest GOP sweep in the 2009 election in Virginia.

Pictures: mine (from 2004)