Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“You don’t belong here.”
Jake Epping (James Franco), a small-town teacher from Lisbon, Maine, is mired in the frustrations of the present. His marriage has dissolved, though not quite acrimoniously. He can’t help his favorite adult ed student, Harry Dunning, get ahead in life, in part because jaded bureaucracy doesn’t have the faith in Harry that Jake does. Jake’s life isn’t falling apart, but he’s losing battles to the onward march of the future, and seems resigned to his sort of lonely, sort of helpless state. He’s the sort of man who doesn’t take a stand because he doesn’t think he can do much to change things.
Enter Al Templeton (Chris Cooper, owning every scene he’s in), diner owner and friend to Jake. Al appears from his pantry, inexplicably dying of cancer, even though he was fine mere moments before. Then he lets Jake in on his secret: he’s got a time tunnel in the back of his diner, and it allows him to travel back to October 21st, 1960. Because Jake, like all time travel skeptics from Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee to Back to the Future’s Marty McFly, needs convincing that this is real, Al has him carve letters into a mere sapling in 1960. When he returns to the present, that tree has grown old and gnarled, and his carving is set deep into the bark: the letters JFK.
This first episode of Hulu’s new series 11.22.63 wastes no time getting to the point: Al’s purpose in traveling back to the past is to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. If JFK lives, he theorizes, his brother Robert will never be shot, and Lyndon B. Johnson will never escalate the US involvement in Viet Nam. Stopping Kennedy’s death will lead to a better way of life in the here and now, Al insists. But, dying, he can’t do it anymore. He wants to hand the reigns over to Jake, and finally give him a chance to make a real difference.
All of this setup flies by; “The Rabbit Hole” is immediately engaging, not the least because Chris Cooper is electrifying in his understated role. His plainspoken delivery is hard to argue with, even as he’s explaining the wonky rules of his time travel closet: no matter how long you’re gone, you return only two minutes after you’ve left. You always go back to October 21st, 1960. And if you go back to the past, you erase everything you did on your previous journey. This is all pretty fun stuff – the rules governing magic always are, especially when they’re not explored too deeply. But like the novel this is adapted from, J.J. Abrams’ 11.22.63 is less concerned with quantum mechanics and far more concerned with people.
Which brings us to James Franco. It was easy to be nervous about the casting here. Franco is often best when he’s allowed to be versions of his public persona onscreen, which is why he excels in Freaks & Geeks and Pineapple Express and is never quite convincing in Oz the Great and Powerful. But somehow, at least in this first episode, Franco does his best to make you believe his character and situation, and almost always succeeds. There are moments when his, for lack of a better term, James-Franconess erupts out of the character: when he has to play goofy for a couple of cops, for example, or tells a woman in the past to “try to stay sweet.” In these scenes and a few others, Franco seems to rely on his charm and his ability to be James Franco rather than his somewhat underrated talent, but that version of Franco doesn’t stick around long. He doesn’t – yet – quite disappear into Jake Epping, but when he does, he excels … especially when he’s scared.
Which brings us to the final rule of Al Templeton’s time tunnel: the past does not want to be changed. Several times during “The Rabbit Hole,” Epping attempts to forcibly change the past, often resulting in disaster and even death. There’s a chilling moment involving a car crash you absolutely know is coming (it’s not a subtle shot) but that doesn’t lessen the impact of it. Two sequences of Epping on the run from thugs are especially effective, and there’s a touch of the gruesome in the second, involving teeming cockroaches straight out of Creepshow.
It’s not the only Stephen King in-joke peppered through “The Rabbit Hole”: there’s at least one car that could be mistaken for Christine, and a moment Epping says he’s someone’s “number one fan.” These little winks to the Stephen King audience don’t stick out so much as remind viewers that Abrams isn’t shying away from the King association as other prestige projects (like Stand By Me, Dolores Claiborne, and The Shawshank Redemption) tended to do. And he doesn’t really have to: King’s novel won awards, ranked as one of the New York Times’ best books of 2011, and was one of King’s most popular novels of the last decade. In terms of King, this book is prestige, as far away from the author’s 1980s image of a hack with a habit of typing fast.
“The Rabbit Hole” is a great entrance into this world and this story. The attention to detail is top-notch (we get a crash-course on why Epping’s screen-printed T-shirt won’t fly in 1960, the food tastes better, and literally everyone is smoking), and the screenplay doesn’t paint 1960 as an idyllic wonderland: he’s encouraged away from the colored restrooms, for example, a wake-up call for someone who was in a mixed-race marriage. One of the most interesting things I noticed was that Epping can just saunter into a senatorial speech without being searched or having to walk through metal detectors; I wasn’t sure whether to be awed or scared. Judging by the cliffhanger, involving a mean man with a lethal hammer, it’s both. I can’t wait.
Kevin Quigley is an author whose novel I’m On Fire and short fiction collection This Terrestrial Hell are currently available as an e-book at fine digital establishments everywhere. He has also written several books on Stephen King, including The Chart of Darkness, Blood in Your Ears, and Ink in the Veins, all available from publisher Cemetery Dance.
