The Missus reminds me that Nicolas Cage was once good, which I guess is true–he was in my least favorite Coen Brothers movie and my least favorite David Lynch movie, but that’s still ahead of, like, 85% of all movies, right? But now he’s just a bag of tics to which some big studio or other occasionally staples a paycheck. Even if he was handing in young-DeNiro performances every time, there’s almost no point in trying to fill the shoes of Edward Woodward in the role of Sgt. Howie. It’s like Vince Vaughan in the remake of Psycho–nice try, but sometimes when you put a quirky character actor into an off-kilter horror film, you get career-best gold the first time around, and trying to duplicate that alchemy is utterly futile.
The real problem, though, is setting the film in America. So much of the strength of the original Wicker Man lies in its very specific milieu, that of the pagan rites of the United Kingdom. To say that the existence of a pagan cult in the middle of the Great American Nowhere strains credulity is to put it mildly. On the other hand, if the filmmakers were to go the more predictable (but also more believable) route and transmogrify the Summerislians into Old Testament types, not only would they be treading on ground trodden pretty damn hard and pretty damn often (there’ve been more than enough Children of the Corn movies, thanks), but they’d be losing the ability to play with the arthouse audience sympathies the way the original film did. Pitting Sgt. Howie’s priggish (though sincere) Christianity against the islanders’ earthy, unabashed paganism ensures that the viewer–like as not a lapsarian–will, on some level or other, be rooting against the Sergeant…until the viewer’s growing sense of complicity in an atrocity gets the better of her, but by then, of course, it’s too late. Make the Summerislians fundies, or even just exurbanites with skeletons in their closets (as I’m assuming LaBute will do, given his preoccupations in the past), and you’ve stumbled out of the blocks.
This is an awful lot of judgement to pass on a film that hasn’t been made yet, I know, and I’ll happily eat my words if the thing comes out great. But The Wicker Man is a very special movie. I’d like it to remain so.