BEFORE: This time Matt Craven carries over from "The Life of David Gale", and I seem to have hit this run of "challenging" pictures, things on the dark side. I've got some lighter fare scheduled later in the month, like a run of Jack Lemmon, but it's going to take a few weeks to get there.
THE PLOT: Mourning his dead child, a haunted Vietnam war veteran attempts to discover his past while suffering from a severe case of dissociation. To do so, he must decipher reality and life from his own dreams, delusion, and perception of death.
AFTER: This is one of those "What's really happening here?" films, and generally regarded as a masterpiece. But I've seen films before that have tried to land in the same pocket, but failed outright. Think "Angel Heart", "What Dreams May Come" or "Naked Lunch" - what separates this film from them? When you set something in the dreamscape, or in the limbo between this world and the next, but it's not an outright horror film, I think you have to walk a very fine line.
What I mean to say is, if there's one mistake in a film, like a jump-cut or an unexplained time shift, or maybe a character who died in reel 2 is seen walking around in the background in reel 4, that's just a "goof" - it gets listed in a section on IMDB, and everyone just shrugs and moves on with their lives. If a film is riddled with things that don't make sense, sometimes it gets classified as a masterpiece. I just want to know where the breaking point is, that's all. We can't always discern the director's intent, right? So is it possible that just through lack of follow-through, a plethora of continuity errors, someone could end up generating a work of art?
Obviously, I don't think that's what's happening here. But I do think there are both kinds of mistakes here, both intentional and unintentional, like the fact that some of the action is set in December in New York (one character mentions that Thanksgiving was a month ago), yet nobody is wearing a heavy jacket, the weather doesn't seem very cold, and everything is shot in sunlight with warm tones. Is this a continuity error, or is it meant to imply that everything is really a fever dream, or that the main character is in hell (or at least in heck, where it's theoretically warm)?
We're also presented with sequences set in Vietnam, and a V.A. hospital - two places that can be categorized as hell on earth, further breaking down the barriers between reality and nightmare. (Some people might add the NYC subway scenes, or perhaps the chiropractic sessions as hellish scenarios, but to each his own, I guess.) But then there is so much time-shifting, or perhaps reality-shifting, that I was reminded of "Slaughterhouse Five", the Vonnegut story where a man gets unstuck in time and jumps around within his own life.
I think it's up to the individual viewer to decide if the "explanation" at the end justifies all that has come before - for me, it really didn't. How am I supposed to discern the difference between a filmmaker being artsy and oblique in his attempt to peer behind the veil of consciousness, and someone who made a disjointed film that spiraled out of his control during production, and he hastily tried to fix it with by saying it's all a metaphor for things we don't understand? The web says this has become a "cult classic", but that's a double-edged sword, I think. "Donnie Darko" is a cult classic, but so is "Naked Lunch".
Also starring Tim Robbins (last seen in "Cadillac Man"), Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello (last seen in "The Purple Rose of Cairo"), Pruitt Taylor Vince, Eriq La Salle, Ving Rhames (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol"), Patricia Kalember, Macaulay Culkin, with cameos from Jason Alexander (last seen in "The Paper"), S. Epatha Merkerson (last seen in "Random Hearts"), Kyle Gass, Lewis Black, Becky Ann Baker (last seen in "The Night Listener"),
RATING: 5 out of 10 baseball cards
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