Moody, muddled tragedy I found this movie interesting and moving, but in the end, unsatisfying. The story is essentially Greek tragedy, with characters who place themselves on inexorable, intersecting paths that will, the viewer knows, lead to tragedy, though the characters themselves are blithely unaware of it. The classic device of hubris is present in plenty. Colonel Bherani is moral and good but stiff-necked and unbending. Kathy is a simple and essentially kind-hearted person, but weak, unstable and impulsive. Lester is a warm-hearted man seeking love and affection, but he also is weak and impulsive, and over-confident in his own brutal sense of justice.
The characters are solid and believable; the plot resorts to no outrageous tricks; the dialog is straightforward and fairly free of clunkers.
So why was I unsatisfied? I wasn't even sure myself, until I began to ponder the movie and its clear echoes of dramatic tragedy. Then I realized that dramatic tragedy--Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Marlowe--rely as a matter of course on dialog to build the tragedy. Things don't really happen on a stage (even the violence is usually off-stage), and the playwrights didn't provide extensive production notes on how to create moods. It was all in the words, and that was where they put their heart and soul. Words reverberated, multiple meanings built upon multiple meanings, and the nature of the tragedy, and its catharsis, existed primarily in the viewer's head, who had to sort all of these things out for himself and come to his own resolution.
This movie, in contrast, relies mostly on mood to tell its story. Sound effects, music, visual images, like swirling fog and crimson sunsets, meaningful glances, vague gestures, silhouettes behind curtains: These are the things on which the story is built, rather than words. (In fact, there is strikingly little dialog in the movie.) It was done well, largely thanks to the very strong cast headed by Ben Kingsley. But in the end, the movie produced no sense of catharsis, as far as I was concerned. It was just a story of headstrong people who all insisted on their rights, until all of their lives were destroyed. Nothing could have been done to prevent it. There's nothing to be learned.
In that sense, it felt almost like a curiously impersonal documentary. And yet, ironically, this movie was far less impersonal, in one sense, than any of the dramatic tragedies, thanks to its extensive efforts to build moods and ominous foreshadowing. Again, Shakespeare left us no notes on creating elaborate visual effects. We have only bare words on paper. Yet--to me, anyway--those words, and the meanings they carry, are far more substantial and satisfying in the end.
A couple side-notes: I thought there was a point where the movie made a tactical error. Early on, when Kathy's relationship with Lester is beginning, I got the sense that she was ruthless, cold, and willing to push Lester into doing anything necessary to achieve her ends. A femme fatale straight out of a Coen brothers movie. Maybe it's her overly-aggressive eyebrows and her cold, piercing eyes. But this proved not to be true. It becomes clear later that she's more of a borderline schizophrenic, frantic to get her house back, but unable to use evil to do it. I found this startling change in her character to be jarring, and possibly a mistake from the editing room.
The other thing that I didn't like, and my reaction was much stronger this time, was the scene with Kathy on the pier, gazing out to sea, and the camera started spinning in a circle around her. That kind of trick is always phony, as far as I'm concerned. It was as if we were suddenly in a scene from "Law and Order," and including it was most definitely a mistake from the editing room. Editors should know when to rein in directors.