BEFORE: Last night's film was about post-mortem crime scenes, and I think that also figures prominently here. Linking from "Sunshine Cleaning" is easy since Amy Adams was in "Julie & Julia" with Stanley Tucci, appearing in tonight's film.
THE PLOT: Centers on a young girl who has been murdered and watches over her family - and her killer - from heaven.
AFTER: I guess I was expecting sort of a cross between "The Sixth Sense" and "What Dreams May Come" - since I wasn't familiar with the novel this is based on, that was as close as I could predict. Of course I'd rather watch a film knowing as little as possible about the plot, but when this movie was released, some very key elements were mentioned very prominently in reviews. Namely, that a girl gets killed - OK, that's the premise, the hook - but did the reviews also have to mention WHO killed her?
I suppose the who doesn't matter - but shouldn't it? The viewing audience gets to know the killer's identity quite early in the film, though it takes the other characters considerably longer to figure it out. But this isn't really a murder mystery, it's more about the fractured family and relationships left behind. This isn't "Law & Order", especially since those cops can solve any crime in under an hour.
And of course it's about the girl - her story doesn't stop just because she gets killed. We see her in the afterlife, one that's not yet heaven, but isn't earth either. Some would say it's a limbo, or an in-between stage since her spirit is restless, what with being murdered and all.
But from a story standpoint, this depiction of heaven (and the one seen in "What Dreams May Come") is all too convenient. A heaven that conforms to each person's state of mind, representing elements from their time on earth, plus additional fantastical perfection? Come on... It's a story crutch, right? I mean, even if you believe in the Judeo-Christian white-fluffy-cloud heaven, the place has got to have rules, right? Do you think heaven will conform to your needs, with 5 billion souls in the world? I'd think it would be the other way around. Here's your halo, here's your harp, now get to work.
That guy on "Inside the Actor's Studio" always asks his guests what they'd like to hear, upon arriving in heaven. For me, it's probably "Thank God you're here - the universe is a mess and we need your help organizing it." But arriving to find that heaven's going to cater to your needs and fantasies? That's more than a little arrogant. It would be an astronaut like flying in a spacecraft across the galaxy to another planet, which just happens to have the right mix of components forming an atmosphere that's breathable by humans. Which I've seen in plenty of films, and it's statistically unrealistic.
Anyway, back to this film. The first part of the film is very important, and the ending of course, but it feels like a lot of the stuff in the middle is window dressing. If nothing advances the plot in the middle hour, then you've got serious story problems. As for the ending, it didn't really resolve the way I expected, or would like to have seen. Of course, we all want to believe that evil people will get what they deserve - it's figuring out what that is that gets tricky. Fate, karma, cosmic justice - are these real, or just our brains adding meaning to the things that just happen?
Plus, we all know how many missing kids there are each year (whatever the number is, it's disturbingly too high) so just how often are evil people found and properly prosecuted?
Also starring Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "The Other Guys"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "Fred Claus"), Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Thelma & Louise"), Michael Imperioli (last seen in "Clockers"), with a cameo by director Peter Jackson (last seen in "King Kong")
RATING: 4 out of 10 flashes of light
Or is it as simple as "Any form of an afterlife would be so completely out of anyone's established experience that their brains would resolve what it's seeing and experience into forms that it can understand"?
ReplyDeleteI've seen a few 10 to 20-minute bits of this movie via cable. It really comes across to me like an example of overthinking a concept.
"What's a parent's life like, seven years after their child has disappeared?"
Even right now, the question makes me pause and take my hands off the keyboard. Your head tells you that your child is almost certainly dead, and almost certainly had their life taken from them horribly and violently. Your heart wants to believe in a miracle. Do you still work to discover what had happened? Do you feel guilty that you enjoyed yourself last Christmas?
On and on. It seems like cheap, film-school melodrama to complicate the purity and depth of such a story.
And the presence of the killer in the movie weakens everything. No other crime inspires such absolute violent hatred for the perpetrator. You want to see Stanley Tucci's character beaten nearly to death with the blunt side of an axe and then denied medical care. That's going to be on your mind throughout the whole film.
Even the ending, in which I suppose we can tell ourselves that there was some form of divine justice, comes across as a bad way to pull off a bad idea. The movie seemed to go out of its way to demonstrate that the evidence had been destroyed beyond any hope of future recovery, and Tucci's death leaves open the possibility that the community will write the report the end of his story as a terrible accident that was perhaps abetted by some strange girl who might have pushed him.
Better to leave the whole thing a mystery. Focus on the family. That's where the story is.
Right - problem is, this film wasn't cheap. Someone spent a lot of money making something that is best described as melodrama.
ReplyDeleteNot having read the book, I can (after the fact) sort of understand the dilemma in ending a story such as this one. If it ends with the killer in handcuffs, it's just a long episode of "CSI". If it ends without any justice served, you'll have an army of moviegoers feeling unresolved.
The story chose a third route, which was still not the resolution we would have liked, but it was a form of resolution. I still can't excuse the film for being oblique, but at least it chose a unique way to get itself out of the corner it had sort of painted itself into.
Sic semper tyrannis and all that.
When you're the director, you get to choose where to point the camera. If the director doesn't call attention to something, s/he's saying "This isn't important. Don't really think about it."
ReplyDeleteGood Lord, I'm talking about a movie I haven't really seen. Still, I instinctively think it's a mistake to make Stanley Tucci a major part of this story. Something about the movie seems to encourage us to want justice. It feels like unfinished business.
I had the same sort of feeling at the end of "Million Dollar Baby." For some reason, I wanted to see a single, careless glimpse of a newspaper in Maggie's hospital room that revealed that the other fighter had been banned from the sport for life. It wasn't a grave error (as I think this move in "Bones" was) but it really did register as a "missing shot" as opposed to something I would have liked to have seen.