A Washington Post reporter, still teary-eyed from his wife’s accidental death, finds himself one night on a West Virginia road, with no idea how he got there. With the help of a suspiciously calm deputy (Laura Linney, “You Can Count on Me”), John Klein (Richard Gere, “Autumn in New York”) quickly unveils a pattern of frightened townsfolk who have all witnessed the same “mothman” that his wife was drawing at her deathbed.
Simultaneously, Klein begins to receive phone calls from mysterious voices spouting off prophecies and seemingly knowing his every move — even when his phone is unplugged.
Even better, Klein manages to get recordings of the voice, complimented by an analyst’s declaration: “These aren’t human voices.” Good enough for your everyday B-rate HBO flick or the latest episode of “X-Files,” but nothing extraordinary — until they tell us it all really happened. Your average, unquestioning moviegoer would be so trusting as to believe such.
The credits for “The Mothman Prophecies” make the bold and inaccurate proclamation that what you are seeing is based on real events. The truth is, “Based on real events” here means this and only this: the sketchy details of the life of New Yorker John A. Keel have been cinematically rearranged as represented by Gere’s John Klein and Alan Bates’ (“Gosford Park”) Alexander Leek.
To set the record straight, the real mothman prophecies go something like this: Keel, already fixated on the bizarre and occult when he was commissioned by Playboy to investigate the sightings of a peculiar figure resembling a moth (A plane? A bird, maybe?), related the story of the mothman and its predictions some years ago, and more recently in his novel of the same title.
Keel swears to have heard voices on the other end of his telephone (presumably from the mothman) for a number of years, warning of the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Martin Luther King — not exactly the most difficult of predictions. Keel also claims to have been told that Robert Kennedy should stay away from hotels. Who, at the time, couldn’t have made an educated guess on any of these?
The extent to which “The Mothman Prophecies” embellishes the truth in the name of cinema is beyond manipulative — it’s flat out deceptive and insulting. The greatest story element in support of indulging in Keel’s little fable is the recording of the mysterious voice — but even that was made up for the screen. Keel somehow never managed to catch the voices on tape and admits he was often the only one able to hear them. It would seem polite and in good taste to avoid suggesting mental instabilities, but let me speak for those with some sensibilities: This seems more like schizophrenia than anything else.
The film itself is so extraordinarily tiring, that when bright lights and loud noises are thrown about with reckless abandon, one cannot help but awaken from the deep, deep sleep the movie has evoked. Gasping can be expected in even the most disinterested movie theater, but don’t let your shock be confused with enjoyment, for you’ll quickly be lulled back to sleep.
GRADE: C
