cetaylor3

I posted this review here in March, 2012. Just watched another Jessica Chastain film tonight ("Memory"), which led me to recalling Take Shelter, came here and discovered my review has disappeared. But i'd kept a copy, so once more with feeling ... and with many spoilers:

This powerful film is about many profound aspects of relationship to self and others -- and ramps up the stakes and odds by seeing it all through the lens of schizophrenia, a state of being which casts an inordinate constant shadow of doubt, distrust, and suspicion on both -- oneself and others. So the film is also about trust and communication. And it's about the power of secrets, the insidious power of secrets -- and, boy, is schizophrenia a "perfect" lens for examining the role and power of secrets cuz the diagnosis means being at the fulcrum -- the schizophrenic has hyper-attuned antenna for "secrets" in the world around him. And, in this case at least, Curtis (positioned in the film to be probably schizophrenic but also potentially psychic) is mightily propelled to simultaneously keep his own brain's mysteries a secret from even the most intimate others in his or her life.

So, to my mind this film pivots on turning points that have to do with secrets - and Curtis's relationship to them. And this bears entirely on my interpretation of the final scene - and convinces me that it is a dream.

When, for the first time in the story, Curtis opts to let go of his secrets from Samantha - fully let go - which means not only revealing his hidden truth to her but also letting her be his partner and witness at the shrink's (rather than seeking counseling alone, in secret) -- he makes a life-altering step toward releasing the power of secrets over his being. No less significant than the more explicitly framed life-altering step -- toward trust -- which was the step he took in unlocking the storm shelter door.

And after the shrink's, the remainder of the film is, imo, Curtis's dream of connecting -- feeling on the "same page" -- and another significant step toward healing: In the dream, he's no longer alone in his suffering and hallucinations. He dreams the entire beach scene. Imo, they didn't actually go to the beach - they had turned their budget for the beach over to paying shrink bills. Instead, what the film ends with is him having a powerful and healing dream: Unlike all his previous hallucinations, this one is a dream, not a nightmare, for the key reason that for the first time he wasn't alienated and alone and dealing in secret with his visualized demons.

In his dream -- because he has let his wife "in" by including her even in his shrink sessions -- he is now able to see them as allies, loved ones seeing the same world he sees. He is no longer panicked -- or as panicked -- by the approaching storm he sees, he remains transfixed with a look of mystification and beholding in his face -- largely because in this dream, he is not the only one, not even the first one to see the storm, his daughter is. Though he does grab up his daughter, there is a newfound degree of calm to his fear of what lies on the horizon precisely because his family shares his perception and fear.

Samantha even feels and examines the same motor-oil downpour (an inclusion that, imho, tips the scale of the director's intention even if he disclaims any preferred reading - raining motor oil cannot happen in a "real" storm). Imo, the reason it happens here is to indicate, metaphorically, that husband and wife are now - at last - in his own view of his world and his marriage -- back on the same page of shared perception, symbolized visually for him in his dream by casting his wife and daughter as seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels.

And so the dream is both effect and cause - it comes about as the effect of his having let Samantha into full partnership in his struggle -- and as "cause" (or trigger of further healing beyond the end of the film) because the dream is the first time his hallucinations don't include feeling alone and alienated from his loved ones in the maelstrom of his perceptions of the world. The storm itself has always been metaphoric for the chaos and potential for life to be threatening and terrifying, but now he's found a vital life truth, that (you could say, to borrow a political phrase) "it's the secrecy, stupid" that is the real "killer" in life with oneself and others, not the vision/hallucination that terrifies. To borrow from politics again, FDR this time, you could also say he learns, or starts to learn, that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

(Meanwhile, a side note of sorts: At the moment the three of them entered the storm shelter, I recalled something a Brazilian author once wrote, "The schizophrenics are the antenna of the human race." In the context of this film's story, I initially applied that in a literal way - that perhaps it was going to turn out he was indeed psychic. And that is how I initially interpreted the final scene as well. But within minutes -- and something I additionally loved about the film -- its reverberations after the "final curtain" led me to realize that instead I see him metaphorically having been the "antenna" that he chose to act on ultimately in a way that led him back to his family rather than away from them.)

I'm so thoroughly in agreement with the accolades here that i probably wouldn't have opted to write something, but I feel a need to respond to one commenter's "a slight reliance on the 'maternity drives women mad trope'"

If I understand the intention behind that comment, I don't think - and didn't feel - that the filmmaker made even a slight reliance on that trope. At the very least, I'd revise that phrasing to 'Catholic corruption (not maternity) drives women mad'** ...

But, as the storyline and Lorna herself articulates explicitly, an even broader message is that 'Being disbelieved drives women mad'.

The long - centuries-long, maybe since forever - history of men raping, abusing, then vilifying women as unworthy mothers or "whores," as exemplified in the series, treating them as baby-producing objects who don't deserve to raise children, and attacking them as hallucinators or otherwise not credible.

The history of women not being believed is a long and literally tortured one. And if any one thing is "driving women mad', I think the film's message would suggest that it's the fact of being unheard and not believed. These women's early life experience was tragic, traumatic, criminally abused, but in their ensuing adulthoods, it was the ongoing dismissiveness by a colluding (actually conspiratorial) male power structure toward their stories, their truths, their rights, their lives that is what 'drives them mad'.

When the last episode ended and i sat discussing these themes with my husband, who is more disgusted and offended by these eternal schemes of men to oppress women, at one point my eyes landed on the binding facing me in the bookshelf: Anita Hill ... Believing -- echoing of one of an infinity of 'plotpoints' through history of women struggling to be believed from Salem witch trials to Joan of Arc to Magdalene laundries to women whistleblowers everywhere (Karen Silkwood to Brooksley Born) to women in the military or in Hollywood or re sex manipulation to women by doctors about physical symptoms. (And imagine if just Anita Hill alone had been believed, what a different nation we would be living in.)

** and, btw, while I don't know the intended definition of "mad" as used by the original commenter that triggered my response here, I continued her choice of "mad" but only to mean 'enraged' (by injustice) and/or devastated, not 'insane': As Lorna noted explicitly and soberly to Colman near the end of ep. 6 when she refuses to claim a "not in right mind" / insanity defense: "I am not mad. I never was."

I had seen both Children of Heaven and Color of Paradise years ago and thoroughly valued them and remembered Majidi as a director whose films touch me. So i brought that background to choosing and seeing The Willow Tree tonight. And i share the respect for the acting and directing that is already voiced here - by a relatively few number of reviewers (as imdb reviews go).

But I write to convey something I felt strongly that no other reviewer seemed to be hit by in the same way.

And here begin the spoilers.

It's been a long long time since I saw a film with such a downward spiral by the chief protagonist that accelerates unrelentingly to the finale. Some might see the very last minute of the film as ambiguous as to whether the protagonist is headed for falling further or rising like a phoenix. I did not see ambiguity nor phoenix-rising; to me it was depiction of a destiny that was a depressing path to witness. (The ant resurfacing in the last shot was surprisingly blatant - my quibble with one directorial choice - but if Majidi wanted that resurrection shot to convey an echo/symbol of a second start, that wasn't a credible hook to hang any hope on in my 'read'; it was more of a blatant bookend to second chances.) Writing a plot in which a chief protagonist descends into bitterness that becomes self-sabotage is a tough watch. Imho.

(I see and highly rate many a film that deals with depressing circumstances, but not in memory with such a straight slide downhill to The End.)

My (much older but close) brother was blind, coincidentally also from age 8, not from firecrackers but from scarlet fever, years before I was born (although he would tell me during 4th of July fireworks that it was the rare thing he could perceive as an awareness of light flashes). And through the first third of the film, I could relate to the protagonist, having grown up myself with braille books and seeing-eye dog as part of family life. My brother never thought of himself as 'handicapped' (he was an Eagle Scout, he made furniture as a hobby, etc) and more to the point he was upbeat - until another medical crisis befell him by the time he was a father of three and stole his life at age 41, way too young.

I share this in part because it may have impacted how i saw the last two-thirds of this film, which i *couldn't* relate to personally from my own life because my brother never regained eyesight - and also never became bitter or self-sabotaging in such a way. Again, it was a tough watch imho.

The film is well made, well acted. I just write to say that it has a far tougher message than, say, Children of Heaven or Color of Paradise.

The surprise to me is that it hasn't been seen more - or reviewed more - since its Sundance launch in 2015. It's quite a good film that becomes engaging in a way that builds steadily.

In contrast to another reviewer here, I want to suggest that the plot is unpredictable, at least at the level of specifics and so I don't want to even give an alert and talk about spoilers.

I recommend watching it - it's a quality film with a theme that digs deep - into what I would call the role of a fantasy in not just one person's life but reverberating, like falling dominoes, into surrounding lives ... more specifically, how something of a fluke (a wedding present) can stimulate a fantasy that over time impacts every member of a family across generations due to fallout from that one instigating worshipful fantasy, in varying ways that determine the life trajectory of others rather than the original fantasizer.

I'm someone who always pays attention for deeper meanings that a film title "invites" me to dwell on for a while after the film has ended.

Some commenters here, including Germans, have noted divergent preferences between the two titles, and the Q&A notes that the original title "Work without author" is a familiar phrase with resonance for Germans that isn't there in English. But even without that reason, I appreciate the choice in English of "Never look away."

That's because I've now thought about the reverberations of that admonition to young Kurt to a degree I likely would not have if Elizabeth's wrenching poignant words had faded into the story's many twists and turns without the title reminding me: pay attention to those words.

And i see a rich linkage in the two parts of Elizabeth's urging to Kurt - the titular admonition followed by and joined to a pithy philosophy: "All that is true is beautiful."

We see young Kurt take that guidance to heart at face value, unquestioned, even as he refuses to let his mother's protective hand blind his view of his beloved aunt's resistance to authority. We put ourselves into his young mind and perceive him plausibly interpreting her to mean 'Look for the beauty in true life even when it's painful, anguishing to behold."

And that early lesson/dictum becomes a kind of moral compass for him that his memory of her and that trauma sometimes have to snap him back to. Her words play a role in an evolving honesty and integrity as to where and how he directs his talents as an artist and what kind of husband (and presumably father) he becomes.

The title seems especially pertinent to the artistic directions he takes, notably as we watch him struggle with being obliged into social realism - which in Soviet/East German hands at least was the opposite of 'true': he could only paint heroic, strong, glorified workers - until his distaste for the straitjacket leads him to escape. And as he meanders artistically in West Germany, his new mentor's assessment - that his modern-art abstractions "are not you" - shakes him up. It echoes of Elizabeth's voice linking truth - true to life, true to oneself, one's sensibilities, one's values, one's life learnings - and beauty.

For him, it's only when he sees a truth in photographs, even of mass murderers ("Don't look away!" - echoes of not looking away as Elizabeth had been wrestled away by Nazis), that he can bring into greater awareness by painting them with as much 'beautiful' artistry as he'd give to painting those he loves, inspired to improvised brush techniques that intrigue, capture attention and make people look, essentially compelling others to not look away.

Then to have the film end, with a plot echo we barely recall by that point - suddenly inspired to bring Elizabeth further back to life, having the busses honk in unison and to become a sort of twirling dervish exulting in their sound, transported by it, just as she had - leaves us with the undeniability of the stamp that Elizabeth's spirit of truth, beauty and freedom have had in directing him to look truth in the face and make it his art. As a child, he stood apart from her orchestrated bus-honking dance, seeming a bit mystified but now there's no holds barred in his assimilation of her message for his life.

Early in Marcus's time on campus, during a American history lecture about Puritan compromises as a "new covenant," a student suggests that it's the same as "going along to get along" ...

That line seems at the moment to just depict a fellow student speaking up to show off or try to score points, but in retrospect that line seems to ricochet into the title theme of the film.

Indignation, if acted upon, is kind of the opposite of "going along to get along" ... and we see Marcus being challenged in context after context, at home, then at school in various situations to "go along" and he rebels.

The backdrop is the Korean War where the draft that hangs over all the students is, if you will, another kind of "going along to get along." Conformity as a doctrine, military or societal, encapsulates a dominant vibe of the 1950s. The Dean's mantra-philosophy could be called Going along to get along; his parents prescribe it - and his mom even turns it into a bribe with Marcus; fraternities thrive on peer-pressure go along to get along; bullies like his initial roommate mock others into going along to get along ("Don't be so serious"). Marcus's indignation manifests as a near-omnipresent irritation - at having his boundaries violated (Olivia's letter) and being taunted/bullied, his indignation at required chapel in a school that's supposedly open to "all faiths" (but not to his atheism, which the Dean mocks as he denounces Marcus's mentor-hero Bertrand Russell, one who defied going along to get along).

And as all of this converges in my post-film reflections, I'm seeing the message of the film as a two-edged sword: Enacting indignation can cast a die that can get you killed. But the message (even while explicitly said or implied by adults and older students) is actually *not* Watch out! (i.e., Rein in your indignation) but more like Who will stand up to the bigoted or bullying or suffocating forces and constraints in society that makes one indignant in the first place? And add hypocritical ["Mr. Messner, hypocrisy is a very strong word!"] with the irony/hypocrisy that the Dean preached tolerance to Marcus while he was being intolerant of any 'coloring outside of the lines'. And one final coping-strategy (that his fraternity convinces him is foolproof) becomes the false-move that seals Marcus's fate, administered by the Dean.

We witness a good-hearted conscientious young person running afoul of such intolerances over and over and ultimately paying the biggest price because, as he narrates in voiceover, one untolerated self-determination can lead like falling dominoes to a completely unimagined (and unwanted) fate. Because of showing up for oneself rather than acquiescing and swallowing one's indignation.

I think indignation is what the film elicits or seeks to raise in us in response to all the treacherous, inhumane, subjugating 'dominoes' that we see Marcos bombarded by as they really hit home and begin stacking up, trapping people into catch-22s, while coming of age.

I always give bonus points for a film that teaches about a true story, which I realize usually means not entirely true and when I learn post-viewing of the discrepancies from reality, they usually don't give rise to the baffling disappointment and headscratching I experienced after seeing Great Debaters last night - over 15 years late to discovering it - and then confounded by further discovering that it had changed reality in seemingly unnecessary and even deflating ways.

Yes, there were some clichés that some commenters have critiqued here and knocked off more than 2 stars for. But the story and acting were compelling and I took them to be immersing me in a realm of real experience, historically, that i was ignorant of. Bonus points.

But then I started discovering factoids both here and elsewhere that just leave me baffled - two significant ones in particular that seem inexplicable:

First, given that the story honors not only the lives but the real names of Melvin Tolson and James Farmer, Sr & Jr (and of wives Ruth and Pearl) ... why oh why did they fabricate names and apparently create composites and/or fictionalized personalities for the other debaters? It's hard to fathom a justification for this - and the headscratching wasn't abated by seeing the dvd's added interview by Denzel of Henrietta and others from among the real and still living debaters (just in time given that Henrietta died soon after).

All these debaters - meaning all 10+ years of them - were incredibly laudable standouts at a time that being outspoken could get any of them lynched. Chillingly courageous as well as surely brilliant as all their debate victories attest.

Second, why did they change history to portray their national upset victory as being against Harvard instead of the actual national champion they did meet and defeat in 1935 - USC?

Their special feature or somewhere claimed that they got permission from both universities to make this swap. What!? Imho the scriptwriter/director obligation was to the audience perhaps more than to the swapped institutions, choosing to reify some cliché that it's always Harvard as the pinnacle of all things academic, but in this case it was a lie. For what reason? Because audiences were predicted to only grasp the significance of such a daunting debate finale if it were Harvard? Because they liked the look of Harvard's debate room more than the actual Bovard Auditorium at USC? It erased the reality of USC just as it erased the reality of Henrietta and other debaters ... for no imagineable reason.

These are gratuitous alterations of history that come with a price - almost a kind of betrayal of audience education and seemingly a disrespect for audience capacity to be fully engaged by reality without having to 'trick them' into what reality was. (If it was based on a true story but *all* the characters named were changed, then i could perhaps feel less baffled but to selectively include historical figures and most of the actual debate stages but then fabricate some of them? That seduces an audience into expecting them all to be real people, real places...imho.)

Finally, to a slightly understandable but still disappointing less consequential degree, I (as well as a few other commenters here) became quite conscious by mid-story that the debate team was drawing the affirmative side of admirable positions every single time, never seeing them have to debate the negative that they wouldn't have personally believed in. Sure, it gave occasion for the kind of passion of conviction that the debaters summoned on some key occasions - like fabricated Samantha in Oklahoma or James Jr. At fabricated Harvard. But again it feels like distrusting the audience to handle a more realistic depiction in which they had to win many of their debates by arguing against their personal convictions.

Okay, I've vented. I did *really* like this film as I watched it. Which in a way made it even harder to swallow some feelings of gratuitous deception after it ended. And then to resent that it turned a solid appreciation of a story well acted in a film with an undue aftertaste, which I wish I didn't have to add.

P.s. My bafflement even led me to research the real debaters online which also proved confusing in that I learned Henrietta only debated for one year - in 1930 - and then had to drop out to her dismay - so she clearly wasn't in the 1935 national championship victory in the film, yet Samantha was supposed to be based on her. Was this fudged with because the 1935 team in fact did not have a woman in it the way Henrietta had been in the 1930 team? Was this another aspect of manipulating history for the sake of a Hollywoodable story with a woman and thus with some romantic intrigue? I tried to find anywhere on the internet a list of the debaters who won each of those national championships - they deserve to be named - but even on Wiley College's website or anywhere else, i could find no such listing. And my curiosity was in part because the other manipulations of history i vented about above made it easy to distrust their version that there was even a woman on the 1935 team. There are photos (without captions) online of what seem to be several all-male teams (not surprising for the era).

Despite all these chagrins, I am grateful to have learned this history unknown to me but for the film. It just seems so unnecessary and imho wrong to have made the above changes from reality.

I rewatched Sunshine last night, nearly 20 years after seeing it the first time in the theater with a friend while having just started knowing the person who would (still unforeseen) become my husband within 2 years, with whom I saw it this time after 18 years together. The life experience of all the complexities of marriage in the interim surely factors significantly in how much my periodic curiosity over the years to see Sunshine again was rewarded.

I can't possibly read the 2,000+ (!!) reviews here so I can only go by the "top 10" or so featured reviews in order to think I have something somewhat different to say about the film's meaning, so even 20 years 'late', when presumably hardly anyone will come here anymore, I offer these possibly novel thoughts.

First, I see it overarchingly as a fable - in part because the plot 'device' of the Lacuna erasure folds in some inexplicable but crucial-to-the-plot connections (e.g,, how does Joel, while deep into his struggle to stop the erasure, manage to collaborate in any real sense with Clementine to try tactic after tactic *together* to subvert the erasure? We can give a kind of poetic license to see it as a dream state of Joel's just wishing Clementine into an alliance of rebels (against erasure) that illustrates the intensity of his grief at seeing memories disintegrate being so strong that he conjures her up as ally. But when she says "Meet me in Montauk" - and that's where they actually do meet again, it more than suggests that Clementine, ostensibly unaware that Joel is even undergoing the erasure and doesn't even recognize him, has somehow managed to enter his erasure process, something ostensibly implausible ... in short, there are leaps of faith here (that we can readily 'buy into' given our own romanticisms) that we must make to the plot 'work'. That's key for me to seeing the story as a fable.

As to what it's a fable *about*, I think the most pivotal scene of the film - and the most consequential 'lesson' learned from the existential threat posed by full erasure - comes in the epilogue after the Montauk re-connection. That re-discovery of each other begins with a kind of 'blissful ignorance' - each one ignorant of their own erasure experience as well as their history with the other. With the rapid escalation in their chemistry (and only a hint of memory (when she asks him on the train "Do I know you from somewhere?"), they seem headed for an 'enlightened' uncomplicated harmony ... until they each receive the tapes (which suddenly made the subplot of the Lacuna staff explosive dynamics vital to the Joel-Clementine plot) and they each hear the other's taped vilifications of them.

Initially each thinks they can and should handle it to listen to the other's ventings ("it's only fair") but this is where an ultimate lesson for marriage and other relationships kicks in: To quote Aaron Beck's CBT 'bible' "Love is Never Enough," it takes work (meaning dedication, self-awareness, communication-skill learning, taking the gavel back from defensiveness or contempt or the other Four Horsemen in a John Gottman framework as to what makes relationships sink or swim).

And what we see in Joel and Clementine is that a vital piece of that work involves awareness and dialogue with one's own ego that can rush - with adrenalin flow - to take the gavel and react to hurt with retaliation and alienation. The most pivotal existential moment in the film and in their relationship comes when Joel is called upon - in the apartment hallway near the end - to let the words on the tape that have devastated his ego be soothed/overcome/put in perspective by a love and hope that his heart and body "know" to be an overriding truth in their bond and relationship. It's the mind, ready to defend the ego to the death, that has thrown away this love once and, despite his inability to recall the erasure trauma, he must re-take a leap of faith to choose love over ego - to dare to risk ego for love. And she responds in kind.

So that is what I think this movie depicts: an existentialist fable of choosing love over ego, heart and body over mind. There is no "spotless mind" and heaven help us if there were. That's the way I read Pope's original poetic encapsulation: a "spotless mind" that can somehow elude worry, doubt, distrust, etc and find a love that needs no 'work' to maintain is pure illusion. Instead the reality of love and connection is that it is a test of our capacity to grow beyond the controlling drive of our egos in the name of love.

I'm writing first to correct either a misimpression or ambiguous wording in another review:

This film is *not* a true story. What perhaps was meant was that real life wound up mirroring this fiction, which in turn mirrored real life. But the film characters and plot are fiction.

Which doesn't keep it from feeling viscerally real and kept me in anticipation (on-edge-of-seat-like) throughout, hoping that this was the kind of directorial flair for suspense that engages one's nervous system but eventually finds a release. This one, not so much.

The film puts us in the skin of two characters. The grieving mother in midlife crisis of faith - in self, in marriage, in work - powerfully conveys the paralysis of simultaneously reliving a life she couldn't save, capturing the haunting trauma of a bereft parent untethered. We see her give lip service to various strategies or tactics for recovery from grief's paralysis, to no avail, including an isolation that makes her coldly rebuff the approaches of the young teenager who becomes the second lead in the film.

He lives even more complex and fraught a hidden life than she does, but after multiple attempts to ensnare her interest, it's the first violence in the plot that brings them together, both of them initially wary of the other - in differing regards.

While I applaud the acting and realism of the plotline in each of the two converging stories makes the film unforgettable, the second key reason I write this piece is because of the spoilers I'm about to generalize by saying that the story ends tragically - in both the fiction and real life.

In the fictional story, there is a twist to the tragedy in that th woman who couldn't save her own son winds up saving a different child and his numerous siblings - at least for the immediate future. (Alas, not so in real life.)

It makes for a harrowing conclusion that affirms the sustained tension/suspense through the film was not gratuitous but rather a buildup that the final moments cap off accordingly. So this is to alert those who don't appreciate having films end on down notes.

In some ways, it reminded me of Pixote, a highly awarded Brazilian film back in 1980, telling also a very gritty reality with also a young male star where the story also ended grimly both on film and in real life. Such stories cry out to us all of the needs worldwide for putting more than lipservice to the treasuring of children.

Since we can't reply to each other, i'm writing a review i might not have written because i just finished watching Ep. 6 and i haven't fully digested it yet but to address one question I can answer.

One commenter wished that we'd known what year the story took place. Actually we do but it requires doing some quick math in the scene where Vittoria takes Giovanna to Enzo's grave - it is late 1995 at that point - and thus 1996 in the later episodes after the story skips ahead about 9 or 10 months.

It was hard to like a lot of the characters (which inherently limits my degree of engagement in a story - i was far more committed emotionally to Ferrante's "My Brilliant Friend" especially Season 1 when we got to know the leads as children with superb child actresses playing them).

But what makes them unlikeable here seems to have been key to the central theme as Giovanna (also superb in her first-ever film) begins from a place of hurt in the opening scene - overhearing her father say she's become ugly and reminds him of his "monstrous" estranged sister. She'd grown up adoring her father, and this was a brutal haunting stab. When her parents learn that she's heard that comment, they "walk it back" in what will become a litany of adult coverups, obfuscations, lies, hypocrisies and secrets that she scrutinizes in search of both truth and of what it seems to mean to be an adult.

She sees falsity, hypocrisy, betrayal, so many kinds of lies that she is soon swimming in them. At the same time, at age 15, she's confronting the paternalistic, crude macho misogynies and presumptuous disrespect for women as objects surrounding her as if to suffocate her at times, and she's continually having to slap them off. We do feel the full injustice of why a young woman should have to endure such indignities - and, to use Vittoria's word for it, being seen as "meat" - when it's already a full-time job trying to process all the lies. Plenty to make her angry and confused on at least two fronts.

And there's a convention since earliest novels, a kind of leitmotif, that threads through the story - a reappearing object that soon epitomizes this broader theme: it's a sumptuous bracelet around which so much 'violation' has occurred - theft, lies, secrets, betrayals - and in which Giovanna is implicated as are most of the central characters eventually. Learning the truth of the bracelet - its history/chain-of-custody and the emotions it evokes for each - becomes a symbolic quest within Giovanna's larger struggle to understand. The ultimate truth of the bracelet and of so much hidden family life, swept under a rug of lies, is at the heart of her loss of innocence that we walk (or motorcycle) through with Giovanna. It certainly doesn't make the rite of passage that is adolescence look any more likeable than are most of the characters.

P.s. There's a sort of 'epilogue' that comes after a moment I thought was going to be the series ending (which would have perhaps put too much of a bow on the finale, as Vittoria admits her lies and explains that she told them because "they were beautiful"). But I guess the point was to have us see a glimpse into Giovanna's lessons-taken from all her detective-like scrutiny of adult rationales, one of which is to take the reins as the master of her own fate, ever on guard against being used or taken lightly.

To adapt another Italian's mantra, her increasingly bold, defined choices in the epilogue suggest she's vowed to "do it her way."

This was a thoroughly engaging series that I would love to see again with my husband who never saw it. How did this get so buried? The performances and plotlines were exceptionally realistic at the time but I'm quite sure it would seem as relevant today as it did then.

How come Australia has managed a dvd with their system that's incompatible here and the U. S. can't come up with one? What sort of proprietary nonsense is making this unavailable?

I'm now understanding frustrations i've read by other posters about why there's a minimum character limit in order to post. If anybody's ever read my reviews, they'd know i have no problem writing reviews that expound at length, but for commenting on a series I saw 20+years ago, your inexplicable minimum character count just leads to this babble.

It's been years since posting here and never before for a reason that entails major spoilers, so this is a serious alert: If you haven't seen the film and don't want major spoilers, wait til you've seen the film to read this. I myself went into this film, as i typically do, knowing nothing of what to expect (reading no reviews) and that surely accounts for much of the unprecedented degree of "fog" throughout my viewing (although the terrible audio we had, missing lots of dialogue, was also part of the fog), such that as we left the theater, baffled, i couldn't have imagined giving it an "8" or even writing here, but that's where the "landmines" come in ... After getting home, reading many critics' reviews, I began to see the film through such new eyes that i suddenly made sense of its plotline and meaning that went way beyond what any critic was saying. I just finished every 'user review' here too and it has persuaded me to write this because i don't see anyone interpreting it in the way I'm here to propose:

I now believe that adult Sophie is (re)watching the camcorder that she has kept for 20 years with this one life-puzzle tape in it and now watches it (yet again?) with added poignancy and purpose for her now being the age her father was then. I believe she has probably rewatched this film many times searching for clues in her father that she didn't fully comprehend at the time. "Aftersun" may allude to a metaphorical "sunburn" she was left with from that trip and is forever dogged by.

While for Sophie that trip meant reconnecting with a dad she loves and misses (wishing at the end that they could stay on together in hotels forever) and, despite all her hesitant inquisitiveness seeking to know dad better and how he sees the world, she had not at all perceived the ultimate purpose of the trip for her dad. In retrospect, he telegraphed the purpose of the trip for him in ways we viewers in the moment also didn't fully "get" as to their "landmine" potential: Especially when he teaches Sophie how to defend herself physically, to hold up her arms just right, etc., he becomes agitated that she isn't taking it as seriously as he wishes and urges upon her just how important this learning is. (Only he knows that he won't have future opportunities to teach her these things.) In other scenes, he's relaying life lessons about being true to herself, etc. For me the landmine only 'exploded' an hour after the film - to realize that Dad knew this was how he'd chosen to spend his last days, doing all he could think of to leave life lessons and self-protections for his beloved daughter's future life.

We don't know what oppresses and depresses her father - and I believe two key scenes are in reverse-chronology (plausibly as adult Sophie's memory evokes them in that order): we see him enter the ocean and never return before we see him sobbing naked on the edge of the bed. (Of course, neither of those scenes can be from her watching the camcorder tape, i.e., they couldn't have been taped, but instead are either from adult Sophie's imagined scenes as to how some of her father's actions played out after she boarded the plane or from just the third-person narration stance that the film did often incorporate.) I believe a reason we'd seen dad fall asleep naked on the bed previously was background to give context when he sits naked and sobbing - and he's alone in the room. This is the truth of what happened after he left the airport through the double doors. He had planned this exodus but it filled him with grief nonetheless - a grief he'd been carrying since childhood when parents didn't remember his birthday(s) and he felt unimportant, untreasured, unloved - which would have given every reason for lifelong depression but we also could have been seeing a dad who was confronted, say, with a terminal illness or other reason besides "simply" depression. For whatever reason, I believe he bought the rug knowing it would be a tactile connection to him that he would be leaving for her (in his personal effects that would be sent to her). I believe he drank more at the end because as her departure grew close so did his intended plan to let the ocean take him away and he was drowning his sadness at leaving his daughter's world as he'd already decided to do. I think doing karaoke with her again was perhaps just too wrenching now that it was the eve of their final time together.

I also believe that his saying "I love you" to Sophie's mom, that made her confused and curious could well have happened if, say, their marriage had ended because of his depression but there was still caring and love.

I believe all this 'emotional history' of her two parents that she gets random clues about during that trip have become core pieces of a puzzle of who Sophie is to herself and yet adult Sophie still looks at the camcorder for more clues about what she might have missed in her father's words and actions during that trip.

I think the 'disco shards' of memory that intervene in the film at times are adult Sophie's ongoing bombardments of puzzle pieces about her heritage - her parents' relationship that brought her into existence and what they were like ... given that at least one parent was capable of sheltering her from the full truth of his (suicidal) intentions.

I myself find all these thoughts to be in the realm of over-interpretation, and I lay them out here partly as my own reality-check whether anyone else did see or could see the plotline and message in this way? Since none of the dozens of reviews I read tonight broached any of these readings of the film except for one commenter here who, almost as an aside, thought Sophie's dad at the end either a) went for cigarettes and disappeared or b) committed suicide, which the commenter sort of dismissed with an "eek."

My own view entails no "eek." And if anything, especially reading all kinds of reviews that used the word 'vulnerability' to describe what her father seemed uncomfortable with. That made me think of Brené Brown's work (on the power of vulnerability - if you're not familiar google that on TED talks and join the 60+ million people who've watched her talk; many a suicide results from the shame of vulnerability) and how one possible message in this film could be a kind of outcry from an abandoned daughter, 20 years later, wishing her father - as she keeps rewatching him on the 'eve' of his suicide - might have not despaired to the point of ending his life because of shame or a sense of failure that may have undergirded his depression. And indeed some of young Sophie's questions of her dad on that trip can be seen as her probing to understand her dad's inner radar and (painful) life experience and learning.

Please forgive my excesses of verbiage here or of what may seem off-the-wall over-interpretations. I write them largely to elicit whatever connection any reader might make and share to any of these notions of the film's message. Thanks.

I was in my early 20s when Glenda had her breakout role and my memory is that her emotiveness was the main thing reviewers talked about because she was on another plane from what level of gut-level feeling emerged from most acting. And, holy cow 50+ years later, she is every bit the actress she was then and then some. After the film and after the rawness of the story's plot managed to settle in, I found myself thinking she could well be the best actress of my era.

And having lost both parents and, before them a dear friend who Glenda physically reminded me of and her character Maud's personality reminded me of as well and since them my mother-in-law all to varying degrees of alzheimer's/dementia, I was constantly rocked by the script and its authenticity as to how this wrenching process can manifest.

The plot itself rang true and credible as I have seen how the memory of early life trauma that has haunted a person's life can indeed become a kind of obsession 'liberated' by the cognitive upheavals of alzheimer's so Maud's doggedness felt very 'real' as well.

Bravo to all, especially the writer and dear Glenda - may you keep blessing us with your tremendous gifts.

This is the film (which I saw last night) that made me realize there needs to be a separate advisory for "Sadistic Violence." This is what I just wrote the MPAA in fact:

Having just watched the first hour of "Widows" last night made me realize (on behalf of my husband as well) that you need to identify Sadistic Violence in movies. It is a whole other beast from 'run of the mill' violence, and viewers should be forewarned. Such a category would include torture (which is - arguably? - inherently sadistic) but would be broader enough to include films such as Widows that might be more 'gray area' vis-a-vis torture but not gray at all regarding inarguably sadistic violence by a major, recurring character in the film. An hour into it, we quit watching the minute that character re-entered the story to predictably carry out more sadistic violence.

While 'violence' is almost unavoidably omnipresent, as it comes with the territory of increasing numbers of films and TV (paralleling the ubiquitous contagion of food prepared with chili peppers?), including otherwise (meaning despite their violence) worthy legal or police crime dramas, and as a result we watch more of it than we wish, sadistic violence is another planet - a genre that also should have been specified in a TV series like "Scandal" for example.

This is a consideration I hope you too will see is worthy of overdue inclusion in your ratings. Your raters surely know sadistic violence when they see it, as distinguished from (alas) routine violence, and classifying it separately would be no more subjective than classifying 'normal' violence itself.

I'm sure there are plenty of others besides us who can tolerate violence up to a point but sadistic violence not at all. We need to know this in advance to make informed choices.

I rented "Widows" on amazon prime with no clue from just the word 'violence' or even 'thriller' that it would cross the line into sadism. Amazon prime has heard my complaint - immediately last night - and my strong urging that they should give such warnings, but it really has to come from you as you are the folks who watch every film to rate it.

Please take this seriously.

Thank you,

The review that is the current featured one includes this comment: "'Bubble' doesn't belittle the simple people it depicts, as many Hollywood-takes-on-small-town-USA films do, but really gives them great depth and complexity."

Well, maybe the film doesn't belittle them, but Soderbergh himself pretty clearly does. A jawdropper of a statement from him in the interview 'special feature' on the dvd reveals his perception of his chosen subjects, a perception that echoes of the kind of patronizing prejudgments of early anthropologists going into remote corners of the "third world" and feeding stereotypes of human cultures.

He says his first motivation for shooting the film was his pondering of what a life factory work must be and wanting to find a place to film a story around a factory-life-world that he went into with the perspective of alienation and disbelief that people could survive such horrible tedious existences.

So that's what he went into the project with as his 'curiosity' about how people trudge on in such monotonous-seeming routines.

Then comes his interpretation of the meaning of how his chosen "real-world actors" deal with news of a murder: In his interview, Soderbergh says that his view of why the 'real-world actors' have various understated reactions to the news of murder is because factory work is "dehumanizing" and they don't have the level of emotional feeling a Hollywood movie script would call for because their monotonous work lives have numbed them.

Man. That statement of his (which i've paraphrased except for his use of "dehumanizing") to me was unadulterated condescension and presumption that he came to 'know' this small town well enough to write off their low-key responses to death/murder as being the effect of factory-work dehumanization. Did he observe these factory workers in their family lives or see them react to some trauma wherein they had unemotional, undramatic responses that would be attributable to factory life? To see factory work as inherently dehumanizing and to read that into their variations on understated responses (as first-time actors to a fictional murder) just seems to be a case of turning factory workers into a "them" - an "other" - who he's saying aren't quite "human" in the way they feel things???

wow.

Hard to assign this series a number of stars, some aspects 10, others 1.

The acting was stellar, making the characters believable in their almost unprecedentedly dysfunctional family crucible.

And kudos to the way cinematography and editing created the most vivid 'inside' view of the mental tortures of PTSD that I know of on film, paralleling the way that A Beautiful Mind put us inside the mental labyrinths of paranoid schizophrenia. (For those commenters who have complained here about the erratic and incessant flashbacks, literally "flash" backs, and found them inexplicable, this would be my response: you were seeing a depiction of the manifestation of PTSD. Imagine how anguishing then it is for an actual PTSD sufferer plagued by all such 'cuts' and slices of trauma bombarding their mental visions, unrelentingly.)

But the artistry which achieved that depiction of PTSD is also a disjunct with the series ending where even more frenetic, barely visible cutting and slicing of flashes of violence -- seeming to be in the same vein as Camille's PTSD that we've been immersed into, racheted up in the splicings into the final credits as if on steroids, cannot serve the same purpose (in terms of the medium being the message) and thus left me with a sour end note as to director's choices. Those mid-closing- credits scenes were not illustrations of the workings of PTSD; they struck me (and my husband) instead as kind of cheap shortcut twists to stab us, the viewer with, so as to shake us up regarding what had seemed to be the series' final verdict on its crimes and punishments. Those cinematic/editing choices rode in on the backs of Camille's PTSD depictions, so to speak, but they violated the exclusive use of those choices up to that point for illustrating PTSD. These could not plausibly (story perspective wise) be Amma's PTSD, they were instead a break away into some "omniscient narrator" visuals. And while the series did put us into the POV of multiple characters, including Amma, that never included entering into anyone else's but Camille's PTSD-flashback experience/sensations.

So that attempted conflating of a use of a film-editing 'device' to illustrate PTSD and then in the last frames of the whole film to use that same 'device' for some wholly other purpose was, for me, a sort of sabotage.

And perhaps also a degree of disrespect for the story and/or the viewer to relegate such a story twist to a barely recognizable insertion mid-final-credits. Other films have deftly left us with final twists that 'owned' themselves, for one thing by coming before final credits - films for example that leave us with some micro last-minute filmed focus on a detail that changes everything, such as making us know that we'd been watching someone's dream rather than 'reality' - "Mulholland Drive" and "Take Shelter" come to mind. Their endings then became controversial fare for folks like us to debate as to what their ramifications and implications were for reframing the entire film's plotline, but that works. Sharp Object's post-ending ending just felt shortchanged and inappropriate to the film's chosen form-function schema.

(It also felt a bit cheap storytelling-wise to have Adora, in her very last extended scene with Camille, segue into a bit of her own backstory to telegraph to the viewer that she came by her dysfunctions "legitimately" i.e., handed down by her own mother to her. I would suspect that the novel did not wait until the last minute to weave that message into the telling.)

As an aside, viscerally, the hardest thing in the film for me was getting my mind around Camille's cutting. Most specifically, was she supposed to have engaged, at least sometimes in 'collaborative cutting' à la tattooing? How could she have 'achieved' those cuttings into her back? Unlike tattooing, which is inherently social, cutting is a very isolationist dis-ease; it felt disrespectful of the viewer not to give any kind of accounting for how those backside word-cuts could have happened, thus leaving it in the realm of implausibility.

Perhaps my biggest fascination with this movie was how it carried off its key theme, which (being the basis of the film's title) would seem to be blatant and yet, as I perceived it, not so. Other films have taken up the notion of celebrity as curse in a way that hits the viewer over the head far less subtly than "Lucky Them" manages.

The link to the theme hinges first, on a line tossed off as a rueful aside by Ellie (Collette) upon learning of the predisposition of a wild, rare Galapagos Bush Baby - ironically captured and caged as a wedding gift - who Ellie feels for as being surely lonely, projecting a key element of her own trajectory, only to be told that Galapagos Bush Babies prefer to be "left alone." "Lucky them." Indeed - and if only. The price for not being left alone by invasive, self-serving humans is that the bush baby winds up dead, apparently of gift-wrapped suffocation.

Second, when we finally come, as Ellie does, face to face with the elusive-and-mostly-presumed-dead mystery protagonist in the story's plot line, the nearly wordless sudden release of mystery and tension, comes as if a hot air balloon had been punctured, with a reverberating unstated "ohhhhhh" epiphany (of Ellie's) that some celebrities truly indeed are not kidding when they say they prefer to be "left alone." And we, like Ellie, are left to piece together the realization of just what lengths an exalted celebrity had to go to in order to find that preferred peace - faking his death, withdrawing from all public notice, yet still speculated upon in Elvis-like fashion as to sightings circulated by internet.

Ellie's own life had lived out a flip side of that celebrity coin, where she has been unable to move on in the decade-plus in which she has been 'stuck' in the wake of that faked death, in part because she tried to get around (drink it away) rather than plunging through the haunting mystery and sense of abandonment. When she has finally succeeded in tracking down the mystery, the 'aha' moment includes the realization that the escape via faked death was an exercise of free-will that wasn't personal (the irony echoes that she'd told upcoming celebrity Lucas that her standoffishness "wasn't personal"). She must finally see the abandonment on its merits and we sense her almost instantly respect it for what it was meant to be and to accomplish - and so now she "fakes" her write-up accordingly so as to honor his free will to have the life he chose. It seems that this choice by Ellie now shows up in her own demeanor before her editor with the fake story in hand. It seems that we leave Ellie suddenly seeming at peace with herself and with a better chance at becoming her own version of a "lucky them" than she has ever known: more irony: a fake story covering up a fake death may have given her too a chance to start a new chapter.

While that mystery and damning sense of having been abandoned as some kind of indictment on her had persisted, the Ellie we've witnessed throughout the film had shown the restless angst of someone who does not feel in control of her life's path but rather darts after deus ex machinas of sorts (mostly in the form of convenient lovers). Now, seeing with profound clarity how her long-lost lover had regained control over his destiny on his own terms in the most reversal-of-course kinds of ways, she seems to have caught a glimmer and inspiration for what it takes and means to regain control over her own destiny.

So, as I see it, the film is ultimately a fresh take on a recurrent filmic treatment of life's priorities – and of the follies or shallow unfulfilling rewards of what is thought of materially as "success." But it's an existential treatment here that reminds that even the most stuck-in-success of celebrities has a choice - and not the self-destructive choice of an Elvis opting for what would seem to have been a slow suicidal escape from limelight through overindulgence but one that was affirmative of an alternate existence honoring one's true self that had gotten lost in such limelight.

That the lead character worked for a magazine whose raison d'etre was capitalizing on limelight and "success," seeking stories that twist their way into notoriety - and that she was edited by a man (Platt) so immersed in that definition of life that his own need for escape (into pot) was depicted as addictive and consuming - served to add irony to the message, given that the film positions us from the outset to accept their occupational goals as legitimate lenses through which to see the story and to seek the demystification of the iconic, disappeared celebrity. It's through the lead character's combined professional and personal converging epiphany that she and we come round to the existential reminder that what gets lived out (by any of us) as if irreversible fate can be altered by an exercise of free will.

As Nemo looks back (from age 118, yearningly, and forward from age 9, predictively, drawing on a 9-year-old's storybook-even-horror-story-based clichéd imaginings of adolescent/adult life and sci-fi future worlds), he sees his life's choices and their envisioned consequences pivotally stemming from one crucial choice at age 9, each path "typed up" as a draft of an alternate life. It's an existential tale of the power of choice to create the environments that reshape the persons who then choose from what life presents in their consequent environments, ad infinitum. It's a romantic tale in both the historic sense of quixotic, picaresque adventure multiply envisioned (including into distant time and space) and the modern sense of a quest for the idealized romance of heart and soul.

The alternate lives Nemo envisions ultimately hinge on a quest for one thing: mutuality of love in marriage. No cliché in that; rather a truth of human want and need borne out of the anguishing pain of a 9-year-old caught in rupturous divorce. Desperate to make the choice no 9-year-old should be asked to make, in such a way that it will be "the right choice" for his future, especially to find rapturous, enduring love, not re-creating his parents' fate, he engages a daunting will to prediction and a time-travel suspension and projection that allow him to see three futures before making the fateful choice.

So, to me, Nemo's three "lives" – represented by three girls and the wives they become in his predictive imaginings and rememberings – depict three points on the continuum of mutuality in love:

• loving more than being loved (with Elise, who marries him on the 'rebound', keeping the torch alive for the old flame)

• being loved more than loving (with Jean, who he marries as fated by a dance, thus a kind of 'arranged marriage')

These two reflect shoe-on-the-other-foot variations on the torturous "I love you but I'm not in love" dynamic where Nemo thinks a marriage can work, but discovers it cannot.

• and mutually impassioned loving (with Anna)

Across scenarios, we see his one mutual love, Anna, as someone he'd meet in various contexts (as if destined, as if his scriptwriting mind is trying to relieve him of the paralyzing thought that any one choice could preclude finding his true love yet also revealing that some timings for crossing paths with Anna could be inopportune, that perhaps only one timing might lead to the sustainable love life he craves):

first as children at the beach (who we wind back to in the final shot, sitting in innocent harmony on the dock), an age seen in first draft as too awkward for Nemo's self-consciousness that makes him hide his truth and blurt relationship-killing statements;

second as adolescents, brought together by parental merger, a merger that eventually reinforces his 9-year-old-self's pain about the fragility of imperfect love while exiling his and Anna's mutual pledges of soul-mate-like-passion;

third as adults, passing in a crowd - train depot, city street, funeral - where timings are off, where too much accumulated adult pain, caution, and distrust interfere, making all but the final draft of such adult encounters – the miracle in the chalk circle – come to a dead end;

and last as aged fellow travelers to Mars (i.e., destined to meet even if Nemo initially married Elise, upon honoring Elise's wish for her ashes).

Old Nemo claiming that these depicted lives are equally "meaningful" doesn't mean equally nurturing or vital; his emotion betrays where his truth lies - with a mutual love that's "to die for" (among all the traumatic deaths - by water, fire, or firearm – that he envisions) - and at age 118 worth living for – long enough to see Time reverse and be able to wind his way back - back to the chalk circle when "chance" or fate or miracle rescues an all-but-lost hope of reconnection, or back further to childhood on the dock as playmate–sweethearts who might never have lost each other, perhaps the maximal dream of the 9–year–old's quest for a love that endures all change.

When old Nemo lives long enough to reach time's reversal, he laughs a victory laugh for having found the scenario that miraculously returns his one mutual love to him in the nick of time, now presumably together (in some time and space) "for as long as both shall live."

Some suggest the "moral of the story" carries a (negative) verdict about wealth or career. But I think it was not wealth-boredom that made the Nemo who married Jean seek an alternate identity that got him assassinated; rather it was the restless boredom of never truly loving, reflected in Jean's questioning whether he even liked or knew her (even whether she took sugar in her coffee), missing the passion of two lovers who mutually attune to their beloved's every desire.

Nor is marrying 'trouble' (Elise grappling with mental instability) what undoes love – Nemo stays committed to the most trial-by-fire of marriages - as long as the love is mutual, but Elise's romantic fantasy is elsewhere.

It's asymmetric, unrequited love that smothers marriage with Jean or Elise, not the fact of an easy life or a hard one.

This message points back to the tale's beginnings, for the very 'die' the 9-year-old Nemo must cast and that traumatizes him is the result of a broken marriage, a love that was not mutually "for better or worse." Whichever of the 9-year-old's Hobson's choices he makes, what he scripts enough drafts to realize is what matters most to sustainable ("eternal") love and how to make his heart recognize, treasure, and hold it when he finds it. His last gasping word, "Anna," evokes Citizen Kane's dying, cryptic "Rosebud," but the latter portrays a self- pitying sense of boyhood loss, whereas Nemo's "Anna" portrays a transparent self-realizing sense of a boyhood dream found.

To my mind, the title is an important part of a film and, whether we like it or think it suited the film or not, it says something about the lens the director sees the film as a whole through. So to say that it could just as easily have been called Motherhood or a number of other things, as some have suggested, imho misses the point that Linklater chose to call it Boyhood so part of what it means to thoughtfully consider and try to appreciate the film he made is to consider what the film says about boyhood.

And this is what i come away with: Mason's boyhood was a wary one. From the time we first see him and his sister go off for a weekend with his long lost dad, we see an already somewhat jaundiced-eye, jaded 6-year-old not ready to throw himself into dad-adoration or even overt dad-longing. He has learned already to associate dad with abandonment and has rightly come to maintain a rather ambivalent or modulated trust, as if he's already learned to rein in expectations of others, especially adults and especially dad and, as the movie progresses and his life takes on stepdads and other male authority figures, we see a boyhood spent growing up in search of a male role model - compounded by seeing mom choose to bring two of the worst candidates into his life as stepdads.

Mason comes out seeming resilient but boyhood nevertheless looks pretty fragile, pretty vulnerable to a chaotic mix of messages from adults who are seen to be as confused as (arguably more confused than) the kids. Samantha experiences the same mix of adult male figures but she's not seeking one to emulate as role model. And it's Mason as lead character whose eyes and needs we perceive the chaos through. And it's Mason (and by extension boyhood) that winds up getting a diversity of really messed-up images of what manhood is. And the older boys he deals with all operate on a basis of intimidation, taunting, goading, demeaning, threatening - and where have they presumably gotten those notions of 'manhood' from? The dots could hardly connect more vividly.

Irony is that it turns out Mason's own dad - the first male in his life, who mom left cuz he was a 'loser', is the closest thing Mason's got - at least a dad he can actually question about life and be taken seriously, even if dad's insights about life may sometimes leave a lot to be desired (e.g., seeing women as opportunists wanting to "trade up"). But one advice in particular from his dad seemed incontestable - and reflected Mason's own lived experience in observing how his mom interacted with the men in her life. Namely, in the balcony overlooking the band doing sound check near the film's end, after being bafflingly dumped, Mason hears his dad tell him to remember that only he holds the key to his own self-worth, to not let himself be defined by someone who has dumped him. It's the very lesson his mom took a long time learning at her children's and her expense, letting one authoritarian husband after another keep her own self-worth on a short leash and squeeze the oxygen out of her own and her children's home lives.

So maybe that is the ultimate view of boyhood here: If one can escape it with an intact sense of self-worth (seemingly against all odds given the array of confused and/or corrupted adult 'guides'), maybe they can reach adulthood themselves, by mostly holding their own counsel, as Mason so deftly depicts turning inwardly to do, and essentially raising themselves to become the male role models they never quite had. But it seems pretty much of a crap shoot - look at the many boys he interacts with who show signs of having learned only to seek to control others and impose their misery through intimidation.

Life is messy, in ways that are both beautiful/magical and wrenching/tragic and sometimes all at once. That is the overarching message I see in this film, not a new message but an artfully conceived version of it, with engaging acting and a script that starts out with a sense of lack of direction but, about 30 minutes into it, wondering if it was going somewhere, within 5 more minutes, I was hooked and saw the buildup as having been appropriate stage-setting for what followed, also in the circuitous path that life often takes.

And in that circuitous and messy quality of life, the film hones in particularly on intensity - and how intensity of emotion catches us by surprise and sometimes can catapult us into emotional arcs we couldn't see coming and may not understand even as they beckon us. The central character travels two comparable but distinct arcs of intensity, arcs separated by an ocean but within a week's time lapse in which we watch her complex responses evolve in the context of these two passages through which she travels.

In retrospect, it was the well-established sense of lack of direction in the film's first half hour which becomes part of the message overall - a sense of several characters (but two in particular and then a third) wandering, stumbling, happenstancing through their young-adult lives. Suddenly out of happenstance grows increasing sense of purpose which is at once bewildering and as if guided by inexplicable forces triggered and mapped by the power of connection – human, heartfelt (and yearning) connection. Sexual chemistry may be the entry point but the film is definitely about a stirring of the imagination and sense of (be)longing, a force that is seen as sometimes distrusted precisely because the entry point was sexual.

In a way, the film can be seen as an exploration of the "If only..." kind of regret that some express (or fear) at life's end ("If only i'd followed my heart at such-and-such a crossroads....") where the 3 central characters reflect slightly different takes on what may happen when you do follow your heart at such points. The consequences are poignant and life-altering, also in different senses for each character. Yet in each case, these three make key decisions, ones that feel vital, in the direction of connection and imagination. The last time we see each of these three, it seems their heart and their realization of who they are and what they thirst for, what their life's priority is, has expanded.

A crucial exclamation point to this message, for me, came across as we see that same power- of-connection-and-imagination play out in the eyes of the youngest protagonist in the film. When the oldest central protagonists, the parents, have their bubble burst and retract in a sense of betrayal that their willingness to believe and to follow a certain idealism and wishfulness of spirit has been deceived, their young son does not follow suit and, in his yearning to still believe that magical connection is real and realizable, he gives expression, bodily, literally, to the titular message exemplified by the three central protagonists in their early adulthoods - namely, that with or without full understanding of what impels them, we see them opt to go running (after a dream-of-sorts they didn't know they had but responded to a powerful glimpse of) - running where the messy intensities of their human connections, where the triumph of belief over doubt, for however long, leads them. (But let me finish by noting that this review ties too neat a bow, it should be messier than this.)

Any Vermeer lover must see this movie, unless maybe you wouldn't be interested in what a Vermeer canvas would be like if it could walk and talk and become spectacular before your eyes for feature length. Girl with a Pearl Earring, which gets an 8.5 out of 10 from me (and I'm a tough grader), is an unprecedented filmic experience in completely investing us inside the life of a painting. And it's intriguing that the first such museum-quality painting to inspire the weaving of an entire literary-turned-filmographic story, initially author Tracy Chevalier's, would be a Vermeer and would especially be "Pearl Earring," a painting which -- without spoiling the fairly predictable plot, I'll simply say -- a certain character refers to near the end as being "obscene." Hardly, I dare venture, a term any lover of Vermeer or *any* modern museumgoer would have produced in any list of adjectives for the work.

Indeed, while I'd never for a moment possibly conceived it as such, that comment alone speaks volumes not just about the character who utters the line and her entire psychocultural inner life and the lives around her but also about what this film impacts upon us more broadly - socioculturally -- in two dimensions: firstly here that of time as culture, just how very remote we are on the surface from the mores of those times-Delft, Holland of 1665. What the filmmaker, Peter Webber, has accomplished is to make us feel penetrated by the eyes of that painting, to feel both just how utterly the master Vermeer has invested or evoked life and soul in those eyes, but also how precisely such an evocation was, especially for the character who finds it 'obscene' but also for the cultural mores of the era, an obscene enterprise - the very idea that a painter might see and depict such life passion steeped down to one's marrow rendered through the eyes. Tempting to think that whoever first said "The eyes are the windows of the soul" was looking at this painting as s/he conceptualized that thought.

The second gripping dimension of this film which makes it stand apart from and above even most quality films is its gritty evocation of social class. It's hard to recall a film that more powerfully conveyed economic class socialization and its constraints. And, while the tableaux and panoramas and street life, seen through the eyes of a newly hired maid (and street-market barterer), immerse us in the grit of it, what rivets us to its power and penetrating impact on every fine-motor detail of daily life is the flawless performance of Scarlett Johansson, now two for two lately (Lost in Translation) in batting not just out of the ballpark but into the stratosphere. At every moment in the film, there is a narrative tension which is precisely a tension of social class that is spoken in her every muscle from face to hands to feet. She *is* The Girl, exudes her so much so that you might wonder if you've fallen asleep in the museum and the painting itself has taken on a dreamlife. (And, henceforth, she alone will suffice as marquee draw to get me to a movie.)

Repeatedly, the lighting and composition of his paintings themselves are captured in Vermeer's studio in almost every move Griet, The Girl, makes as she goes about her raw-fingered chores, not too often to make it cloying but just repeatedly enough to make you feel almost at times "Well, but of <i>course</i> he painted what he did and so well, it was his entire oxygen, such scenes as he captured were literally walking through and 'posing in' his daily routine! He would have had to be blind not to have painted what he did!" And in so doing, Vermeer lent and still lends an elegance to labor, a refined gentility to simplicity and poverty, a wisdom to ingenuity.

Friends I saw the movie with had read the book, and while also thoroughly enjoying the film, I could tell there was the usual nostalgia for a book that a film almost never captures. And as they explained, upon request, how the plot of the book continues on beyond where the film ends, collapsing scenes over time to bring the book's ending far forward in the film's plotline, I found myself quite appreciative of the screenwriter's choice. It worked emotively quite powerfully for me that the film ended as it did.

...And ended in a way which caught me by surprise: Suddenly i found just how much the film had tied me through its lustrous specifics into a palette of universalisms -- about the heart, about human dreams, about justice, about inequity, about treasures and treasuring, about natural mentors opening the eyes of natural students to entire new worlds of understanding, about the power of passions for good and ill, harmony and disharmony, about precisely just how much two spirits can bridge (and yet not bridge) an enormous gulf of separating life circumstances. And, thanks to the film's masterful mixing of these 'colors' of life, all of that was able to culminate in a visual exclamation point without a single word being uttered. It now is all there for me to take away from the film and able forevermore to read and re-read in a canvas. A canvas I thought I already admired but now will never again see without these far-reverberating extra strokes ... much as Griet comes to learn to never again see a cloud as being (simply, erroneously) white.

My only recurrent problem was something in Colin Firth's portrayal of Vermeer himself. It was good but not masterful. Periodically i was pulled back from the story and the feelings by a jarring expression or tone of voice which made this Vermeer feel "in and out." Mostly "in" - in character, in the moment -- but not always. And it stood out because he -- and perhaps Vermeer's mischievous daughter (who was a bit of a throwback to films of prior decades when child actors felt routinely two- or even one-dimensional) -- were the only two for whom that was true at all within a cast of diverse very strong character types (notably the wife, the mother-in-law, and the head of household staff, as well as Tom Wilkinson's choice of a character far afield from his prior work but one he was so buried in I never thought of Tom, the actor, for a moment).

These were small blemishes, however, on a filmic canvas which was so rich in such diverse cultural time-specific and also profoundly universal ways that the flaws do pale and dissolve away, leaving only some of the most lasting images and feelings conveyed on film this year.

Once the drama inherent in screenwriter Carl Foreman's story moves from an intro to his career beginnings and what he put on the page into what he was obliged to maneuver personally and professionally in the shark-infested waters of McCarthyism, leading to his HUAC summons, his resilient defiance of pressures to capitulate, and then exile to London as the only alternative to prison, just for refusing to "name names," this documentary takes on a riveting power of an all-too-relevant tale of free speech, civil liberties, and coercive intrigue in the name of pseudo-patriotism and feels like fresh insight despite the many looks into the blacklist era in both docu and drama over recent decades. The freshness derives from the convergence of: first-person narration (voiceover of a long 1952 letter in which Foreman had recounted all the behind-the-scenes plot lines and subterfuges during the making of High Noon); intriguing editing that skillfully juxtaposes the off-screen tale with scenes from High Noon bearing the marks of his ongoing personal fight for honor amid the contemporaneous U.S. political intimidations and conformist messages (where betrayal and abandonment of friends and commitments became expedient) which had descended of him and found their way consciously into his writing of High Noon as allegory; and a range of interviews with key protagonists in Foreman's own story. (Neither Stanley Kramer nor John Wayne come out looking very good in their less-than-brave roles in this real-life story.) As much as I previously knew of this era and blacklisting's nightmare from a variety of sources, this didn't feel in the least 'redundant' but adds a rich, bittersweet chapter focusing on how one film and one screenwriter in particular were subjected to and epitomized an era of censorship, paranoia, and misguided patriotism ... Matters that echo again all too strongly in 2002. I do recommend this documentary as an ever-important lesson in our collective history. In addition, I dare say I'll never watch "High Noon" again without whole new layers of reverberation as to its making and its meaning.

She doesn't come across as embued with academic snobbery as other reviewers suggest is the tone intended here, but rather as 'playing at' some concept of uppity British aloofness and it felt imposed, self-conscious and offputting to me. I wish Paltrow, who was brilliant and fresh in the days up to and notably peaking in Sliding Doors and Shakespeare in Love, would find vehicles and senses of herself that would take her back to those earlier performance levels. I personally think she has lost her gift post-Oscar in a series of too-self-conscious portrayals. That was the main thing I can identify which kept me at arm's length from Possession. It would be easy to think someone other than LaBute (probably the worst choice for her to work with) might have brought out something more engaging but the fact is I for one have to look back to Shakespeare in Love to recall the last truly engaging Paltrow, and it's a shame. It was a bad sign that at some point in the film I found my brain querying as to whether Nicole Kidman might have pulled off the role more effectively. And it now strikes me as a curious alternative I first came up with given what, as I think about it, strikes me as actresses on very different trajectories, where Kidman in the last year alone has given two performances that lost her one-time self-consciousness or manneredness. I wish that Paltrow weren't going in the opposite direction.

Dorrie seems to have mellowed since Men and Nobody Loves Me, both of which were fresh and delightfully uncharted-water, passionately warm takes on one of her overriding concerns and themes, an exploration and advocacy of an existentialist philosophy of life. This time out, perhaps just for being another decade out post-existentialism, her labyrinth of expatriate German adventurers in exotic Spain ultimately feels oddly somewhat less fresh or less fully emotionally engaging but nevertheless is a solid and intellectually engaging new set of contexts and characters through which to examine more turns of the die. A child's-captivated-ear indoctrination into the myths which so easily lead us astray (into false hope, then deception, then dried-up going-through-the-motions stub-toed, danceless mere existence) frames what is broader in scope in this film compared to the previous two: there is no age or gender delimitation of focus here as we see random-encounterers young and old, female and male, show their vulnerability to idealized visions which leave them floundering. Through one particular children's tale which begins and ends the film, Dorrie implicitly observes that it is in the stories we are told that our false expectations of life take root, here a tale about a tiger and a bear who conjure up a ballyhooed idyllic land to set their sails for-a banana-growing nirvana named Panama. We adults know, wink-wink, the folly of the tiger and bear, but we love such stories and we crave expectation-building stories like an addiction, she seems to say...and thereby in childhood learning sets the stage for evaluating the ensuing adult ventures toward their own mirage-like horizons. So feed us stories, Doris: ...about a lost lover--or two, a lost wife or two (one mortally, another spiritually), a lost identity or two (one intentionally, another accidentally), a lost fantasy or two... or a dozen. The title would have us ask to what extent these losses of illusion, of dreamed-of perfection, impact our ability to see and feel true untrammeled pleasure in both ourselves (am I beautiful?) and in others (can I delight in making another happy? to realize and throw off the layers of claptrap that keep me/us from casting onerous cognition to the wind and instead to indulge the heart and the moment--from literally throwing one's possessions out the window to indulging what might have been an offputting fetishist's fantasies to singing out to engage the spirit of a foreign exotic spiritual procession and be willing to acknowledge in song one's fears and quests). It's not a new theme but it's reworking works, albeit keeping us a bit at arm's length from the subjects, perhaps (wittingly?) to mirror the arm's length from the fullness of engagement in life that is the nature of existence for her characters until varying quiet epiphanies open their paths to new alternative ways of perceiving. (In some ways, this medium-is-the-message reflection on the chagrins of a life lived at arm's length parallels that of the more recent French film Under the Sand.) As the path taken by Linda (Franka Potente)--one of the younger and central questers--displays, the search for the keys to existential truth, to 'be here now', can too easily alight on answers >that look programmable and can lead to 'false gods' along the path, most unacceptably that of inauthenticity. Just as Linda learns that she can derail herself entirely if she is not honest or tries to manipulate (trying to control others or their feelings with her bag of tricks whilst living in disguise from and thus not owning herself), so others learn how easy it is to kid themselves into thinking they've found the elusive 'peace' or 'simplicity' which they perceive in an ostensibly uncomplicated lover who then proves suicidal, or other escapist plan which goes awry. Almost nothing is what it, he, or she seems-until they learn to be vulnerable, self-accepting, sentient and thereby empowered. There lurks complexity and pain, just more buried in some than in others. There is no carefree Panama banana republic, but there is pleasure in honesty of spirit. And the voices of this realization come in some curious packages (further fleshing out the wisdom-where-you-least-expect-it notion whose fascinating messenger in Nobody Loves Me was the voice of a marginalized, lovelorn but lovingly unselfish transvestite): here an overweight chef who is blissfully married to his young-love sweetheart with a passion for her soul that knows no parameters or criteria but is unabashedly unconditional, a Spaniard who refuses to indulge his German girlfriend's need to hear spurious pledges of eternal love, the errant husband/father who seizes the moment to respectfully respond to Linda until her deception forces him to draw his line in the sand and thus startles her back to self-acceptance, another errant husband/father whose Caribbean indulgences have actualized his spirit of "to dance is to live" and who finally lures down the encrusted wall behind which his wife has been taking sullen refuge. Here it is most often the women who have internalized the childhood idyllic stories to their peril, having sold themselves a flurry of fantasies that focus on the future or the past, who with well-meaning enchantment see heaven in a red cashmere sweater they sell or buy, a stereotypically fanciful wedding gown, a notion of storybook romance, and who--with considerable blindness--stumble in seeking their way back to themselves. But they do listen, and learn.