Column: A movie's story exposition is a tricky thing. Consider how we learn what's what in ‘Presence.'

Chicago Tribune

29-01-2025

I saw a good movie the other night, guided by a tight, 85-minute narrative and a gratifying seriousness underneath its supernatural premise.
The film is 'Presence,' made for a couple of million dollars, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and written by the equally versatile industry veteran, screenwriter David Koepp. They made 'KIMI' together, similarly scaled, and terrific.
'Presence' does, however, have a little trouble setting itself up for success. It's a matter of exposition, the stuff screenwriters typically crowbar into the beginning of a movie, with the intention of explaining the premise or a character's situation without too much fuss.
In 'Presence,' Koepp's introductory scenes remain elusive as well as allusive on details regarding what sort of financial chicanery and potential legal trouble facing the Lucy Liu character. Her husband (Chris Sullivan) may be dragged into the circumstances. The family in 'Presence' has been living with evasions and secrets for years.
The story unfolds from the visual point of view of the unseen, ghostly presence haunting this family's new house, for reasons revealed in time. Koepp's scenes, confined to the two-story house or just outside it, play out as acts of voyeurism, sometimes a line or two in a bedroom, sometimes longer scenes roving around the house. Soderbergh encourages us to lean in and judge some of the murmured conversational details for ourselves, avoiding (mostly, not entirely) the usual 'OK, this part is important' close-ups as a cue.
There is a downside to this approach. Do we glean enough of what's at stake, outside Koepp's present-tense framework, regarding Liu's character? Does this guesswork feed the film's pervasive atmosphere of mistrust in a crafty way, or is it more of a wait what?
Most folks tend to focus on two elements of movies: Plot, and acting. That's the movie, essentially. Acting, plus story. Most folks are not future or current or former critics, who tend to get into the whys and what-elses of the movies. Why is that pratfall funny? Why is this one mirthless and artless? Why does that extremely violent scene offend me, and this other extremely violent scene in another film, by another director, justify its particulars? Why is this elaborate camera choreography so beautiful, and why is another, similarly designed shot, in a lesser work, showing off like a pretender?
The director Vincente Minnelli once cited 'a hundred or more hidden things' that conspire to create any single second of film containing a speck of magic. Digging for those hundred or more elements can lead to some compelling evidence for an aesthetic argument. Those elements of filmmaking contain the here's-why behind an opinion.
The story's the thing, as Shakespeare almost said (he said 'play,' because he rarely went to movies). And expositional deftness doesn't hurt, whatever the narrative medium.
Anton Chekhov's full-length plays made little sense to his initial audiences because he didn't write plots they could hum. With 'The Seagull' Chekhov threw out most of the heavy melodramatic narrative machinery dominating the 19th century Russian plays no one stages anymore. He didn't want it. Or need it. He only needed his audiences to relax and forget what they thought they needed.
Every artist dreams a new world. Earlier this month, the globally mourned passing of director David Lynch sent millions into a collective dream realm of his film work. That work is nothing without one of Lynch's most cherished words: abstraction. Abstraction: the enemy of mundane clarity.
Lynch returned often to that word, abstraction, in interviews and reluctant explanations of the dreams and nightmares he filmed. His screen imaginings took him, and us, to points unknown and unsettling, in shadow realms including 'Eraserhead,' 'Blue Velvet,' 'Mulholland Drive' and the far reaches of 'Twin Peaks,' especially the second, recent set of Showtime episodes.
Often Lynch relied on mystery tropes, none more basic than the four words — who killed Laura Palmer? — that sold the first 'Twin Peaks' series to a huge initial ABC-TV audience, hooked by a fresh take on the whodunit genre. Earlier, Lynch's 1986 stunner, 'Blue Velvet,' created a distant relation to the whodunit: the whose-ear-is-it.
The story begins with Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) home from college after his father has suffered a heart attack. He finds a severed ear, crawling with ants, in a field near his home. Whose ear? Why does the police detective neighbor (George Dickerson, peerlessly sphinx-like) respond to the discovery the way he does? Is he a little off, like everything in Lumberton?
There's hardly any exposition at the outset. None needed. The questions and the ear are plenty. Besides, Lynch is pretty hopeless with conventional exposition, and conventional anything.
There's a scene later where Jeffrey is required to explain to someone (i.e. us) what's up with the 'well-dressed man disguise' worn by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) and its role in the story. It's not a scene anyone would teach screenwriting students. Lynch likely wrote it in a state of 'oh, hell, if I must.'
Already, not to his career benefit, Lynch had adapted and directed 'Dune.' The expository demands of Frank Herbert's source material must've been vexing to the filmmaker, more than any American of his time or ours, who mainstreamed (and mainlined) Surrealism and its neighbor, abstraction.
With 'Dune,' Lynch couldn't figure out a way of streamlining even a chip off that granite hunk of narrative into a tidy couple of blockbustery hours. It's a giant, toothy sandworm of expositional demands. And exposition is difficult to make interesting, even in projects requiring far less of it. Hardly any, even.
What's slightly frustrating, in the end, about Koepp's script for 'Presence' boils down to a few unwritten (or unfilmed) lines at the beginning. Would the film succeed more fully — and it does succeed, on its own terms — if it were a touch more direct, less consciously dodgy, early on? Or would even an expositional micro-dump leave us with a more ordinary movie?
And there's your nut graph. In journalistic phraseology, the nut graph sets up the premise or controversy or questions raised by a newspaper story. Or a column. Much like a typical bite of exposition in a movie, or a play, the nut graph belongs at the start of something, not the finish, lest people become disoriented. Lost, even.
But this once, in honor of David Lynch, we'll make an exception.