FilmBlather.com

"She fucking killed herself tonight. She's dead. And so are you."

If there's one thing that every film writer on the planet harps on ad infinitum, it is the notorious wasteland that is January at the movies. It would be one thing if there were simply nothing going on; instead, studios use the month as a dumping ground for projects that have been delayed, shelved, test screened to disaster, et al. So when December's Oscar frenzy draws to a close and you start seeing trailers for, say, a cheesy-looking supernatural thriller starring Ashton Kutcher to be released on January 24th, the signs are not good. I try to keep a more or less positive attitude, but I know several critics who view the beginning of the year as active punishment.

A side effect of this is that movie experiences that would normally elicit mild satisfaction result in elation instead. Such was my reaction to The Butterfly Effect, the aforementioned seeming travesty, which turned out, against all odds, to be shockingly dark, startling, thoughtful and good. Its script wasn't tossed together over lunch break, nor was the footage edited by committee. The plot isn't airtight, but it serves, and the movie consistently surprises you -- sometimes with a twist of the story, other times simply by how far it is willing to go in the direction of darkness and violence. This is so different from what I expected.

Though the trailer cheerfully reveals the thrust of the plot, the script doesn't tip its hand until relatively late -- so late that I was almost beginning to question my recollection of the advertising. (It certainly pays to go into this one cold.) The opening indulges in the irritating and all-too-common stunt of showing a crucial scene from late in the film in an effort to "set the mood" or some such nonsense. Then Ashton Kutcher goes away for a while, as the movie rockets back into the past of its protagonist, who suffered from mysterious blackouts as a child. Sometimes the blackouts seemed to come at random times -- Evan would be eating lunch in the kitchen, for example, and then next thing he knows he would be standing in the middle of the room holding a knife. Others came at traumatic and inopportune moments -- the results of a dangerous prank were wiped from Evan's memory, as was most of the time a friend's father took him down to the basement with a video camera. An attempt to recover recollections of the events using hypnosis ended in bloody convulsions?

Soon enough, the movie introduces its central gimmick -- Evan, now played by Kutcher, can use the journals he kept to help him with his blackouts as portals back to the times and the places recorded in them. As he begins to use this power in attempts to fix what is wrong in his life and the lives of those around him, he finds that his revisions result in different, drastic, and often unpleasant changes -- hence the titular reference to the Chaos Theory.

It is here that we begin to realize the level of the film's sophistication. Now, this isn't exactly Marcel Proust, but relative to my expectations it was fairly striking. The Butterfly Effect has a frighteningly bewildering first act -- even with the knowledge of where the story is eventually headed, it's intentionally impossible to make heads or tails of the lurching, scary initial forty minutes. Then, although its central concept is simple, the movie begins to intricately weave elements from the opening scenes together with the ideas it introduces. When all is said and done holes remain, but I was impressed with how carefully The Butterfly Effect maintained the integrity of its plot strands.

I was also aghast at how deeply into sinister and R-rated territory New Line permitted writer-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (Final Destination 2) to venture, though that had to do more with my expectations than the actual content -- I was awaiting something in the bland, harmless vein of Swimfan. In the end, though, it wasn't just the violence and darkness that I responded to, but the way the film uses those elements to genuinely unsettle us.

The factor that is likely to keep the real film fans away from The Butterfly Effect is Ashton Kutcher, the boneheaded star of such hallmark cinema as Dude, Where's My Car and Just Married. While you won't catch me singing his praises, I must admit that he acquits himself. He never quite disappears into the role, but there is barely a hint of his freakish That 70's Show personality.

Bress and Gruber come up with the perfect closing note -- for a second my heart sank because I thought they were going to bail, but they stay with it, to glorious effect. Forget what you know about January movies. This isn't dumping ground material. This movie is thinking -- it's not always thinking straight, but it's always thinking.