Nancy’s Reads & Reels: "Take Shelter"—All Your Fears in One Movie; "The Leftovers"—A Novel About a Traumatized Community

Michael Shannon is Curtis a hardworking family man living in a small Ohio town.  He has a nice but modest home, a devoted wife and a young daughter who is deaf.

He begins to have premonitions and dread of coming disasters. At the beginning of the movie he stands outside in the rain and holds out his hand, the rain is brownish and oily. He then begins to experience increasingly bizarre and terrifying dreams.

His wife and friend notice his odd behavior and when he sets out to build an elaborate storm shelter his life really goes off the rails.

Jessica Chastain is Samantha, the wife, and Tovia Stewart is Hannah, the daughter. Michael Shannon is riveting as a good man who fears losing everything and gradually unravels.

All that being said, many of his fears are something we can all relate to: environmental disasters, losing your job and health insurance. Perhaps when Take Shelter ends you will ponder the close up of raindrops on an outstretched hand — I did.

Just finished reading The Leftovers, a novel by Tom Perrotta. This book was a real bummer.

I haven’t read any of the rapture novels, which obviously gave Mr. Perrotta the idea for his book, and never had the desire to read them. Imagining your family and friends just vanishing for no known reason is hard to get your brain around. Set aside the premise and you have character studies of ordinary people put in an extraordinary situation.

I would have preferred reading about how Kevin Garvey, Mapleton’s new mayor, deals with his dying marriage, teenage daughter, and college-age son without the vanished part (there are plenty of more believable situations). Garvey’s wife moves out (even though her family has been left intact), the mayor’s teenage daughter is hanging out with a troubled young woman who moves in with them and his son has dropped out of college to follow a nutty prophet named Holy Wayne.

Each of these characters, especially the daughter and son are described in a realistic way that held my interest. I really liked another book of Perrotta’s, The Abstinence Teacher, and I saw and liked Little Children and Election — movies made from his books — so I found this book somewhat disappointing.