Since Oliver Twist hit the screens in 1909, audiences have lamented that the movie is not as good as the book. No one expected Cloud Atlas to break from that trend, but the fact that it went out of its way to be more complicated and less moving than David Mitchell's sci-fi bestseller still came as a surprise.
In my review of the book, I took issue with the stories' thin characterizations, but the narrative sequencing was actually least of the novel's problems. Naturally, this is what the film decided to dismantle first.
The first half of the book introduced us to the six reincarnated lives of one soul. Each person's story started, continued long enough for us to get a feel for the plot and personalities involved, then ended abruptly at a climatic point, to be followed by the next life. In the second half of the book, we revisit each life and witness the end of the story. The six lives are tenuously connected and it's difficult to divine the karmic evolution of the soul, as it travels from one life to the next. Do the people pay for past sins? Are they rewarded for growth and selflessness? Not so you'd notice. Rather than learning life lessons through the centuries, they appear to be on a cosmic treadmill, just as prone to a misstep, to make mistakes, even the same mistakes, in the 1800s as they are 500 years later. Furthermore, the reincarnated characters might share a birthmark from one life to the other, but do not particularly share other traits. At the end, I wondered why Mitchell even bothered telling us that the six tales involved the same people reincarnated, rather than just presenting them as six short stories, with slightly overlapping themes.
Instead of minimizing the book's flaws, the movie tries to continuously "connect" the stories in the most fatuous way possible, obliterating most of the author's content in the process.
The six stories are spliced together, intercut so that we never stay in one lifetime more than two minutes at a time. Running 2:50 hours, if the film had followed the movie's outline, we would have spent a half hour on each life, 15 continuous minutes in the beginning and then returning to give us another block of 15 minutes at the end. This would have been the best way for the diverse plots to come together to make one big picture in the end. As it is, when we cut away from each story after a minute or two, you never become fully immersed in any of them and they're never tied together. Instead, an actor intones a cliché like "I believe that life never ends. Death is just a door and when one closes another opens' and basically taunts, That's all the cohesion you're gonna get!
To make matters worse, on the page the same soul can inhabit different bodies, regardless of race, sex or age, but it's hard for that concept to translate onto film. Why compound the problem by having the actors play different reincarnated souls in each life? In one story Halle Berry plays the soul we recognize through the crescent-shaped birthmark she bore in the past. Yet, in the next segment, it's Tom Hanks who bears that birthmark. You can't buy the idea that two people are soulmates, destined to be linked through all eternity, when you can't even identify them as the same spirits, from one life to the next.
They have as little in common with their past selves as they do with each other, from one existence to the next.
In the book, Robert Frobisher and Zachry were the most intriguing and empathetic protagonists. In Mitchell's hands, music composer Frobisher chose death. It wasn't forced on him, because he painted himself into a corner. Instead, he was, perhaps, bi-polar and killed himself in a moment of acute restlessness. He didn't act out of grief or fear, but was spurred by the nothingness that remained following great excitement and (delusional) emotion. Certainly, his bisexuality was never a factor in his suicide because it was portrayed with humor, rather than shame.
All that changes in the movie. Frobisher falls in love with the older composer whom he only used in the book. When he's spurned, blackmailed and faced with ruin, he shoots the composer, flees, is forced into hiding and penury, then kills himself. The written Frobisher was so used to a life of deception he would have found such contretemps a lark, not a dilemma. He picked death as one of the many options available to him, not as a last resort. The film made his mental problem a mechanical one. Replacing introspection with a gun can never improve a story.
The movie seems obsessed with offering the reason that things happened, never mind the fact that its reasons are absurdly shallow ones. In reality people hate, love and leave you with no rationale, or one that's too nebulous, complicated or multi-folded to comprehend. Black and white is neat, but not compelling. For instance, in the Timothy Cavendish tale, a publisher's brother has him confined to a mental hospital. Cavendish has no idea why he's victimized this way, but in the book he repeatedly is. Thus, his brother's specific motives are inconsequential. It's more intriguing to ask what weakness Cavendish possesses that causes everyone to immediately view him as a mark. The film tells us that his brother set him up as revenge for an affair Cavendish had with his wife. This thought occurred to Cavendish in the book, but the answer remained a mystery. For me, that was best. Brothers hate brothers and if you ask Cain why, I doubt he'd have a single response for you. There wasn't one transgression, there were many, since Abel's birth, and they gathered threads, thwarts and thorns, forming one big ball of rage that finally exploded one day. That's how life happens and we usually can't specify the day or insult that caused everything to fall apart.
Brother Denny Cavendish's conduct puzzled me too. Since he'd lent his brother money in the past, I thought he must have some feeling for him. Perhaps, he met to rescue him from the institution shortly, but died before he could. In the movie, he simply turns on him in spite. Fiction is often concerned with tying up loose ends, but pat explanations are worse than none at all.
In Zachry's story, although he and the Prescient from a more advanced world marry in a gratuitous "happy ending" they have less of a bond than they did in the book, as platonic comrades. His distrust of Meronym, the Prescient, dissolves slowly as they come to empathize and rely on one another in the book. In the movie, she is on a dangerous exploratory mission and he agrees to help her only because she has the sophisticated medicine needed to save his niece's life (it was his sister in the book, where Zachry was decades younger than Tom Hanks), not because he has grown to relate to her, despite the devil on his shoulder warning him that he shouldn't. Her commander warns her not to corrupt and alter his world by sharing her technology with Zachry, but when he implores her, she can't resist. As they soften towards each other, they sacrifice everything just to protect their friend. We sense more of the past-life instincts that draw them together in the book, while circumstances do most to bind them together onscreen.
If the five stories involving humans were lifeless, then the one with the fabricant, Sonmi, were even more so. Again, instead of sacrificing herself to change mankind's heartless ways, in the movie she is motivated as much by love as civil rights. We see her spooning romantically with the union leader who recruits her, rather than dispassinately realizing she's just a tool in his crusade, as the written Sonmi does. The only thing her plot had going for it was it's larger focus on humanity, over the individual humans that comprise it. This story served as the umbrella under which the other five operated, which is why the evil that has built over generations and culminates with her civilization finally implodes upon itself. The planet is reborn, from remnants of the destruction. Only Zachry's almost prehistoric world remains. In the last reincarnation, Zachry's, Sonmi is revered as a God by villagers who have found the artifacts of her words and embue them with biblical significance, centuries after the true facts of her life and death have been lost to time.
While Sonmi's story should have been the largest reflection of the small themes (freedom, prejudice, equality, greed, betrayal, and cruelty) that ran throughout the other plots, it centers instead on Sonmi's love for the union leader who enlists her and, as she rides shotgun, races through space shooting up their enemies like Neo, just without the long trench coat. Sonmi's language and world, some of the more unique aspects of the book, are stripped away and redressed as trite.
Cloud Atlas, the book, was less about love triumphing over time and death, than about our persistent battle against hate and evil, in relationships, societies, and universes. The small plot point should have been an echo of the large one, instead they all run adjacent, like different lanes on a track, but no obvious finish line in sight.
While the paranormal plotting should have been all the "action" the movie needed, it gives each story unnecessary "chase" scenes and weaves them together, in back to back snippets, so they are collectively less exciting than they would have been individually developed and fully played out, without interruption.
If the fight scenes are underwhelming, the other segues are stultifying. A door opens in Luisa's story and closes in Tim Cavendish's. Transitions can enhance if they highlight important plot parallels, but when they only emphasize how superficial the chain keeping each element of the cloud atlas together is, everything suffers. This film was a case in which the sum lessened the six parts.
Monday, February 10, 2014
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Saving Mr. Banks (2013)
The first 30 minutes of this movie seemed like it would be little more than a chronicle of P. L. Travers' cranky, persnickety habits. Fortunately, it expanded beyond her eccentricities, but perhaps tried to give us a too simplistic and belabored rationale for them.
We meet Pamela Lyndon Travers (nee Helen Lyndon Goff) 25 years after her first, enormously popular Mary Poppins novel was published. She has nearly exhausted the financial security the book sales brought her, won't write new stories, and, her lawyer informs her, is about to lose her home if she can't generate income soon.
Her attorney has to fight just to help her help herself and convince the sudden Travers to just consider Walt Disney's repeated offer to buy the movie rights to her book. She finally agrees to fly to the dreaded Los Angeles, just to allow Disney present his movie script to her. She makes no promises about contracting over her rights. In fact, she only agrees to go by falsely convincing herself that she won't give up the movie rights and isn't constrained by looming foreclosure to do so.
During the plane ride, Travers' possessiveness over her creation and proud helplessness cause her to flashback to her childhood, when her alcoholic father lost his job and they were forced to move to an isolated, ramshackle home in Allora, Queensland. Young Helen, the eldest of three daughters, is about 10 in the flashbacks (and probably only 6 in real life). With the help of her fantasy-weaving father, she considers their move more of an adventure than a disgrace, but one can see that the worry, humiliation and realization that her husband's instability is only increasing is weighing her mother (played by the incomparable Ruth Wilson, kisses to Alice!) down.
Goff tells his daughter that she is a princess, they find at their new home has only been blighted by a witch's curse. It's really a fine horse, with feet as fast as wings. Does she trust him? "Yes." Always, only, unconditionally. He swings her up onto the horse, tucks her legs around his waist and they gallop off, away from the dirt and poverty and into Goff's fairytale world, where he doesn't need to maintain either sobriety or employment to light Helen with joy.
Back in the present, Travers is greeted at LAX by a chauffeur who refuses to call her "Mrs. Travers" as ordered. Everything is ostentatious and excessive, but especially her hotel suite, cluttered with Disney stuffed animals, food and celebratory debris. The wasteful indulgences affront her. She finds the pears in her gift fruit basket particularly offensive and throws them out the window, much to the dismay of the people lounging at the pool below.
Travers may have created a woman who flies up bannisters and entertains magical friends, but though possessed of magical powers, Mary Poppins is as practical at heart as Travers herself and Disney's welcoming flattery isn't the way to win her compliance. In fact, it makes her more resistant.
At Walt's corporate offices, Travers is told that he insists on being called "Walt" and is as obstinate about his forced casualness as she, "Mrs. Travers, is about formality. And that's what this is, a battle of wills between two equally eccentric people, both insistent on having their own way. The difference is that Disney wants his way with Travers' creation. To me, that makes him the most unreasonable one. For the first 40 minutes, I thought the movie did not acknowledge this. While Disney was too loud, too overbearing, too confident, the quintessential "Ugly American," he was portrayed as rational. Everyone's reaction to Travers however, painted her as decidedly abnormal. Her aversion to Disney animation portrayed as being just as illogical as her intolerance for pears.
The one-sided depiction was starting to make me bristle. Wasn't Travers allowed to be just as insulted when Disney suggested her characters sing, as he was when she called his cartoons silly? Why was she the only one being judged? Perhaps because she was surrounded by Disney employees who automatically assumed their way, their boss', was the only right one. Disney, though, proved more introspective than he'd seemed on the surface.
One evening after his frustrated writers are exhausted from wrangling with Travers, Disney drops in to visit, after Travers' has left for the day. The writers hopefully assure him that she'll change her mind about all the changes she's demanded and Disney says she won't. He repeats this conviction with a grave expression, explaining that he has been on the other side of Travers' fight. He remembers trying to appease backers for the Disney company and everything they wanted him to give up, even the mouse. He fought them. It would have killed him to give up that mouse, he says. It would have killed him. He knows that this is not a contract negotiation for P. L. Travers, it's a heart transplant. He's threatening to take something that means everything to her, stands for everything she is, away.
Of course, once we learn that Disney realizes this it makes his treatment of her seem deliberately insensitive. He's never cruel and not often impolite, but he's unbudging. He doesn't want to compromise. He only wants to win. She loathes animation, rather than even considering its removal from the movie that is his vision, not hers, he lies to her about his plans. He wants to make no concessions to get what's hers.
This is why it's rather satisfying to have Travers ride herd over the Disney staff. They think they're just indulging her and eventually want to place a limit to her changes to their script. Then, they learned that Travers has no contract with Disney. She hasn't signed the contract yet. Until she does, she's the boss, not Walt. They aren't being kind to a difficult woman, they're working for her. I like it when this dawns on them. She may never have triumphed over Walt, but at least she demands obeisance from his employees -- even sending one out of the room for rudeness like a naughty school boy, with no power to object.
As her trip continues, so do her flashbacks. She's 10 years old again. Her father is still drinking, putting his job as bank manager in jeopardy. It's his occupation that lends its name to the Banks family for whom Mary Poppins becomes governess. Mr. Banks, the father is modeled after her own. That's why he must have no mustache, Goff was always clean shaven, the better to kiss his favorite daughter. But because Disney sees the film patriarch as his own father, Elias, Disney insists that the character does have a mustache. Disney wins.
Yet, once he understands how emotionally connected Travers is to Mr. Banks, he softens the characters gruff edges and allows him to be a kinder father. Putting in the "Let's Go Fly a Kite" scene just for Travers. She not only embraces the gentler portrayal of Mr. Banks but is so taken by the song, performed by father and children that she doesn't even rue the fact that the movie is a musical any longer. In fact, the staff breathlessly call Disney to the writers' room so he can witness it himself: Mrs. Travers' is actually DANCING.
Travers' also warms up to her chauffer. She hated his small talk and pleasantries. His "fine weather we're having" greeting, but after helping her build a trench in the mud (the same type she used to build as a child while playing) the driver explains his obsession with the weather. His daughter is wheelchair bound. Her limbs are stiff. On rainy days he has to leave her in doors all day. When the sun shines, she can bask in its warmth and light. Travers says nothing, but she doesn't object to his salutations any more.
By this time, relations seem positively conciliatory between Author and Movie Studio.
Back in the past, Travers' world is falling apart. Her father not only falls down drunk during the bank's presentation at a county fair, but he coughs up blood and is taken to bed with fever. Her overwhelmed mother tries to drown herself while in a somnolent state and is rescued by young Helen. A prim aunt arrives to save the family by, first bringing order to their home and making sure everything is "spit spot." Thus, Mary Poppins is born.
The delirious Goff has turned upon his daughter, mocking the poem she has written him, breaking her heart. But she doesn't reject him. Instead, she writes a better poem. In a last moment of lucidity, Goff is loving and Helen asks him if there's anything he'd like. Pears, he answers. She runs off to pick them and when she returns, she finds that he has died. That's why she hates pears today. A little of this goes a long way. It's true that we are what we were. But the line between everything that shaped us as children and the mold we carry into adulthood is not that clear, clean or literal. It's fine for the film to show us Travers' (Helen's) early disappointments and influences, but there's no need to link everything she and Mary Poppins are to the life and death of Travers Goff, especially since he died when the real Helen was only 8 and the movie doesn't tell us what happened during the rest of her formative years. To say that everything she feels today is an amplification of what she felt then is to take a paint-by-numbers approach to storytelling.
Back at Disneyland, literally, we see Travers get a firsthand tour of the famous park. The costumes, scenery and sets that recreate Los Angeles in the early sixties are rich, vividly transporting us to that other time. Walt is greeted by a mass of Disney visitors who want his autograph. He gives them something better, copies of his signature that he has Xeroxed and dispenses like fliers. Everything in his world is a façade, but it's the only reality Walt knows -- in his mind, it's the superior reality. Travers' just observes, until he orders her to get on the merry go round. I wish she had barked right back at him, just as she did to his writers. As much as I love the Mary Poppins movie, the magic Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke brought to it, I'm sad to the extent that Travers' was reversed.
Disney tells Travers that reading her book saves children, just as Mary Poppins saved Jane and Michael Banks. Travers scoffs. Does he really think Mary (well, Travers insists that it's always "Mary Poppins" never just "Mary") was there to save the children? After some reflection, Disney sees that Mary Poppins saved Mr. Banks instead, just as Travers' wishes her father had been saved. In the end, Mary Poppins is going to be something different to each of us, beyond what either Travers or Disney's definitions. Still, Disney has no right to insist that his vision usurp Travers'. She comes to this conclusion upon learning that the dancing penguins in Disney's movie script will be animated, against Travers' express cartoon prohibition. Travers hands the unsigned contract back to Disney and flies home to England. One would cheer her exit, if we didn't know how the story ends.
At home, Travers is relieved to be reunited with fine English tea again. She shares a cup with ... a stuffed Micky Mouse. The same toy that she tossed aside when she first arrived in Los Angeles has now become quite a companion.
After she leaves, Disney probes deeper into Travers' background and learns she didn't grow up a pampered English Rose. She was a poor Australian girl. All this time he'd been dealing with Travers, he should have been talking to her inner Helen.
He flies to England, tells her a tale about his own icy childhood, delivering newspapers for a stern father in frigid snow and threadbare shoes.
Avuncular and caring, he convinces Travers that she understand her needs. She signs the contract.
I feel the movie should have ended there, but it proceeds to the movie premier. Disney doesn't send Travers an invitation. She'll only gripe openly about every scene and his film doesn't need the bad publicity. With prodding from her attorney, Travers' decides she's not the type to take the slight lying down. She flies to Los Angeles, this time expensively attired, having reaped the rewards of her book deal. She demands an invitation to the premiere. She feels alone amid the Hollywood glitterati. Her words and ideas have made this movie possible, but she is an outsider, no cameras vie for her attention on the red carpet. No one wants her interview. They associate Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews, Walt Disney, even Disney's writers, but not P. L. Travers.
Travers watches the movie enthralled and cries loudly (and I think rather absurdly) for Mr. Banks. Once again we're told that his trial, tribulations and triumphs are her father's. Her own.
The movie ends with priceless credits showing pictures of the real Travers, Disney and writers, in place of Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks and the other cast members. Then we hear audio of P. L. Travers' actual voice as she precisely instructs Disney's restless writers. She tells them how the Banks' house exterior should look, it's modeled after her own. She explains how the flowers should be arranged, clarifies the Banks' class status, explains that Mr. Banks is not an unkind man, he's just been burdened by the cares of the world. Those matter-of-fact words from Travers' herself are more touching than the heavy-handed exposition that the movie offered.
Even if some things were explained in broad, repetitive strokes, the film's expert acting and attention to visual detail made it a pleasure to watch.
Aside from Travers' relationship to her father, I wanted to know a little more about those early years. At times it seemed that Goff sought to alienate the child from her mother, painting the woman who weakly tried to hold things together, as the bad guy who wanted to ground their flights of fancy. He'd rather have Helen by his side imagining herself a princess, than helping her mother set the table so that they could eat the meager provisions his errant ways left them. I'm not sure, but at times it seemed as if Travers' resented her mother's physical closeness to Goff, seeming to mind when they kissed or embraced. Helen once muttered, "she's a foul fowl," but I'm unclear as to whether she was referring to her, actually, docile mother or a witch from one of her father's stories. Did she consider her mother a rival? I can't say, but as long as we were visiting Travers' past, I'd like to have seen how she interacted with her sisters, mother and aunt who became the Mary Poppins' prototype. She probably spent more time with any and all of them than with her alcoholic dad. Of course, she idolized him. any child would gravitate towards what is handsome, reckless and impractical, over the sober and conventional. Maybe a small part of Travers was even charmed by Walt Disney, for the very same reason.
We meet Pamela Lyndon Travers (nee Helen Lyndon Goff) 25 years after her first, enormously popular Mary Poppins novel was published. She has nearly exhausted the financial security the book sales brought her, won't write new stories, and, her lawyer informs her, is about to lose her home if she can't generate income soon.
Her attorney has to fight just to help her help herself and convince the sudden Travers to just consider Walt Disney's repeated offer to buy the movie rights to her book. She finally agrees to fly to the dreaded Los Angeles, just to allow Disney present his movie script to her. She makes no promises about contracting over her rights. In fact, she only agrees to go by falsely convincing herself that she won't give up the movie rights and isn't constrained by looming foreclosure to do so.
During the plane ride, Travers' possessiveness over her creation and proud helplessness cause her to flashback to her childhood, when her alcoholic father lost his job and they were forced to move to an isolated, ramshackle home in Allora, Queensland. Young Helen, the eldest of three daughters, is about 10 in the flashbacks (and probably only 6 in real life). With the help of her fantasy-weaving father, she considers their move more of an adventure than a disgrace, but one can see that the worry, humiliation and realization that her husband's instability is only increasing is weighing her mother (played by the incomparable Ruth Wilson, kisses to Alice!) down.
Goff tells his daughter that she is a princess, they find at their new home has only been blighted by a witch's curse. It's really a fine horse, with feet as fast as wings. Does she trust him? "Yes." Always, only, unconditionally. He swings her up onto the horse, tucks her legs around his waist and they gallop off, away from the dirt and poverty and into Goff's fairytale world, where he doesn't need to maintain either sobriety or employment to light Helen with joy.
Back in the present, Travers is greeted at LAX by a chauffeur who refuses to call her "Mrs. Travers" as ordered. Everything is ostentatious and excessive, but especially her hotel suite, cluttered with Disney stuffed animals, food and celebratory debris. The wasteful indulgences affront her. She finds the pears in her gift fruit basket particularly offensive and throws them out the window, much to the dismay of the people lounging at the pool below.
Travers may have created a woman who flies up bannisters and entertains magical friends, but though possessed of magical powers, Mary Poppins is as practical at heart as Travers herself and Disney's welcoming flattery isn't the way to win her compliance. In fact, it makes her more resistant.
At Walt's corporate offices, Travers is told that he insists on being called "Walt" and is as obstinate about his forced casualness as she, "Mrs. Travers, is about formality. And that's what this is, a battle of wills between two equally eccentric people, both insistent on having their own way. The difference is that Disney wants his way with Travers' creation. To me, that makes him the most unreasonable one. For the first 40 minutes, I thought the movie did not acknowledge this. While Disney was too loud, too overbearing, too confident, the quintessential "Ugly American," he was portrayed as rational. Everyone's reaction to Travers however, painted her as decidedly abnormal. Her aversion to Disney animation portrayed as being just as illogical as her intolerance for pears.
The one-sided depiction was starting to make me bristle. Wasn't Travers allowed to be just as insulted when Disney suggested her characters sing, as he was when she called his cartoons silly? Why was she the only one being judged? Perhaps because she was surrounded by Disney employees who automatically assumed their way, their boss', was the only right one. Disney, though, proved more introspective than he'd seemed on the surface.
One evening after his frustrated writers are exhausted from wrangling with Travers, Disney drops in to visit, after Travers' has left for the day. The writers hopefully assure him that she'll change her mind about all the changes she's demanded and Disney says she won't. He repeats this conviction with a grave expression, explaining that he has been on the other side of Travers' fight. He remembers trying to appease backers for the Disney company and everything they wanted him to give up, even the mouse. He fought them. It would have killed him to give up that mouse, he says. It would have killed him. He knows that this is not a contract negotiation for P. L. Travers, it's a heart transplant. He's threatening to take something that means everything to her, stands for everything she is, away.
Of course, once we learn that Disney realizes this it makes his treatment of her seem deliberately insensitive. He's never cruel and not often impolite, but he's unbudging. He doesn't want to compromise. He only wants to win. She loathes animation, rather than even considering its removal from the movie that is his vision, not hers, he lies to her about his plans. He wants to make no concessions to get what's hers.
This is why it's rather satisfying to have Travers ride herd over the Disney staff. They think they're just indulging her and eventually want to place a limit to her changes to their script. Then, they learned that Travers has no contract with Disney. She hasn't signed the contract yet. Until she does, she's the boss, not Walt. They aren't being kind to a difficult woman, they're working for her. I like it when this dawns on them. She may never have triumphed over Walt, but at least she demands obeisance from his employees -- even sending one out of the room for rudeness like a naughty school boy, with no power to object.
As her trip continues, so do her flashbacks. She's 10 years old again. Her father is still drinking, putting his job as bank manager in jeopardy. It's his occupation that lends its name to the Banks family for whom Mary Poppins becomes governess. Mr. Banks, the father is modeled after her own. That's why he must have no mustache, Goff was always clean shaven, the better to kiss his favorite daughter. But because Disney sees the film patriarch as his own father, Elias, Disney insists that the character does have a mustache. Disney wins.
Yet, once he understands how emotionally connected Travers is to Mr. Banks, he softens the characters gruff edges and allows him to be a kinder father. Putting in the "Let's Go Fly a Kite" scene just for Travers. She not only embraces the gentler portrayal of Mr. Banks but is so taken by the song, performed by father and children that she doesn't even rue the fact that the movie is a musical any longer. In fact, the staff breathlessly call Disney to the writers' room so he can witness it himself: Mrs. Travers' is actually DANCING.
Travers' also warms up to her chauffer. She hated his small talk and pleasantries. His "fine weather we're having" greeting, but after helping her build a trench in the mud (the same type she used to build as a child while playing) the driver explains his obsession with the weather. His daughter is wheelchair bound. Her limbs are stiff. On rainy days he has to leave her in doors all day. When the sun shines, she can bask in its warmth and light. Travers says nothing, but she doesn't object to his salutations any more.
By this time, relations seem positively conciliatory between Author and Movie Studio.
Back in the past, Travers' world is falling apart. Her father not only falls down drunk during the bank's presentation at a county fair, but he coughs up blood and is taken to bed with fever. Her overwhelmed mother tries to drown herself while in a somnolent state and is rescued by young Helen. A prim aunt arrives to save the family by, first bringing order to their home and making sure everything is "spit spot." Thus, Mary Poppins is born.
The delirious Goff has turned upon his daughter, mocking the poem she has written him, breaking her heart. But she doesn't reject him. Instead, she writes a better poem. In a last moment of lucidity, Goff is loving and Helen asks him if there's anything he'd like. Pears, he answers. She runs off to pick them and when she returns, she finds that he has died. That's why she hates pears today. A little of this goes a long way. It's true that we are what we were. But the line between everything that shaped us as children and the mold we carry into adulthood is not that clear, clean or literal. It's fine for the film to show us Travers' (Helen's) early disappointments and influences, but there's no need to link everything she and Mary Poppins are to the life and death of Travers Goff, especially since he died when the real Helen was only 8 and the movie doesn't tell us what happened during the rest of her formative years. To say that everything she feels today is an amplification of what she felt then is to take a paint-by-numbers approach to storytelling.
Back at Disneyland, literally, we see Travers get a firsthand tour of the famous park. The costumes, scenery and sets that recreate Los Angeles in the early sixties are rich, vividly transporting us to that other time. Walt is greeted by a mass of Disney visitors who want his autograph. He gives them something better, copies of his signature that he has Xeroxed and dispenses like fliers. Everything in his world is a façade, but it's the only reality Walt knows -- in his mind, it's the superior reality. Travers' just observes, until he orders her to get on the merry go round. I wish she had barked right back at him, just as she did to his writers. As much as I love the Mary Poppins movie, the magic Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke brought to it, I'm sad to the extent that Travers' was reversed.
Disney tells Travers that reading her book saves children, just as Mary Poppins saved Jane and Michael Banks. Travers scoffs. Does he really think Mary (well, Travers insists that it's always "Mary Poppins" never just "Mary") was there to save the children? After some reflection, Disney sees that Mary Poppins saved Mr. Banks instead, just as Travers' wishes her father had been saved. In the end, Mary Poppins is going to be something different to each of us, beyond what either Travers or Disney's definitions. Still, Disney has no right to insist that his vision usurp Travers'. She comes to this conclusion upon learning that the dancing penguins in Disney's movie script will be animated, against Travers' express cartoon prohibition. Travers hands the unsigned contract back to Disney and flies home to England. One would cheer her exit, if we didn't know how the story ends.
At home, Travers is relieved to be reunited with fine English tea again. She shares a cup with ... a stuffed Micky Mouse. The same toy that she tossed aside when she first arrived in Los Angeles has now become quite a companion.
After she leaves, Disney probes deeper into Travers' background and learns she didn't grow up a pampered English Rose. She was a poor Australian girl. All this time he'd been dealing with Travers, he should have been talking to her inner Helen.
He flies to England, tells her a tale about his own icy childhood, delivering newspapers for a stern father in frigid snow and threadbare shoes.
Avuncular and caring, he convinces Travers that she understand her needs. She signs the contract.
I feel the movie should have ended there, but it proceeds to the movie premier. Disney doesn't send Travers an invitation. She'll only gripe openly about every scene and his film doesn't need the bad publicity. With prodding from her attorney, Travers' decides she's not the type to take the slight lying down. She flies to Los Angeles, this time expensively attired, having reaped the rewards of her book deal. She demands an invitation to the premiere. She feels alone amid the Hollywood glitterati. Her words and ideas have made this movie possible, but she is an outsider, no cameras vie for her attention on the red carpet. No one wants her interview. They associate Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews, Walt Disney, even Disney's writers, but not P. L. Travers.
Travers watches the movie enthralled and cries loudly (and I think rather absurdly) for Mr. Banks. Once again we're told that his trial, tribulations and triumphs are her father's. Her own.
The movie ends with priceless credits showing pictures of the real Travers, Disney and writers, in place of Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks and the other cast members. Then we hear audio of P. L. Travers' actual voice as she precisely instructs Disney's restless writers. She tells them how the Banks' house exterior should look, it's modeled after her own. She explains how the flowers should be arranged, clarifies the Banks' class status, explains that Mr. Banks is not an unkind man, he's just been burdened by the cares of the world. Those matter-of-fact words from Travers' herself are more touching than the heavy-handed exposition that the movie offered.
Even if some things were explained in broad, repetitive strokes, the film's expert acting and attention to visual detail made it a pleasure to watch.
Aside from Travers' relationship to her father, I wanted to know a little more about those early years. At times it seemed that Goff sought to alienate the child from her mother, painting the woman who weakly tried to hold things together, as the bad guy who wanted to ground their flights of fancy. He'd rather have Helen by his side imagining herself a princess, than helping her mother set the table so that they could eat the meager provisions his errant ways left them. I'm not sure, but at times it seemed as if Travers' resented her mother's physical closeness to Goff, seeming to mind when they kissed or embraced. Helen once muttered, "she's a foul fowl," but I'm unclear as to whether she was referring to her, actually, docile mother or a witch from one of her father's stories. Did she consider her mother a rival? I can't say, but as long as we were visiting Travers' past, I'd like to have seen how she interacted with her sisters, mother and aunt who became the Mary Poppins' prototype. She probably spent more time with any and all of them than with her alcoholic dad. Of course, she idolized him. any child would gravitate towards what is handsome, reckless and impractical, over the sober and conventional. Maybe a small part of Travers was even charmed by Walt Disney, for the very same reason.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Thor (2011)
Having seen The Avengers first, I appreciate the backstory this movie offered me about the Thor/Loki relationship and I marvel at how Tom Hiddleston evolved in villainy from the first movie to the second. Makes me look forward to seeing him in The Dark World.
This movie had quite a few laughs that I know must have made a bigger impact in the theater than they did on my home television screen, as when Thor grapples with the fact that he's lost his powers and makes an arrogant speech of omnipotence only to be failed like a mortal. Those made me smile, but I'm sure I would have guffawed had I been part of a theater audience.
When Thor finally gets to the hammer, I'm annoyed that he wastes so much time, to build the excitement, before trying to lift the darn thing. You know, just walk up to and pull. I have to say I didn't see the fact that he wouldn't be able to pick it up coming, even though I knew Odin had taken his power away, I still thought he would have the magic touch. So, Thor's surprise and despair was quite effective.
His redemption was stupid though. He became a better man just because ... well, he was humbled by not being able to raise the hammer. Then Loki hits him with the news that his dad was dead. Thirdly, he's falling for Jane who has asked him not to smash mugs. I know these things might combine to change a person, but he was transformed in 2 minutes. Next thing you know, he's making and serving breakfast for everyone, committed to serving others. Suddenly he thinks sparing innocent lives is more important than winning and the path of non-violence is better than killing all of your ice enemies. I just don't see where this change came from.
Yes, he was taken down a notch, but in the end I don't think anything happened to erase his earlier desire to kill all of the Frost Giants. He only met about 50 people during his short stint on earth. He's not like baby Superman who grew up with mortals. I don't buy that spending a few hours on another planet convinced him that his goal should be to make sure that all of the realms co-existed, rather than to get even.
While his ouster and Loki's lie that Odin was dead would be enough to make him regret his argument with Dad, I don't think it would change his views on world peace.
As for Loki and Jane, again I don't think they could have fallen in love that quickly. She hits him with her car twice and then spend an evening chit chatting, but ... while meeting a real superhero must have been thrilling for her, I don't know what she did to convince Thor that she was the smartest human on the planet. She didn't seem any sharper than Darcy to me. Speaking of which, Kat Dennings is far more charming than CBS ever allows her to be on Two Broke Girls. When, someone can handle wit with a deft, light hand, why have her do it with a, ahem, hammer on your sitcom?
The film tried to convince us it was love at first sight for Jane and Thor, but I think you have to share more to get to that point. Having them both laugh gaily together when nothing is funny does not establish chemistry. For this reason, by the time they parted, I thought it would have been more realistic for Thor to say, "Nice meeting you," rather than, "I promise I'll return for you." Still, in the end when Heimdall tells Thor he can still see Jane and "she searches for you" it did tug a little at the old heartstrings. Thinking of people, separated by a universe and pining for each other is moving, especially when someone has the gift of site that Thor lacks. Having a vicarious glimpse of a loved one is somehow more painful than having none at all. Yet Heimdall's words cause him to smile. As for Heimdall, I still pine away a bit for Luther. I wish this movie required any of Idris Elba's unique charisma or even his real speaking voice, rather than the distorted sound effect.
I'd like to see more of Thor's friends, Sif, Hogun, etc. It's hard for Jane and her crew to compare to them. A story set on earth is one thing, but if the movie shows you both the Gods in their habitat and humans in theirs, the Gods' world will look more enticing.
The Odin/Thor/Loki relationship was the strongest for me and I don't think Loki's inferiority complex was unjustified. His father and brother's dismissive treatment wasn't enough to make him evil and murderous, but it certainly should have made him cranky. If you're going to adopt your enemy's kids as your own two unite warring factions, then don't treat him like a red-headed stepchild. That's how you create factions. In the flashback to their youth, Odin tells him that they were both born to lead, but there could only be one king. We see how meaningful these words are later, when we learn Loki's true identity. But, why didn't Odin treat Loki as more of Thor's equal when they were grown men? If he had, then he'd have more of a Harry and William thing, than Cain and Abel.
When Loki tricked and killed King Laufey, it convinced me that in the end he would never actually harm Odin. He just wanted to be credited for saving the day by the men in his family, like he was by Frigga. As he told Thor, he never wanted to be King, he just wanted to be his equal. I believe that.
But the dysfunctional family dynamic served the movie well. When Odin held Thor and Thor held Loki, their screams for Loki not to let go gave this movie its only heart. It's the feelings, not the fights that bring the comics to life.
This movie had quite a few laughs that I know must have made a bigger impact in the theater than they did on my home television screen, as when Thor grapples with the fact that he's lost his powers and makes an arrogant speech of omnipotence only to be failed like a mortal. Those made me smile, but I'm sure I would have guffawed had I been part of a theater audience.
When Thor finally gets to the hammer, I'm annoyed that he wastes so much time, to build the excitement, before trying to lift the darn thing. You know, just walk up to and pull. I have to say I didn't see the fact that he wouldn't be able to pick it up coming, even though I knew Odin had taken his power away, I still thought he would have the magic touch. So, Thor's surprise and despair was quite effective.
His redemption was stupid though. He became a better man just because ... well, he was humbled by not being able to raise the hammer. Then Loki hits him with the news that his dad was dead. Thirdly, he's falling for Jane who has asked him not to smash mugs. I know these things might combine to change a person, but he was transformed in 2 minutes. Next thing you know, he's making and serving breakfast for everyone, committed to serving others. Suddenly he thinks sparing innocent lives is more important than winning and the path of non-violence is better than killing all of your ice enemies. I just don't see where this change came from.
Yes, he was taken down a notch, but in the end I don't think anything happened to erase his earlier desire to kill all of the Frost Giants. He only met about 50 people during his short stint on earth. He's not like baby Superman who grew up with mortals. I don't buy that spending a few hours on another planet convinced him that his goal should be to make sure that all of the realms co-existed, rather than to get even.
While his ouster and Loki's lie that Odin was dead would be enough to make him regret his argument with Dad, I don't think it would change his views on world peace.
As for Loki and Jane, again I don't think they could have fallen in love that quickly. She hits him with her car twice and then spend an evening chit chatting, but ... while meeting a real superhero must have been thrilling for her, I don't know what she did to convince Thor that she was the smartest human on the planet. She didn't seem any sharper than Darcy to me. Speaking of which, Kat Dennings is far more charming than CBS ever allows her to be on Two Broke Girls. When, someone can handle wit with a deft, light hand, why have her do it with a, ahem, hammer on your sitcom?
The film tried to convince us it was love at first sight for Jane and Thor, but I think you have to share more to get to that point. Having them both laugh gaily together when nothing is funny does not establish chemistry. For this reason, by the time they parted, I thought it would have been more realistic for Thor to say, "Nice meeting you," rather than, "I promise I'll return for you." Still, in the end when Heimdall tells Thor he can still see Jane and "she searches for you" it did tug a little at the old heartstrings. Thinking of people, separated by a universe and pining for each other is moving, especially when someone has the gift of site that Thor lacks. Having a vicarious glimpse of a loved one is somehow more painful than having none at all. Yet Heimdall's words cause him to smile. As for Heimdall, I still pine away a bit for Luther. I wish this movie required any of Idris Elba's unique charisma or even his real speaking voice, rather than the distorted sound effect.
I'd like to see more of Thor's friends, Sif, Hogun, etc. It's hard for Jane and her crew to compare to them. A story set on earth is one thing, but if the movie shows you both the Gods in their habitat and humans in theirs, the Gods' world will look more enticing.
The Odin/Thor/Loki relationship was the strongest for me and I don't think Loki's inferiority complex was unjustified. His father and brother's dismissive treatment wasn't enough to make him evil and murderous, but it certainly should have made him cranky. If you're going to adopt your enemy's kids as your own two unite warring factions, then don't treat him like a red-headed stepchild. That's how you create factions. In the flashback to their youth, Odin tells him that they were both born to lead, but there could only be one king. We see how meaningful these words are later, when we learn Loki's true identity. But, why didn't Odin treat Loki as more of Thor's equal when they were grown men? If he had, then he'd have more of a Harry and William thing, than Cain and Abel.
When Loki tricked and killed King Laufey, it convinced me that in the end he would never actually harm Odin. He just wanted to be credited for saving the day by the men in his family, like he was by Frigga. As he told Thor, he never wanted to be King, he just wanted to be his equal. I believe that.
But the dysfunctional family dynamic served the movie well. When Odin held Thor and Thor held Loki, their screams for Loki not to let go gave this movie its only heart. It's the feelings, not the fights that bring the comics to life.
Friday, November 29, 2013
About Time (2013)
I saw the trailer and thought I already knew everything about this movie going in. I figured hero traveled to the present from another time, fell in love with contemporary woman and started building a life with her when some plot device loomed to drag him back to his own period and separate them forever through time and space. In reality, the movie was much simpler, more unique and endlessly charming than that.
Tim is not so much a time traveler as a time tourist. On his 21st birthday he learns that he can revisit points in his own lifetime, it's a family trait passed down to all males. He can't travel into the future, only back into his own past. He lives in the present day with his family: a wry, plain-spoken mother; a father who retired at 50 and spends all of his time reading, playing table tennis with his adored son; or being amusing; a crazy sister, Kit Kat, who is more annoying than endearing to me, but is beloved by Tim; and an affectionate Uncle D who, removed from much around him, always seems to have his mind on something else, but the family has never been able to figure out quite what.
Tim always sensed that his family was different, the way they spent every weekend on the beach, no matter what the weather, for instance. But he never realized how far from center they really are until his father takes him aside a day after New Year's, when Tim has come of age and tells him that he can time travel. All he has to do is go into a private space, like a closet or bathroom in a pinch, scrunch his hands, concentrate hard to focus on where he wants to go and then voila, he'll travel back to that point. The father is pretty short on details. For instance, he doesn't tell Tim how to return (I guess you return the same way you came). He doesn't tell Tim how long he can stay in the past (although, I suppose it's indefinite). He doesn't detail any of the rules, which leaves room for some interesting plot developments, but seems rather insensitive when you think about it. It's fine to let your son make his own mistakes, but when consequences are high, a few pointers would not be remiss.
For one thing, since the father is a time traveler too and their circle is a very small one, it's strange that they don't have any fear about changing each other's pasts or erasing events that one of them found horrible, but the other actually cherished. Sculpting the past can be a very selfish endeavor. Tim and his dad are both kind and disciplined people who don't abuse their power. Even so, in a movie less loving, there would be real consequences to explore regarding the travel. Plus, there is at least one event that they'd both want to change. Since they don't consult with each other before traveling, how do they ensure that they both don't act to undo the same point in the past? It's a situation where two attempts to right the same thing could result in a terrible wrong. I applaud the movie for avoiding obvious plot devices, like false misunderstandings and romantic games which artificially keep lovers apart. The absence of such ploys is what makes the characters seem so genuine and welcoming. Yet, although some time traveling problems arise, the movie is still sometimes too simple and frictionless for its own good, given the premise.
The women in the family don't inherit the time travel gene and the men, for reasons unknown, have chosen to keep it secret from them.
Tim is, of course, skeptical but immediately puts his father's revelation to the test and find that the impossible is true. The family hosted a New Year's Eve party which unraveled for Tim when he chickened out and failed to kiss an expectant young woman on the stroke of midnight. Both of them were left humiliated by his omission. He time travels back to that point and not only rectifies his mistake, but knowing what will happen before hand, he is able to improve upon his own limitations and not only smooches her, but gives her a doozy of a kiss that leaves both of them pleased and impressed.
Despite this kiss, Tim remains romantically inexperienced and is immediately infatuated when Kit Kat brings a beautiful friend, Charlotte, home to stay with them for the summer. Tim pines for Charlotte for months and on her last day with them, he makes an advance. She tells him it's a shame he waited so late. It almost makes his stated feelings for her seem like an afterthought. If he'd revealed his interest earlier in the summer, they might have had a chance. Upon hearing this, Tim immediately goes back in the past and expresses his love (I'm not sure it can really be called that, he seems more attracted to her than in love, to me) to Charlotte earlier, at which point she tells him that he has spoken too soon. She says he should have waited until the last night of her visit and then maybe she would have returned his feelings. The last night? He questions. Yes, the last night, she confirms.
This tells me that Charlotte was leading him on and had no intention of dating him at any point during the summer. It seemed clear that she was not a nice person, but apparently (we learn later) Tim isn't left with that impression. He just thinks he struck out. I wonder why he didn't go back in time and ask her TWICE, once at the beginning of her vacation and once on the last day, to see how she would have shot him down then, but he doesn't try that.
The next thing we know, Tim is working as a lawyer. Since he was just 21, I'm not sure how he skipped law school altogether, but maybe things work differently in the United Kingdom. He rooms with a friend of his father's, a crazed (and slightly sadistic) playwright named Harry and is still hoping that love will find him.
One night he dines at one of those black-out restaurants (where the interior is completely dark and the diners can't see either their meal or the people around him) with his friend and they are seated next to, two women.
Tim and the unseen woman, Mary, click instantly and share jokes all evening. When dinner is over, Tim stands nervously outside waiting to see Mary emerge, hoping not only that she looks even 50% as good as she sounded, but that he won't be a turn off for her, with his flaming red hair. Both of their hopes are realized when they see each other and are equally pleased and shy. Mary gives Tim her number, entering it into his cell phone and he can hardly wait to call her.
When he arrives home that evening, Harry is enraged and practically suicidal. It was the opening night of the latest play he wrote and one of the actors forgot his lines, ruining the play and, with it, Harry's career. Tim quickly excuses himself, goes into a closet, re-enters the past and hurries to the theater where, minutes before show time, he tells an actor in the play to learn his lines. Now, if the actor didn't know them already, I'm not sure why a word from a stranger would prompt him to learn the lines. But after shooing Tim away indignantly, once Tim leaves the actor does review the script and is flawless. This is absurd, because actors usually go up out of nervousness and reviewing the script won't keep them from getting stage fright and freezing in front of an audience, but unbelievably, Tim's visit did the trick and the actor's performance was perfect. BUT his co-star's wasn't. Apparently, Tim didn't even bother to find out which actor flubbed his lines. So, he ends up going back in time again, having to make cue cards for the other actor and holding them in the wings. This time, both actors succeed and the play is a success.
The next morning, Harry is delighted about the rave reviews his creation has garnered and berates Tim for having missed most of the show (because, unbeknownst to Harry, Tim was backstage). Relieved, Tim has that out of the way and is ready to call Mary, but when he takes out his phone, her number is gone. The night he spent with her never happened. He erased it, to go into the past to help Harry.
Now, I think Mary > Harry and I would just go back in time, forget Harry and relive the night in the restaurant with Mary. But Tim takes the harder route. He recalls that Mary said she loved Kate Moss. There is an (unlikely) Kate Moss exhibit at the museum and Tim camps out at the museum for hours on end, waiting for Mary to show up there. How he got enough time off of work to do this, I'll never know.
After several days, Mary does come and he goes up to say hi, forgetting that they have never met before. The restaurant never happened. So, rather than responding to him with warmth, Mary thinks he's a weirdo. But he claims to be a fan of Kate Moss' and soon wins her over as she effusively discusses her idol with him and he feigns agreement. Now, I don't particularly like this artifice on his part. He charmed her on their real first meeting by being himself and now he's just pretending to share her interests, to lure her in. If she knew the time-traveling truth, I'm sure she'd resent this, but the ethical repercussions are never explored in the film and, in fairness, Tim is mostly earnest, manipulating the situation far less than I, for one, would. So, you tend to forgive him.
Tim and his new friend Mary are having lunch when he learns she has a boyfriend. When did that happen. He doesn't just wonder, but demands a precise answer, pressing Mary, her boyfriend, and her pal, Joanna, for the specific time, date and location of Mary's introduction to her new beau. They met at Joanna's party. Where was that party held? Now, why a puzzled Joanna would give this crazed man her home address is beyond me, but she does. He leaves immediately. Mary's boyfriend thinks Tim is strange, but she says she kind of liked him.
Tim travels back in time to Joanna's party and finds Mary on the patio, a wallflower. He immediately strikes up a conversation and whisks her off to dinner before her boyfriend-to-be can arrive. They pass the man on their way out and exchange brief words. What a jerk, Tim observes of the guy later. Mary agrees with him. So, I guess that's a sign. When she missed her destiny with Tim, she still thought he was a nice person after she began dating someone else. She saw his true essence, even though she barely knew him, suggesting they were true soul mates. But when Tim changed things so that she didn't meet the other boyfriend, when she crossed his path in the alternate life, she didn't have any positive feelings for him at all.
At dinner, Tim manipulates Mary even further, by repeating her own words (from the changed past) about Kate Moss back to her. She is bowled over by his insights, so uncannily like her own. He has said what she thinks, before she thought it! She asks him to walk her to her car, but it turns out her car is at her house, so he's actually being invited upstairs. She tells him she is going to slip into her new pajamas. He seemingly takes that news in stride, although it befuddles me. Then, she adds that she's putting them on and, in two minutes, he can come in and take them off, if he wants.
Since she only gave him her phone number during their real first date, I'm surprised that she's moving so fast, but he's thrilled. He starts to disrobe her and fumbles with the bra. She has to tell him that it opens in the front. They have sex and he apologetically informs her that it will be better next time. She demurs and says she thought it was pretty good this time. He thinks there is room for improvement, goes into the next room, goes into the past and starts at the pajamas again. This time, he unhooks the bra with ease. They have great sex, but he still thinks it can be better. Back into the past, this time he comes at her like a locomotive, practically undoing her bra with just a touch. The sex is so exciting they end up on the floor, minds blown.
It was the best night of his life and now he thinks he will get the best sleep of his life. Oh, does that mean he's only good for one time, Mary wants to know. Exhausted from three bouts of sex, to her one, Tim remarks that he thinks that is a little unfair of her.
We see them fall in love in a series of train partings. They go to the train station together and then separate for their separate routes, day after day after day. Their adoration as deep as it is domestic. They aren't running to each other across a crowded field. They're sharing days, both on the same page, becoming inextricable parts of the other. At the train station, they ride the escalator together. Once she kisses his shoulder, a peck so tenderly expressing everything that a tangle of two tongues could not. Once they get on the escalator holding hands, then pull back and talk to each other and then clasp hands again, unable to stay apart for too long. Their mutual need is normal, slow, natural, not the quick, desperate and fleeting variety.
They move in together. Mary introduces Tim to her parents on short notice. They show up at the door and she tells him he shouldn't say he lives there. He can admit they're having sex, but not oral sex. Why would that even come up, Tim asks incredulously. But once she's put it into his head, he can't take it out and he sputters to her father that they're definitely not having oral sex. He has to go into the past to change that debacle. But he's not the only nervous one. Mary rambles and then discloses that it's only because she loves Tim and wants her parents to love him too. This is the only time these two come close to saying they love each other during the film, but it's not something they have to put into words, so evident is it in their every easy gesture.
One night he says he has tickets to an opera. Does she want to go? It sounds boring and she'd rather stay at home nestled in bed. He should take someone else. He takes his friend Rory from work and they see Charlotte, the woman Tim remembers as his first love, though I beg to differ.
He's an awkward boy again and goes over to meet her. She's with a friend and thinking that they're a gay couple Tim gushes that he's so relieved, because it means that her disinterest wasn't because of his own shortcomings years ago. This is an unacceptable thing to say, even if Charlotte is gay. But she's not. Tim is mortified and goes back in time to fix that, only to make another gaffe. He does one more redo and then gives up, deciding not to talk to Charlotte at all. But she sees him and comes over to catch up. She walks away and I am relieved that he's not going to make the mistake of sleeping with "the one who got away" (more like "the one who never was and never should have been"), but not so fast! Charlotte changes her mind, ditches her friend, ditches Tim's friend and asks Tim to take her out to dinner. Since she's still as rude as she was during the summer spent at his home, I don't know why Tim is still enamored, but he is. I figure he'll sleep with her, regret it and go back in time to change events. A move that would not sit well with me. I keep waiting for the twinge of guilt to overcome him. Is he not going to remember his love for Mary until after the deed is done? I don't like where this is heading, especially when she invites him up to her apartment. Outside the door, she tells him it's even better inside and leans in for a kiss. He backs away, thank goodness, and says there is something he has to do.
He rushes home to Mary who is in bed. Get up, he has something to say to her. She says it's selfish of him to wake her, when she's feeling so comfy. She apparently likes a snuggly bed as much as I do. He realizes that this the wrong way to start a momentous event and goes back in time to begin again, waking her up more firmly, before trying to converse. She notices that he is on his knee, there's romantic music playing and a question he says cannot wait. She jokingly wonders what happened at the opera? Did he get so bored that he thought he'd come home and ask her to marry him? Yes, he says. In fact, that's exactly what happened. I like that he is realizing he was so bored with Charlotte that that's how he knew Mary was his future. It wasn't guilt that made him stop. It was his indifference to Charlotte, to anyone but Mary. Nice, but I wish he'd realized that indifference earlier. I know you never forget your first crush, but once real love comes along, crushes pale in comparison and I'd think he'd see that instantaneously, not after a few hours had gone by with Charlotte, platonic though they were.
He asks Mary to marry him. She pauses and I think they're too sure of each other for him to be really nervous, but he is a bit, yes, no? She says she thinks she'll say yes. I wonder if the mood is anti-climatic for her. Couldn't he have waited until she was fully up and alert? She says she is glad that he asked her when they were alone and didn't make a big public production of it. Upon hearing this, he slips out and quietly tells the musicians he'd hired to serenade her to leave.
She meets his parents. They announce the engagement and also the fact that she's already pregnant. It rains on their wedding day and Tim asks Mary if she would have chosen another day. No, she insists, she wouldn't change a thing. Whew! He's relieved he won't have to go back in time to change that, but he did go back to change his best man twice, after his first choices completely failed at the wedding toast. On the subject of toasts, his father also went back in time, regretting the fact that he did not say he loved Tim the first time. Love is implied, Tim says. He begs him not to change his words, but the father won't listen. In his alternate toast, he says that he's only loved three men, not his father, who was a rascal, but Uncle D, Tim and B. B. King, obviously. He says that nothing gives him greater pride than being Tim's father. These words move Tim and the audience and it's clear Tim prefers it to the original toast, which now no longer exists. Whether the results are good or bad, how does Tim, or his father, feel about having their past erased to suit someone else's whim? I'd mind. It's a discussion they never have.
Wedding vows undertaken "and so it begins" Mary says, reminding me of Henry and Claire finding each other in Time Traveler's Wife and making my heart break just a little. Of course, Rachel Adams was in the Time Traveler's Wife movie, for which I'll never forgive her, so life-changing was the book. But that's another story and this movie greatly redeems McAdams past horrors.
Mary and Tim move into a bigger place and have baby Posy. On Posy's first birthday, Kit Kat doesn't arrive for the party. She's become a depressed alcoholic and Tim discovers she's had a bad accident, when leaving her boyfriend after yet another argument. Tim decides to change the course of Kit Kat's entire life. It occurred to him to do this, when he realized he might lose her. He tells her his secret, takes her into the closet with him and together they travel back to that old New Year's Eve party, where he prevents her from meeting her deadbeat boyfriend and she begins dating his boyhood friend Jay instead. Back in the present, Jay and Kit Kat turn out to be happy people, happy together. Now, I think it's somewhat insulting to suggest that all Kit Kat needed to turn her life around was the right man. But he's satisfied with his retroactive results and leaving Kit Kat and Jay in bliss, heads home.
He walks into his kitchen to find the baby in the high chair is not Posy, but some kid he doesn't recognize. Now, since Posy was just a year old, he could start fresh with this new little stranger and never look back. But, to his credit, he wants his baby girl back. He has a talk with his dad who tells him that you can't go back in time after the birth of a child, because if you're a second off, then the same sperm won't combine with the egg and you'll have a different baby. Why hadn't he mentioned this earlier? Also, why didn't the old man go back in time to save Kit Kat after the accident. Why did Tim have to do it? Why didn't Tim chat up his dad, first, just to verify that Dad had no intention of trying to undo the accident as well. Great minds think alike, don't they, especially when they're in the same family and both, presumably, love Kit Kat.
So, to get Posy back, Tim reverses his trip back in time with Kit Kat and instead just gives her a stern lecture at her hospital bed. Since she wasn't dying anyway, I don't know why he took it upon himself to change her whole life trajectory in the first place. How can she learn from her mistakes, if he doesn't let her have any? The trip back was a mistake for reasons having nothing to do with Posy. All Tim and Mary have to do is tell Kit Kat to think about her life -- which they should have done before the accident and she decides to give up her boyfriend and stop drinking pretty quickly. Then, Tim suggests she date Jay. She'd never thought about it before, but is keen to give it a go. She and Jay click and her life reverses course, because of the accident, not because Tim makes it unhappen.
Tim asks Mary to have another baby. They do. They are at home and she is changing her dress for the umpteenth time so they can attend a work affair of hers, when the phone rings with bad news. They go to his parents' and learn his father is dying of cancer. He only has a few weeks to live. The father reveals that when he learned this, he went back in time and retired at 50 so he could spend Tim's childhood at home with him.
At the father's funeral, Tim slips away, into the past, to spend a few moments with his father in the study. Their time together gives him the strength he needs to get through the rest of that painful day.
Sobered by their immortality, Mary asks Tim to have another baby. He is reluctant. He realizes that once the baby is here, he can no longer visit his father in the past or else it will change the baby. He doesn't want to let go of the past in order to pursue their future. But Mary presses and he's not used to refusing her anything. When she asks to try to conceive right now (which I think is unreasonable of her, since they're both still young and their 2 kids are still toddlers) he agrees.
Apparently, during her pregnancy he keeps time traveling and probably changes the identity of the fetus many times. But when Mary is in her ninth month, he realizes that time is short. He goes back into the past and enters his parents' rec room. He and his father play ping pong and what is the winner's prize going to be? A kiss Tim says. A KISS, the unmushy Dad exclaims and then realizes ... so this is it? Yes, Tim says. There is a baby on the way any minute. This is their last time together. Oh, this is the built in heartbreak of all time travel story and it never fails to melt me, whether it's Time Traveler's Wife or Doctor Who. The first meeting is as beautiful as the last is devastating. Tim's father says that they should break the rules just one time to go for a run on the beach. They time travel together back decades ago when Tim was just a little boy, running by his father's side.
Then, it's over. The third baby is born. Tim says that his father gave him a tip: live every day twice. Go through it the first time, trial and tribulations. Then, go through it a second time and find the good moments in each day, the ones you glossed over during the first run through. Savor the wins and the rain and see the silver lining that eluded you in round one. Tim does this and finds that his father was right, even the dismal days held transcendent moments, when he just knew where to find them.
So, he lives each day twice for awhile, but then he takes off the training wheels and says he never time travels anymore. He doesn't have to. Now, he has just learned to live each day with joy the first time, without the need for a do-over. It's a philosophy to which even us non-time travelers should aspire. Just relish each moment, then you won't have to relive it, but that's a facile motto really. There are some irrevocably bad days that even Pollyanna couldn't salvage and I know that if Mary or one of the kids died, Tim would time travel again, no matter what his resolve.
Still, you can't begrudge him his last sunshining message. This movie has earned its goodwill by being funny, original and realistic, despite its fantasy premise. It gave us likable characters who were defined and well-acted. They created a world I wanted to live in. By keeping the emotions understated and, largely, unspoken, it's given us all of the love, but none of the schmaltz. It uses the supernatural to bring us closer to what's concrete. Magic is just a metaphor for life and, as Kit Kat's accident established, there are many ways to start over again, without the help of time travel.
Tim is not so much a time traveler as a time tourist. On his 21st birthday he learns that he can revisit points in his own lifetime, it's a family trait passed down to all males. He can't travel into the future, only back into his own past. He lives in the present day with his family: a wry, plain-spoken mother; a father who retired at 50 and spends all of his time reading, playing table tennis with his adored son; or being amusing; a crazy sister, Kit Kat, who is more annoying than endearing to me, but is beloved by Tim; and an affectionate Uncle D who, removed from much around him, always seems to have his mind on something else, but the family has never been able to figure out quite what.
Tim always sensed that his family was different, the way they spent every weekend on the beach, no matter what the weather, for instance. But he never realized how far from center they really are until his father takes him aside a day after New Year's, when Tim has come of age and tells him that he can time travel. All he has to do is go into a private space, like a closet or bathroom in a pinch, scrunch his hands, concentrate hard to focus on where he wants to go and then voila, he'll travel back to that point. The father is pretty short on details. For instance, he doesn't tell Tim how to return (I guess you return the same way you came). He doesn't tell Tim how long he can stay in the past (although, I suppose it's indefinite). He doesn't detail any of the rules, which leaves room for some interesting plot developments, but seems rather insensitive when you think about it. It's fine to let your son make his own mistakes, but when consequences are high, a few pointers would not be remiss.
For one thing, since the father is a time traveler too and their circle is a very small one, it's strange that they don't have any fear about changing each other's pasts or erasing events that one of them found horrible, but the other actually cherished. Sculpting the past can be a very selfish endeavor. Tim and his dad are both kind and disciplined people who don't abuse their power. Even so, in a movie less loving, there would be real consequences to explore regarding the travel. Plus, there is at least one event that they'd both want to change. Since they don't consult with each other before traveling, how do they ensure that they both don't act to undo the same point in the past? It's a situation where two attempts to right the same thing could result in a terrible wrong. I applaud the movie for avoiding obvious plot devices, like false misunderstandings and romantic games which artificially keep lovers apart. The absence of such ploys is what makes the characters seem so genuine and welcoming. Yet, although some time traveling problems arise, the movie is still sometimes too simple and frictionless for its own good, given the premise.
The women in the family don't inherit the time travel gene and the men, for reasons unknown, have chosen to keep it secret from them.
Tim is, of course, skeptical but immediately puts his father's revelation to the test and find that the impossible is true. The family hosted a New Year's Eve party which unraveled for Tim when he chickened out and failed to kiss an expectant young woman on the stroke of midnight. Both of them were left humiliated by his omission. He time travels back to that point and not only rectifies his mistake, but knowing what will happen before hand, he is able to improve upon his own limitations and not only smooches her, but gives her a doozy of a kiss that leaves both of them pleased and impressed.
Despite this kiss, Tim remains romantically inexperienced and is immediately infatuated when Kit Kat brings a beautiful friend, Charlotte, home to stay with them for the summer. Tim pines for Charlotte for months and on her last day with them, he makes an advance. She tells him it's a shame he waited so late. It almost makes his stated feelings for her seem like an afterthought. If he'd revealed his interest earlier in the summer, they might have had a chance. Upon hearing this, Tim immediately goes back in the past and expresses his love (I'm not sure it can really be called that, he seems more attracted to her than in love, to me) to Charlotte earlier, at which point she tells him that he has spoken too soon. She says he should have waited until the last night of her visit and then maybe she would have returned his feelings. The last night? He questions. Yes, the last night, she confirms.
This tells me that Charlotte was leading him on and had no intention of dating him at any point during the summer. It seemed clear that she was not a nice person, but apparently (we learn later) Tim isn't left with that impression. He just thinks he struck out. I wonder why he didn't go back in time and ask her TWICE, once at the beginning of her vacation and once on the last day, to see how she would have shot him down then, but he doesn't try that.
The next thing we know, Tim is working as a lawyer. Since he was just 21, I'm not sure how he skipped law school altogether, but maybe things work differently in the United Kingdom. He rooms with a friend of his father's, a crazed (and slightly sadistic) playwright named Harry and is still hoping that love will find him.
One night he dines at one of those black-out restaurants (where the interior is completely dark and the diners can't see either their meal or the people around him) with his friend and they are seated next to, two women.
Tim and the unseen woman, Mary, click instantly and share jokes all evening. When dinner is over, Tim stands nervously outside waiting to see Mary emerge, hoping not only that she looks even 50% as good as she sounded, but that he won't be a turn off for her, with his flaming red hair. Both of their hopes are realized when they see each other and are equally pleased and shy. Mary gives Tim her number, entering it into his cell phone and he can hardly wait to call her.
When he arrives home that evening, Harry is enraged and practically suicidal. It was the opening night of the latest play he wrote and one of the actors forgot his lines, ruining the play and, with it, Harry's career. Tim quickly excuses himself, goes into a closet, re-enters the past and hurries to the theater where, minutes before show time, he tells an actor in the play to learn his lines. Now, if the actor didn't know them already, I'm not sure why a word from a stranger would prompt him to learn the lines. But after shooing Tim away indignantly, once Tim leaves the actor does review the script and is flawless. This is absurd, because actors usually go up out of nervousness and reviewing the script won't keep them from getting stage fright and freezing in front of an audience, but unbelievably, Tim's visit did the trick and the actor's performance was perfect. BUT his co-star's wasn't. Apparently, Tim didn't even bother to find out which actor flubbed his lines. So, he ends up going back in time again, having to make cue cards for the other actor and holding them in the wings. This time, both actors succeed and the play is a success.
The next morning, Harry is delighted about the rave reviews his creation has garnered and berates Tim for having missed most of the show (because, unbeknownst to Harry, Tim was backstage). Relieved, Tim has that out of the way and is ready to call Mary, but when he takes out his phone, her number is gone. The night he spent with her never happened. He erased it, to go into the past to help Harry.
Now, I think Mary > Harry and I would just go back in time, forget Harry and relive the night in the restaurant with Mary. But Tim takes the harder route. He recalls that Mary said she loved Kate Moss. There is an (unlikely) Kate Moss exhibit at the museum and Tim camps out at the museum for hours on end, waiting for Mary to show up there. How he got enough time off of work to do this, I'll never know.
After several days, Mary does come and he goes up to say hi, forgetting that they have never met before. The restaurant never happened. So, rather than responding to him with warmth, Mary thinks he's a weirdo. But he claims to be a fan of Kate Moss' and soon wins her over as she effusively discusses her idol with him and he feigns agreement. Now, I don't particularly like this artifice on his part. He charmed her on their real first meeting by being himself and now he's just pretending to share her interests, to lure her in. If she knew the time-traveling truth, I'm sure she'd resent this, but the ethical repercussions are never explored in the film and, in fairness, Tim is mostly earnest, manipulating the situation far less than I, for one, would. So, you tend to forgive him.
Tim and his new friend Mary are having lunch when he learns she has a boyfriend. When did that happen. He doesn't just wonder, but demands a precise answer, pressing Mary, her boyfriend, and her pal, Joanna, for the specific time, date and location of Mary's introduction to her new beau. They met at Joanna's party. Where was that party held? Now, why a puzzled Joanna would give this crazed man her home address is beyond me, but she does. He leaves immediately. Mary's boyfriend thinks Tim is strange, but she says she kind of liked him.
Tim travels back in time to Joanna's party and finds Mary on the patio, a wallflower. He immediately strikes up a conversation and whisks her off to dinner before her boyfriend-to-be can arrive. They pass the man on their way out and exchange brief words. What a jerk, Tim observes of the guy later. Mary agrees with him. So, I guess that's a sign. When she missed her destiny with Tim, she still thought he was a nice person after she began dating someone else. She saw his true essence, even though she barely knew him, suggesting they were true soul mates. But when Tim changed things so that she didn't meet the other boyfriend, when she crossed his path in the alternate life, she didn't have any positive feelings for him at all.
At dinner, Tim manipulates Mary even further, by repeating her own words (from the changed past) about Kate Moss back to her. She is bowled over by his insights, so uncannily like her own. He has said what she thinks, before she thought it! She asks him to walk her to her car, but it turns out her car is at her house, so he's actually being invited upstairs. She tells him she is going to slip into her new pajamas. He seemingly takes that news in stride, although it befuddles me. Then, she adds that she's putting them on and, in two minutes, he can come in and take them off, if he wants.
Since she only gave him her phone number during their real first date, I'm surprised that she's moving so fast, but he's thrilled. He starts to disrobe her and fumbles with the bra. She has to tell him that it opens in the front. They have sex and he apologetically informs her that it will be better next time. She demurs and says she thought it was pretty good this time. He thinks there is room for improvement, goes into the next room, goes into the past and starts at the pajamas again. This time, he unhooks the bra with ease. They have great sex, but he still thinks it can be better. Back into the past, this time he comes at her like a locomotive, practically undoing her bra with just a touch. The sex is so exciting they end up on the floor, minds blown.
It was the best night of his life and now he thinks he will get the best sleep of his life. Oh, does that mean he's only good for one time, Mary wants to know. Exhausted from three bouts of sex, to her one, Tim remarks that he thinks that is a little unfair of her.
We see them fall in love in a series of train partings. They go to the train station together and then separate for their separate routes, day after day after day. Their adoration as deep as it is domestic. They aren't running to each other across a crowded field. They're sharing days, both on the same page, becoming inextricable parts of the other. At the train station, they ride the escalator together. Once she kisses his shoulder, a peck so tenderly expressing everything that a tangle of two tongues could not. Once they get on the escalator holding hands, then pull back and talk to each other and then clasp hands again, unable to stay apart for too long. Their mutual need is normal, slow, natural, not the quick, desperate and fleeting variety.
They move in together. Mary introduces Tim to her parents on short notice. They show up at the door and she tells him he shouldn't say he lives there. He can admit they're having sex, but not oral sex. Why would that even come up, Tim asks incredulously. But once she's put it into his head, he can't take it out and he sputters to her father that they're definitely not having oral sex. He has to go into the past to change that debacle. But he's not the only nervous one. Mary rambles and then discloses that it's only because she loves Tim and wants her parents to love him too. This is the only time these two come close to saying they love each other during the film, but it's not something they have to put into words, so evident is it in their every easy gesture.
One night he says he has tickets to an opera. Does she want to go? It sounds boring and she'd rather stay at home nestled in bed. He should take someone else. He takes his friend Rory from work and they see Charlotte, the woman Tim remembers as his first love, though I beg to differ.
He's an awkward boy again and goes over to meet her. She's with a friend and thinking that they're a gay couple Tim gushes that he's so relieved, because it means that her disinterest wasn't because of his own shortcomings years ago. This is an unacceptable thing to say, even if Charlotte is gay. But she's not. Tim is mortified and goes back in time to fix that, only to make another gaffe. He does one more redo and then gives up, deciding not to talk to Charlotte at all. But she sees him and comes over to catch up. She walks away and I am relieved that he's not going to make the mistake of sleeping with "the one who got away" (more like "the one who never was and never should have been"), but not so fast! Charlotte changes her mind, ditches her friend, ditches Tim's friend and asks Tim to take her out to dinner. Since she's still as rude as she was during the summer spent at his home, I don't know why Tim is still enamored, but he is. I figure he'll sleep with her, regret it and go back in time to change events. A move that would not sit well with me. I keep waiting for the twinge of guilt to overcome him. Is he not going to remember his love for Mary until after the deed is done? I don't like where this is heading, especially when she invites him up to her apartment. Outside the door, she tells him it's even better inside and leans in for a kiss. He backs away, thank goodness, and says there is something he has to do.
He rushes home to Mary who is in bed. Get up, he has something to say to her. She says it's selfish of him to wake her, when she's feeling so comfy. She apparently likes a snuggly bed as much as I do. He realizes that this the wrong way to start a momentous event and goes back in time to begin again, waking her up more firmly, before trying to converse. She notices that he is on his knee, there's romantic music playing and a question he says cannot wait. She jokingly wonders what happened at the opera? Did he get so bored that he thought he'd come home and ask her to marry him? Yes, he says. In fact, that's exactly what happened. I like that he is realizing he was so bored with Charlotte that that's how he knew Mary was his future. It wasn't guilt that made him stop. It was his indifference to Charlotte, to anyone but Mary. Nice, but I wish he'd realized that indifference earlier. I know you never forget your first crush, but once real love comes along, crushes pale in comparison and I'd think he'd see that instantaneously, not after a few hours had gone by with Charlotte, platonic though they were.
He asks Mary to marry him. She pauses and I think they're too sure of each other for him to be really nervous, but he is a bit, yes, no? She says she thinks she'll say yes. I wonder if the mood is anti-climatic for her. Couldn't he have waited until she was fully up and alert? She says she is glad that he asked her when they were alone and didn't make a big public production of it. Upon hearing this, he slips out and quietly tells the musicians he'd hired to serenade her to leave.
She meets his parents. They announce the engagement and also the fact that she's already pregnant. It rains on their wedding day and Tim asks Mary if she would have chosen another day. No, she insists, she wouldn't change a thing. Whew! He's relieved he won't have to go back in time to change that, but he did go back to change his best man twice, after his first choices completely failed at the wedding toast. On the subject of toasts, his father also went back in time, regretting the fact that he did not say he loved Tim the first time. Love is implied, Tim says. He begs him not to change his words, but the father won't listen. In his alternate toast, he says that he's only loved three men, not his father, who was a rascal, but Uncle D, Tim and B. B. King, obviously. He says that nothing gives him greater pride than being Tim's father. These words move Tim and the audience and it's clear Tim prefers it to the original toast, which now no longer exists. Whether the results are good or bad, how does Tim, or his father, feel about having their past erased to suit someone else's whim? I'd mind. It's a discussion they never have.
Wedding vows undertaken "and so it begins" Mary says, reminding me of Henry and Claire finding each other in Time Traveler's Wife and making my heart break just a little. Of course, Rachel Adams was in the Time Traveler's Wife movie, for which I'll never forgive her, so life-changing was the book. But that's another story and this movie greatly redeems McAdams past horrors.
Mary and Tim move into a bigger place and have baby Posy. On Posy's first birthday, Kit Kat doesn't arrive for the party. She's become a depressed alcoholic and Tim discovers she's had a bad accident, when leaving her boyfriend after yet another argument. Tim decides to change the course of Kit Kat's entire life. It occurred to him to do this, when he realized he might lose her. He tells her his secret, takes her into the closet with him and together they travel back to that old New Year's Eve party, where he prevents her from meeting her deadbeat boyfriend and she begins dating his boyhood friend Jay instead. Back in the present, Jay and Kit Kat turn out to be happy people, happy together. Now, I think it's somewhat insulting to suggest that all Kit Kat needed to turn her life around was the right man. But he's satisfied with his retroactive results and leaving Kit Kat and Jay in bliss, heads home.
He walks into his kitchen to find the baby in the high chair is not Posy, but some kid he doesn't recognize. Now, since Posy was just a year old, he could start fresh with this new little stranger and never look back. But, to his credit, he wants his baby girl back. He has a talk with his dad who tells him that you can't go back in time after the birth of a child, because if you're a second off, then the same sperm won't combine with the egg and you'll have a different baby. Why hadn't he mentioned this earlier? Also, why didn't the old man go back in time to save Kit Kat after the accident. Why did Tim have to do it? Why didn't Tim chat up his dad, first, just to verify that Dad had no intention of trying to undo the accident as well. Great minds think alike, don't they, especially when they're in the same family and both, presumably, love Kit Kat.
So, to get Posy back, Tim reverses his trip back in time with Kit Kat and instead just gives her a stern lecture at her hospital bed. Since she wasn't dying anyway, I don't know why he took it upon himself to change her whole life trajectory in the first place. How can she learn from her mistakes, if he doesn't let her have any? The trip back was a mistake for reasons having nothing to do with Posy. All Tim and Mary have to do is tell Kit Kat to think about her life -- which they should have done before the accident and she decides to give up her boyfriend and stop drinking pretty quickly. Then, Tim suggests she date Jay. She'd never thought about it before, but is keen to give it a go. She and Jay click and her life reverses course, because of the accident, not because Tim makes it unhappen.
Tim asks Mary to have another baby. They do. They are at home and she is changing her dress for the umpteenth time so they can attend a work affair of hers, when the phone rings with bad news. They go to his parents' and learn his father is dying of cancer. He only has a few weeks to live. The father reveals that when he learned this, he went back in time and retired at 50 so he could spend Tim's childhood at home with him.
At the father's funeral, Tim slips away, into the past, to spend a few moments with his father in the study. Their time together gives him the strength he needs to get through the rest of that painful day.
Sobered by their immortality, Mary asks Tim to have another baby. He is reluctant. He realizes that once the baby is here, he can no longer visit his father in the past or else it will change the baby. He doesn't want to let go of the past in order to pursue their future. But Mary presses and he's not used to refusing her anything. When she asks to try to conceive right now (which I think is unreasonable of her, since they're both still young and their 2 kids are still toddlers) he agrees.
Apparently, during her pregnancy he keeps time traveling and probably changes the identity of the fetus many times. But when Mary is in her ninth month, he realizes that time is short. He goes back into the past and enters his parents' rec room. He and his father play ping pong and what is the winner's prize going to be? A kiss Tim says. A KISS, the unmushy Dad exclaims and then realizes ... so this is it? Yes, Tim says. There is a baby on the way any minute. This is their last time together. Oh, this is the built in heartbreak of all time travel story and it never fails to melt me, whether it's Time Traveler's Wife or Doctor Who. The first meeting is as beautiful as the last is devastating. Tim's father says that they should break the rules just one time to go for a run on the beach. They time travel together back decades ago when Tim was just a little boy, running by his father's side.
Then, it's over. The third baby is born. Tim says that his father gave him a tip: live every day twice. Go through it the first time, trial and tribulations. Then, go through it a second time and find the good moments in each day, the ones you glossed over during the first run through. Savor the wins and the rain and see the silver lining that eluded you in round one. Tim does this and finds that his father was right, even the dismal days held transcendent moments, when he just knew where to find them.
So, he lives each day twice for awhile, but then he takes off the training wheels and says he never time travels anymore. He doesn't have to. Now, he has just learned to live each day with joy the first time, without the need for a do-over. It's a philosophy to which even us non-time travelers should aspire. Just relish each moment, then you won't have to relive it, but that's a facile motto really. There are some irrevocably bad days that even Pollyanna couldn't salvage and I know that if Mary or one of the kids died, Tim would time travel again, no matter what his resolve.
Still, you can't begrudge him his last sunshining message. This movie has earned its goodwill by being funny, original and realistic, despite its fantasy premise. It gave us likable characters who were defined and well-acted. They created a world I wanted to live in. By keeping the emotions understated and, largely, unspoken, it's given us all of the love, but none of the schmaltz. It uses the supernatural to bring us closer to what's concrete. Magic is just a metaphor for life and, as Kit Kat's accident established, there are many ways to start over again, without the help of time travel.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Gravity (2013)
I saw this in Imax but save for one effect, Ryan’s floating tears, I don’t think that was especially necessary. I know the world disagrees.
It was a great inspiring adventure. Bullock has come a long way from Speed and expertly pulled off what was most often a one-man show. She shoulders the task as well as Tom Hanks did in Cast Away. Of course, George Clooney’s Matt is a bit more captivating than Wilson.
Matt is the senior officer in charge of their space mission. Ryan is a medical engineer, not an astronaut. She’s gone through just 6 months of training to get out there to perform IT in the cosmos, working on the computer system. Ryan is still pretty nauseous as her body continues to adjust to the lack of gravity. I thought her queasiness would play a part in the story, as she hasn’t been able to keep any food down, but it doesn’t, which is good and in keeping with the plot that is really about human strength (the real kind, not the superhuman), rather than contrived weakness. When the movie starts she, Matt and Shariff (as doomed as any red shirt) are outside performing technical repairs. They have a crew back inside their ship and are talking to Mission Control on earth.
Clooney has gotten to the point where he reminds me of what I always used to say about Cary Grant, that his light, playful side is so well known that even when he’s in a movie where he’s cold and withholding (Notorious) or depressed (Penny Serenade) the audience is fully familiar with the part of him that is missing. They can imagine him laughing and kidding, even if they never see him do it onscreen, because the essence of Cary Grant is so ingrained in their minds. You almost assume that any character Grant plays has all of his known personality traits, even when they’re not on display. This is also now true for Clooney and it works both ways: when he’s being irreverent (as Matt is in the beginning) you are aware that he can easily be grave. When he’s cool, you know he can be tender. When he’s gruff, you know there’s a reason for it and are never left to think it’s just bad temperament. You’re always cognizant of the different emotions under his surface and know that if he’s not showing them, there’s a calculated reason, because he wants to spur some particular reaction. Clooney has become such a commodity that it allows him to act in shorthand, one gesture or lip turn speaks volumes.
While Ryan works, Matt is regaling Mission Control with stories he’s told 100 times before. His wife left him, but he really misses the car she took with her. He’s concerned about the space walk record held by an astronaut rival that he’s determined to beat. He plays country music that Ryan asks him to turn down, so she can concentrate. No problem, he says. He’s being the life of the party because that’s his character, because it’s needed to break the tedium, but also because that laid back air will not add to Ryan’s nervousness as a novice in space.
He’s in the middle of a joke when Mission Control tells him that debris from a fallen Russian satellite is headed their way. Ryan is trying to bring the computer server up before they had back to the ship and it looks like they have time, but soon Matt realizes they don’t and orders her to stop what she’s doing. She hesitates, thinking she can finish in seconds and we see the commander in him kick in, ordering her to stop instantly. “Don’t make me tell you, again.” Before they can reach safety, the debris hits. Their ship is caved in. Shariff’s helmet crashes in. Temperatures in space can reach well below freezing and they need their suits and helmet for protection and oxygen.
The earth below them goes dark, all lights extinguished. After the debris storm is over, Ryan finds that she’s been knocked away from their base. She’s floating in darkness, alone in the world, in the universe. We share her isolation in the vastness. She begins hyperventilating as she spirals out of control in her suit. Too terrified to try to navigate the chaos.
Matt is wearing a jet pack that he can use to guide himself. He is still transmitting to her and after an excruciating length of fear as she takes in the reality of her situation thousand of miles away from civilization with no way back, Ryan calms herself down enough to respond to Matt and give him her location. He finds her and tethers her to his suit.
Matt asks for Mission Control’s permission to retrieve Shariff’s floating body. They’ve lost contact with Mission Control, but Matt keeps making blind transmissions. He tells Ryan that they can’t hear MC, but they never whether or not MC can still hear them. So you keep broadcasting, in case there’s someone out there who can save your life. Poor Shariff. The character was not played by a star, so the minute you see him as their co-worker on a dangerous mission, you know he’s not long for this world. He’s the expendable one. The one whose death will bring home the horror of the situation. And so it does. When they get next to Shariff’s body, she’s the one who has to reel him in. She comes face to what used to be HIS face. Some kind of space garbage smashed a hole in his helmet that went right through the middle of his head. But it’s so frozen up there that there’s no skull or body parts really. He looks more like a brittle mask than a man.
When they get back to their ship, it’s been blasted apart and the rest of the crew has suffered the same fate. Matt tells MC that he and Ryan are the only survivors. He doesn’t show palpable emotion, but the priority he made the retrieval of Shariff’s body, so it could be tethered to the ship and, hopefully, some day taken back home to earth, says it all.
He tells Ryan there’s a Russian satellite nearby and they can go there, get a capsule that they can use to travel to the Chinese satellite, which will get them home. She is running out of oxygen. She says she is only slowing him down and he should leave her. She’s going to die anyway. Her tank goes empty, but Matt tells her there’s more in her suit. She just has to “sip” it, not gulp. Stay calm. He assures her she can make it to the Russian satellite and he promises that there’s vodka there to revive her. He knows where the Russians hide it.
She apologizes for not stopping work on the computer and taking shelter as soon as he ordered. He says that the debris was coming no matter what and there is nothing she could do to stop it. He’s right, if they’d gone back to the ship earlier, they would have been inside when everyone else got killed.
Not that you can distract someone at a time like this – when their oxygen is dropping fast – but Matt tries. He asks where she is from and what people in her town would be doing at 8:00 p.m. What would SHE be doing? Driving. “Let me guess: NPR?” Nothing special. She listens to anything where there’s not a lot of talk. She values the quiet. That’s the one thing she likes about space: the silence. She could get used to that. Where would she be going? Was there someone waiting for her. A Mr. Stone? No. She clamps up but then bursts out that she had a daughter. Alert Matt takes out a mirror from his suit, so that he can see her in back of him and read her face, make sure she is not on the verge of hysteria or despair. Her daughter, Ryan continues. A four year old who fell at school playing tag, hit her head and died. It was so silly, she says. And we understand. Life is silly, senseless and capricious. You can’t really talk fair and unfair in a random reality like that. She was driving when she got the news and she has kept on driving since.
As his jet pack runs out of fuel, they plummet roughly onto the Russian satellite, but it has been hit by the debris too. They get swung around trying to enter the ship and they become untethered. Ryan’s foot is loosely caught in ties hanging from the satellite and she is holding onto the broken tether, keeping Matt linked to her. He’s floating, being pulled away from the satellite and Ryan. She says that she can maneuver them both to safety. He sees that she can’t. The atmosphere is too heavy and if they stay connected he will just pull her away from the cords that are her only perilous tie to the satellite. Once her foot loosens from those cords, they will both be floating in space, with no way to guide themselves to even a SMALL chance of escape back. This makes me wonder if gravity free space is like floating in the water. Can’t you kind of wave your arms and propel your body in a certain direction that way? I guess not, but I think I would have tried flapping my elbows like a chicken, just to see.
He says that she has to go to the satellite without him. And then she has to take it to the Chinese satellite IMMEDIATELY, because the last they heard from Mission Control the remnants of the fallen satellite were en route to them and they would be hit by even bigger and deadlier stuff soon, so she has to get out of there as fast as she can. No, she won’t go without him, she insists, holding the broken tether firmly. “I have you. I have you.” She says. He says, it’s not her decision and slowly starts to unbuckle the clasp from his end, breaking his link to her tether. Sealing his fate. It’s more chilling and sad than if he’d put a gun to his head and killed himself in front of her THAT WAY. “Nooo!” She screams. “I HAD you. I HAD you,” she sobbed and you feel the futility of his sacrifice just as she must. And it’s not just his life that she mourns, his sacrifice that she regrets. It’s the fact that without him she will be alone. Alone in this endless black. In a way, that’s worse than death. Better that they had perished together, exchanging, communicating, sharing, rather than that he, she, die alone out there. The silence she once graved is what is most scary now.
But it’s not there yet. She can still hear Matt. He’s giving her directions to get into the Russian satellite. She can see him floating, but he gets more distant each second. She says that she is going to get in and then find and save him. No, there’s no time. She has to be at the Chinese satellite before the next round of deadly space garbage hits. She can’t detour to find him, he orders. “That ship has sailed” he tells her calmly. No, she WILL do it. But he seems at peace already. You can’t beat the view up there, he says, where the sun’s glow is as big as a city. His country music is playing and he already seems at peace.
She gets into the satellite, just after her oxygen reserve is completely drained. She gasps as she finds air and enclosure that it must seem has been absent for a lifetime. She tears off her helmet, the space suit and is left in only a tank top and briefs. Barefooted she pulls her legs to her chest and floats in the fetal position, a brief moment of safety. Then, she pushes her way through the satellite to the dashboard and tries to talk to Matt. She wants his coordinates. She’s coming to get him. No answer. I think that maybe he can still hear her but is CHOOSING not to answer, because he wants her to head to the Chinese station and not waste time trying to retrieve him. I feel confident that he will turn up again. She makes a blind transmission to Mission Control and tells them that she is now the only survivor.
We saw flames flickering in the satellite as she navigated through it, but Ryan didn’t. Not until now. They erupt and start barreling towards her. She speeds away from them, fleeing into the capsule and locking the hatch, closing out the flames just in time. She pulls on a hanging space suit and I’m thankful. I’m afraid the space suits had been consumed in the fire and that she would be trapped without one.
She reads the instruction manual and launches the capsule, but is caught in its parachute attachment, the netting and ropes from it ensnaring her. She has to get out to try to unscrew the parachute from the capsule. Looks into space while completing this task and sees tons of more debris heading her way. She narrowly makes it to cover and then tries to restart the capsule when it runs out of fuel. Ok. That is where I draw the line. It’s a space satellite. Don’t international crews constantly maintain these things and make sure they have plenty of fuel just for emergencies like this?? Maybe the fuel tank was pierced during the debris avalanche. I can only hope there’s some plausible explanation for what looks like a bad plot device in a film that, to its credit, has largely felt real despite the extraordinary circumstances.
At this point, Ryan thinks the turn of events is almost as comical as it is tragic. I mean, when you’re on the verge of hysteria, Murphy’s Law is actually good for a quite a laugh. The tears of hopelessness she sheds sail away from her face and towards the camera lens, in a poignant use of the 3d effect. She tries to get a signal on the capsule’s dashboard and gets a foreign voice. She thinks it may be another satellite that can rescue her and says “May Day,” the person thinks that’s her name. [isn’t “mayday” a word that is universally understood]. She speaks frantically trying to make herself understood, but then hears dogs and realizes that the person on the other end is on earth, not close enough to help. She all but collapses in helplessness. She’s going to die. We’re all going to die. But SHE is going to die today. She lets the fear that this certainty brings her set in. Along with the dogs she hears a baby crying. The man sings. Is he singing the baby a lullaby. She used to sing to her daughter and she finds this soothing. She bids him to keep singing as she takes off her helmet, relaxes in her seat and welcomes death as if it’s only slumber.
She’s half-conscious when she hears a knock on the capsule door. It’s Matt. He is preparing to open the capsule. She motions for him to wait as she scrambles to put on her helmet as protection from the elements, but he doesn’t pause. Why not? He looked through the window and saw she didn’t have anything on her head. What was the point of knocking to give her a thumbs up if he’s just going to barge in in a way that might endanger her? He comes in and she cowers, but I guess it’s not’s 145 degrees below Fahrenheit out there after all, because even though his entry makes it a little windy in there, it doesn’t seem to cause her much discomfort.
How did he get there? It’s a long story he says, jocular as ever. Turns out there was still a little power left in his jet pack, there’s ALWAYS something left, and without her around to hold him back he was able to maneuver to safety. Did she get the vodka? No, he never told her where it was. He finds it under the seat and offers her some. She declines. He says they better get going to the Chinese satellite. But they’re out of fuel. But they can still launch can’t they? Didn’t she learn that in training? They can use that as their fuel. She doesn’t think it will work. That’s right he says. She should give up. Her daughter is dead – she clinches – so why bother carrying on? It would be just easy to just curl up in a ball and resign herself to dying. Go ahead. Lay back and die. It’s easier than fighting. Accepting his challenge she sits up … Matt disappears. It was her subconscious, yes, but I still expected her to reach under the seat and find the vodka bottle whose location SHE didn’t know and prove that it WAS indeed a paranormal visitation and not just Ryan talking to herself into action. But it’s not that kind of movie. It’s about will power rather than fantasy.
She figures out how to launch the capsule. Gets enough force to propel herself to the Chinese satellite. When she gets out of her capsule, she takes a jetpack but then discards it prematurely I think. I’m afraid she will lose her grip on the satellite and go floating out to space. I keep wanting her to somehow tether herself to the satellite spokes as she tries to locate and enter the hatch rather than kind of just jumping from one part of the vessel to another, completely unfettered. I’m not the only one afraid. People around me audibly exhale when Ryan finally opens the hatch door and is almost knocked from the satellite as the lid swings back. She makes it in just barely. Brief respite again. Accepting Matt’s death she tells him he’s going to see a little girl with knotted hair, because she never liked to brush it. Tell her her momma loves her so much and is so, so proud of her. Ryan is headed home or to her fiery death if the satellite is burned as she plunges through the atmosphere. Either way, down they go.
The trip back to earth seems like a surprisingly fast one. Before we know it, Ryan’s satellite capsule, parachute open, is plummeting into the ocean. Her dashboard hits up. Mission Control is asking the unidentified capsule to identify itself (it’s a wonder that the military doesn’t shoot at the capsule as a downed Chinese surveillance vehicle, but they know they have a missing space crew and probably are gleeful realizing that someone has survived. The capsule hits the surface, but it’s filling with smoke and she has to open the door. Water rages in and the capsule begins to sink. It’s a rush for time as Ryan races to get out before she drowns. In the water, weighed down, she has to pull off the heavy space suit. With herculean effort she swims to the surface, again in just her tank and briefs.
Heading towards the muddy shore, she climbs through plants and finally slithers out of the water, onto the damp soil. Terra firma. She lays flat, reveling in its solidity. U.S. planes fly overhead. She holds the mud in her fingers, loving It and everything it stands for. Home, survival, triumph. She tries to make it to her feet, but stumbles at first, her body so unused to gravity. The reverse of where she started. She tries to rise again, loses her balance, but regains it. Like a baby taking first steps. Then, walking upright, body wet from the water, skin glowing and revitalized, bare feet firmly on the ground.
The movie is an affirmation and I love that we don’t see the planes land. She made it back alive, not by herself necessarily, but without anyone rescuing her. It’s a story of courage, perseverance and autonomy. And it’s not as if the audience ever thought Ryan couldn’t do it. She panicked, felt forsaken, almost gave up, but she was NEVER incompetent, just thrust outside of her skillset and not completely sure there was a world below to which it was worth returning. But, in the end, the will to survive is greater than the pain of going on. Life is not the easiest way forward, but winning the fight to make it the ONLY way, the only choice, is the best victory.
Ryan faltered like we all would and succeeded like we all hope we could. The film’s suspense originated more from thought than action and that’s exactly what made it so exciting.
It was a great inspiring adventure. Bullock has come a long way from Speed and expertly pulled off what was most often a one-man show. She shoulders the task as well as Tom Hanks did in Cast Away. Of course, George Clooney’s Matt is a bit more captivating than Wilson.
Matt is the senior officer in charge of their space mission. Ryan is a medical engineer, not an astronaut. She’s gone through just 6 months of training to get out there to perform IT in the cosmos, working on the computer system. Ryan is still pretty nauseous as her body continues to adjust to the lack of gravity. I thought her queasiness would play a part in the story, as she hasn’t been able to keep any food down, but it doesn’t, which is good and in keeping with the plot that is really about human strength (the real kind, not the superhuman), rather than contrived weakness. When the movie starts she, Matt and Shariff (as doomed as any red shirt) are outside performing technical repairs. They have a crew back inside their ship and are talking to Mission Control on earth.
Clooney has gotten to the point where he reminds me of what I always used to say about Cary Grant, that his light, playful side is so well known that even when he’s in a movie where he’s cold and withholding (Notorious) or depressed (Penny Serenade) the audience is fully familiar with the part of him that is missing. They can imagine him laughing and kidding, even if they never see him do it onscreen, because the essence of Cary Grant is so ingrained in their minds. You almost assume that any character Grant plays has all of his known personality traits, even when they’re not on display. This is also now true for Clooney and it works both ways: when he’s being irreverent (as Matt is in the beginning) you are aware that he can easily be grave. When he’s cool, you know he can be tender. When he’s gruff, you know there’s a reason for it and are never left to think it’s just bad temperament. You’re always cognizant of the different emotions under his surface and know that if he’s not showing them, there’s a calculated reason, because he wants to spur some particular reaction. Clooney has become such a commodity that it allows him to act in shorthand, one gesture or lip turn speaks volumes.
While Ryan works, Matt is regaling Mission Control with stories he’s told 100 times before. His wife left him, but he really misses the car she took with her. He’s concerned about the space walk record held by an astronaut rival that he’s determined to beat. He plays country music that Ryan asks him to turn down, so she can concentrate. No problem, he says. He’s being the life of the party because that’s his character, because it’s needed to break the tedium, but also because that laid back air will not add to Ryan’s nervousness as a novice in space.
He’s in the middle of a joke when Mission Control tells him that debris from a fallen Russian satellite is headed their way. Ryan is trying to bring the computer server up before they had back to the ship and it looks like they have time, but soon Matt realizes they don’t and orders her to stop what she’s doing. She hesitates, thinking she can finish in seconds and we see the commander in him kick in, ordering her to stop instantly. “Don’t make me tell you, again.” Before they can reach safety, the debris hits. Their ship is caved in. Shariff’s helmet crashes in. Temperatures in space can reach well below freezing and they need their suits and helmet for protection and oxygen.
The earth below them goes dark, all lights extinguished. After the debris storm is over, Ryan finds that she’s been knocked away from their base. She’s floating in darkness, alone in the world, in the universe. We share her isolation in the vastness. She begins hyperventilating as she spirals out of control in her suit. Too terrified to try to navigate the chaos.
Matt is wearing a jet pack that he can use to guide himself. He is still transmitting to her and after an excruciating length of fear as she takes in the reality of her situation thousand of miles away from civilization with no way back, Ryan calms herself down enough to respond to Matt and give him her location. He finds her and tethers her to his suit.
Matt asks for Mission Control’s permission to retrieve Shariff’s floating body. They’ve lost contact with Mission Control, but Matt keeps making blind transmissions. He tells Ryan that they can’t hear MC, but they never whether or not MC can still hear them. So you keep broadcasting, in case there’s someone out there who can save your life. Poor Shariff. The character was not played by a star, so the minute you see him as their co-worker on a dangerous mission, you know he’s not long for this world. He’s the expendable one. The one whose death will bring home the horror of the situation. And so it does. When they get next to Shariff’s body, she’s the one who has to reel him in. She comes face to what used to be HIS face. Some kind of space garbage smashed a hole in his helmet that went right through the middle of his head. But it’s so frozen up there that there’s no skull or body parts really. He looks more like a brittle mask than a man.
When they get back to their ship, it’s been blasted apart and the rest of the crew has suffered the same fate. Matt tells MC that he and Ryan are the only survivors. He doesn’t show palpable emotion, but the priority he made the retrieval of Shariff’s body, so it could be tethered to the ship and, hopefully, some day taken back home to earth, says it all.
He tells Ryan there’s a Russian satellite nearby and they can go there, get a capsule that they can use to travel to the Chinese satellite, which will get them home. She is running out of oxygen. She says she is only slowing him down and he should leave her. She’s going to die anyway. Her tank goes empty, but Matt tells her there’s more in her suit. She just has to “sip” it, not gulp. Stay calm. He assures her she can make it to the Russian satellite and he promises that there’s vodka there to revive her. He knows where the Russians hide it.
She apologizes for not stopping work on the computer and taking shelter as soon as he ordered. He says that the debris was coming no matter what and there is nothing she could do to stop it. He’s right, if they’d gone back to the ship earlier, they would have been inside when everyone else got killed.
Not that you can distract someone at a time like this – when their oxygen is dropping fast – but Matt tries. He asks where she is from and what people in her town would be doing at 8:00 p.m. What would SHE be doing? Driving. “Let me guess: NPR?” Nothing special. She listens to anything where there’s not a lot of talk. She values the quiet. That’s the one thing she likes about space: the silence. She could get used to that. Where would she be going? Was there someone waiting for her. A Mr. Stone? No. She clamps up but then bursts out that she had a daughter. Alert Matt takes out a mirror from his suit, so that he can see her in back of him and read her face, make sure she is not on the verge of hysteria or despair. Her daughter, Ryan continues. A four year old who fell at school playing tag, hit her head and died. It was so silly, she says. And we understand. Life is silly, senseless and capricious. You can’t really talk fair and unfair in a random reality like that. She was driving when she got the news and she has kept on driving since.
As his jet pack runs out of fuel, they plummet roughly onto the Russian satellite, but it has been hit by the debris too. They get swung around trying to enter the ship and they become untethered. Ryan’s foot is loosely caught in ties hanging from the satellite and she is holding onto the broken tether, keeping Matt linked to her. He’s floating, being pulled away from the satellite and Ryan. She says that she can maneuver them both to safety. He sees that she can’t. The atmosphere is too heavy and if they stay connected he will just pull her away from the cords that are her only perilous tie to the satellite. Once her foot loosens from those cords, they will both be floating in space, with no way to guide themselves to even a SMALL chance of escape back. This makes me wonder if gravity free space is like floating in the water. Can’t you kind of wave your arms and propel your body in a certain direction that way? I guess not, but I think I would have tried flapping my elbows like a chicken, just to see.
He says that she has to go to the satellite without him. And then she has to take it to the Chinese satellite IMMEDIATELY, because the last they heard from Mission Control the remnants of the fallen satellite were en route to them and they would be hit by even bigger and deadlier stuff soon, so she has to get out of there as fast as she can. No, she won’t go without him, she insists, holding the broken tether firmly. “I have you. I have you.” She says. He says, it’s not her decision and slowly starts to unbuckle the clasp from his end, breaking his link to her tether. Sealing his fate. It’s more chilling and sad than if he’d put a gun to his head and killed himself in front of her THAT WAY. “Nooo!” She screams. “I HAD you. I HAD you,” she sobbed and you feel the futility of his sacrifice just as she must. And it’s not just his life that she mourns, his sacrifice that she regrets. It’s the fact that without him she will be alone. Alone in this endless black. In a way, that’s worse than death. Better that they had perished together, exchanging, communicating, sharing, rather than that he, she, die alone out there. The silence she once graved is what is most scary now.
But it’s not there yet. She can still hear Matt. He’s giving her directions to get into the Russian satellite. She can see him floating, but he gets more distant each second. She says that she is going to get in and then find and save him. No, there’s no time. She has to be at the Chinese satellite before the next round of deadly space garbage hits. She can’t detour to find him, he orders. “That ship has sailed” he tells her calmly. No, she WILL do it. But he seems at peace already. You can’t beat the view up there, he says, where the sun’s glow is as big as a city. His country music is playing and he already seems at peace.
She gets into the satellite, just after her oxygen reserve is completely drained. She gasps as she finds air and enclosure that it must seem has been absent for a lifetime. She tears off her helmet, the space suit and is left in only a tank top and briefs. Barefooted she pulls her legs to her chest and floats in the fetal position, a brief moment of safety. Then, she pushes her way through the satellite to the dashboard and tries to talk to Matt. She wants his coordinates. She’s coming to get him. No answer. I think that maybe he can still hear her but is CHOOSING not to answer, because he wants her to head to the Chinese station and not waste time trying to retrieve him. I feel confident that he will turn up again. She makes a blind transmission to Mission Control and tells them that she is now the only survivor.
We saw flames flickering in the satellite as she navigated through it, but Ryan didn’t. Not until now. They erupt and start barreling towards her. She speeds away from them, fleeing into the capsule and locking the hatch, closing out the flames just in time. She pulls on a hanging space suit and I’m thankful. I’m afraid the space suits had been consumed in the fire and that she would be trapped without one.
She reads the instruction manual and launches the capsule, but is caught in its parachute attachment, the netting and ropes from it ensnaring her. She has to get out to try to unscrew the parachute from the capsule. Looks into space while completing this task and sees tons of more debris heading her way. She narrowly makes it to cover and then tries to restart the capsule when it runs out of fuel. Ok. That is where I draw the line. It’s a space satellite. Don’t international crews constantly maintain these things and make sure they have plenty of fuel just for emergencies like this?? Maybe the fuel tank was pierced during the debris avalanche. I can only hope there’s some plausible explanation for what looks like a bad plot device in a film that, to its credit, has largely felt real despite the extraordinary circumstances.
At this point, Ryan thinks the turn of events is almost as comical as it is tragic. I mean, when you’re on the verge of hysteria, Murphy’s Law is actually good for a quite a laugh. The tears of hopelessness she sheds sail away from her face and towards the camera lens, in a poignant use of the 3d effect. She tries to get a signal on the capsule’s dashboard and gets a foreign voice. She thinks it may be another satellite that can rescue her and says “May Day,” the person thinks that’s her name. [isn’t “mayday” a word that is universally understood]. She speaks frantically trying to make herself understood, but then hears dogs and realizes that the person on the other end is on earth, not close enough to help. She all but collapses in helplessness. She’s going to die. We’re all going to die. But SHE is going to die today. She lets the fear that this certainty brings her set in. Along with the dogs she hears a baby crying. The man sings. Is he singing the baby a lullaby. She used to sing to her daughter and she finds this soothing. She bids him to keep singing as she takes off her helmet, relaxes in her seat and welcomes death as if it’s only slumber.
She’s half-conscious when she hears a knock on the capsule door. It’s Matt. He is preparing to open the capsule. She motions for him to wait as she scrambles to put on her helmet as protection from the elements, but he doesn’t pause. Why not? He looked through the window and saw she didn’t have anything on her head. What was the point of knocking to give her a thumbs up if he’s just going to barge in in a way that might endanger her? He comes in and she cowers, but I guess it’s not’s 145 degrees below Fahrenheit out there after all, because even though his entry makes it a little windy in there, it doesn’t seem to cause her much discomfort.
How did he get there? It’s a long story he says, jocular as ever. Turns out there was still a little power left in his jet pack, there’s ALWAYS something left, and without her around to hold him back he was able to maneuver to safety. Did she get the vodka? No, he never told her where it was. He finds it under the seat and offers her some. She declines. He says they better get going to the Chinese satellite. But they’re out of fuel. But they can still launch can’t they? Didn’t she learn that in training? They can use that as their fuel. She doesn’t think it will work. That’s right he says. She should give up. Her daughter is dead – she clinches – so why bother carrying on? It would be just easy to just curl up in a ball and resign herself to dying. Go ahead. Lay back and die. It’s easier than fighting. Accepting his challenge she sits up … Matt disappears. It was her subconscious, yes, but I still expected her to reach under the seat and find the vodka bottle whose location SHE didn’t know and prove that it WAS indeed a paranormal visitation and not just Ryan talking to herself into action. But it’s not that kind of movie. It’s about will power rather than fantasy.
She figures out how to launch the capsule. Gets enough force to propel herself to the Chinese satellite. When she gets out of her capsule, she takes a jetpack but then discards it prematurely I think. I’m afraid she will lose her grip on the satellite and go floating out to space. I keep wanting her to somehow tether herself to the satellite spokes as she tries to locate and enter the hatch rather than kind of just jumping from one part of the vessel to another, completely unfettered. I’m not the only one afraid. People around me audibly exhale when Ryan finally opens the hatch door and is almost knocked from the satellite as the lid swings back. She makes it in just barely. Brief respite again. Accepting Matt’s death she tells him he’s going to see a little girl with knotted hair, because she never liked to brush it. Tell her her momma loves her so much and is so, so proud of her. Ryan is headed home or to her fiery death if the satellite is burned as she plunges through the atmosphere. Either way, down they go.
The trip back to earth seems like a surprisingly fast one. Before we know it, Ryan’s satellite capsule, parachute open, is plummeting into the ocean. Her dashboard hits up. Mission Control is asking the unidentified capsule to identify itself (it’s a wonder that the military doesn’t shoot at the capsule as a downed Chinese surveillance vehicle, but they know they have a missing space crew and probably are gleeful realizing that someone has survived. The capsule hits the surface, but it’s filling with smoke and she has to open the door. Water rages in and the capsule begins to sink. It’s a rush for time as Ryan races to get out before she drowns. In the water, weighed down, she has to pull off the heavy space suit. With herculean effort she swims to the surface, again in just her tank and briefs.
Heading towards the muddy shore, she climbs through plants and finally slithers out of the water, onto the damp soil. Terra firma. She lays flat, reveling in its solidity. U.S. planes fly overhead. She holds the mud in her fingers, loving It and everything it stands for. Home, survival, triumph. She tries to make it to her feet, but stumbles at first, her body so unused to gravity. The reverse of where she started. She tries to rise again, loses her balance, but regains it. Like a baby taking first steps. Then, walking upright, body wet from the water, skin glowing and revitalized, bare feet firmly on the ground.
The movie is an affirmation and I love that we don’t see the planes land. She made it back alive, not by herself necessarily, but without anyone rescuing her. It’s a story of courage, perseverance and autonomy. And it’s not as if the audience ever thought Ryan couldn’t do it. She panicked, felt forsaken, almost gave up, but she was NEVER incompetent, just thrust outside of her skillset and not completely sure there was a world below to which it was worth returning. But, in the end, the will to survive is greater than the pain of going on. Life is not the easiest way forward, but winning the fight to make it the ONLY way, the only choice, is the best victory.
Ryan faltered like we all would and succeeded like we all hope we could. The film’s suspense originated more from thought than action and that’s exactly what made it so exciting.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The movie starts with Tommy Lee Jones’ voice over. That’s misleading for two reasons: (1) He’s the sheriff. You’ve seen him in The Fugitive (or even Men In Black) and you automatically assume he’s going to be hot on the tail of the bad guys, closing in, making their lives miserable, giving them a taste of what it’s like to be hunted. That never happens. (2) Jones’ character, Ed Tom Bell is a third generation sheriff. He grew up hearing not only about his father and grandfather’s pursuits, but of their colleagues. Bell talks of law enforcement officers who did not even wear guns. He says he likes to hear their stories. Combine this with the movie title and you might conclude that this is no country for old men, because crime has gotten much worse than it used to be. Andy Taylor’s Mayberry once existed but is now extinct. But we soon learn the opposite is true.
He sent a man to jail for killing a 14 year old girl. They called it a crime of passion, but the killer told him it wasn’t passion. He’d been planning to kill someone all of his life and if he got out of jail, he promised Ed he’d kill again.
Evil is old. Bell knows it, so did his father and his father before him. Evil’s unreasonable, unpredictable, and inexorable. It’s not invisible, just unnoticed. It takes you by surprise or it comes while you’re waiting. You deserve it or you don’t. You grasp its logic or grapple trying. It’s slow, it’s fast, it’s inescapable.
Here evil is embodied by Anton Chigurh. With his pageboy, oxygen tank and deliberate reticence, his weirdness is obvious, but not frightening. Not at first.
We first see him being arrested and cuffed, but inexplicably, he’s not chained to anything. His movement is restricted, but not prevented. When the deputy turns his back while talking on the phone to describe his capture, Anton easily comes up and kills him from behind. Their bodies spin on the floor as Anton strangles. The blood swirls and the killer’s intensity is almost sexual.
He steals the deputy’s car, police lights whirring, he pulls over a motorist who thinks the oxygen tank by the “cop’s” side is strange, but not troubling. “What’s that he asks.” “Can you please step out of the car?” Anton replies and even though Anton is dressed as a civilian, the driver doesn’t begin to think anything is wrong, until perhaps the very end, when Anton raises the hose on the oxygen take and uses it to propel a lethal pellet into the man’s head. My friend thought it was a stupid weapon, but for a serial killer who murders more for psychological art than necessity, it’s perfect. Anton does not prefer this tank over a shotgun because it’s less conspicuous, as he has no trouble parading massive rifles in public places. Rather, the tank gives him the opportunity to watch the fear and certainty of death dawn, then spread, then end, while a gun or knife would have put his victims on instant alert, shortening the game. Cat and mouse is more layered, when you see the mouse just discovering he is prey.
Anton stops off at a gas station and, oxygen tank in tow, he teases the owner. Twisting his words, taking offense where none was meant, until the man soon realizes there’s no answer he can give this stranger that will keep him safe. Anton takes out a coin and asks the man if he’s feeling lucky. This moment was part of the movie’s famous trailer. Its tension is part of what kept me away from the film for 6 years. I didn’t want to know what happened when that coin stopped spinning. I can watch violent scenes, but don’t like seeing them approach. A shoe on the floor is nothing, compared to watching it drop, in slow motion. If you’ve never been assaulted, you can’t empathize with the injury, but hopeless, helpless waiting is something we’ve all experienced in one form of another and it’s stomach-turning. If the shark doesn’t get you, his theme music will. But things end well for this shopkeeper. Anton tells him to call the coin. He delays, saying how can he call it if he doesn’t know what he stands to win or lose. Anton insists. Head or tails? He chooses head. He wins. Anton gives him the coin as a prize, but orders him to keep it in a special place. Don’t let it mingle with all the other coins, because then it won’t matter.
I wonder about the shopkeeper though. He’s in an unpopulated part of Texas. Near the Mexican border. He’s got merchandise, money and few places to hide. If urban 7-Elevens are dangerous, surely isolated road stops are. How’d he protect himself before Anton? And if he didn’t, surely he knew that the day would come when he might regret it. Ed Tom Bell saw trouble on the horizon and this man should have seen it too, but instead of preparing for it, they both seemed to just wait to see what would happen when it came.
Meanwhile we see Llewelyn Moss out hunting in the desert. He comes upon a slew of dead bodies and abandoned vehicles. There’s one man still alive, bleeding, begging Moss for water. “I ain’t got no water,” he answers unapologetically. He notices that the man’s truck bed is full of drugs. They were transporting an illegal load across the border and obviously got double-crossed during the exchange. Moss asks the fast failing man who was the last one left standing. There was a fight, but it seems that that the attacked killed as many people as the attackers did. There are drugs, but no drug money. Where’d it go? Moss decides that whoever took the money would have gone to the shade. He sees a big tree in the distance and stealthily heads over. There’s a dead man there and a brief case. It’s loaded with money and Moss takes it and hurries off.
Back at his trailer home, he eludes his wife Carla Jean’s questions about where he’s been and hides the money, still in the briefcase, under his trailer.
I appreciate that the lead characters in this movie are all smart, but they do some really dumb things. This is one of them. This is a world where people where dirty jeans to a funeral. It’s hot and dusty and no one carries a brief case. Why would Moss have kept the money in there. It draws attention and it’s heavier than a back pack would have been. Plus, he seems to know that there’s $2 million in the case, but he apparently never bothered to count the stash. It’s a ridiculous point that runs the plot and I’d like to tell the Coens that they could have told the same story, only with a more believable cash container. But I guess avoiding the strange and unlikely has never been their strong suit.
Moss goes to bed, but then decides to return to the desert. He lets Carla Jean know that he’s going off on a fool’s errand and may never return. “Tell mama I love her,” he says as he departs. She reminds him that his mother is already dead. Oh, then he’ll tell her himself, if anything happens. He fills a jug of water before he leaves. So, did he return only to take water to the man he left dying? Did his conscious prick him? Is this gesture supposed to tell us that at heart he’s a decent man? Since he scoffed at the man and had no qualms about abandoning him in the first place, I’m not moved by Moss’ belated compassion, especially since the guy was in such bad shape that I’d hardly expect him to live for 12 more hours waiting for Moss to take pity and help him.
Moss finds his way back to the scene of the shoot out and the man he’d left in the car is now dead. He survived the first round of gunfire only to die later. You're never really spared, only suspended. Aqua came too late to save him. Moss sees vehicles in the distance and as they start shooting at him, he has to leave his truck behind. He makes it home wounded and tells Carla Jean that his truck is registered and can be traced back to him, the Department of Motor Vehicles opens at 9:00 a.m. and that’s how much time they have to get away. She needs to pack everything she can, because she’ll never see any of it again.
He puts her on a bus to her ornery mother in Odessa. But once his vehicle paperwork reveals his identity to the killers, they’ll know who his wife is too. They can easily track down her relatives, so sending her to this destination for protection was crazy. He should have sent her anywhere Greyhound goes where she would have no roots that could be trailed.
He sends her off and rather than getting on a separate bus himself, he gets a car and tries to lay low in the local area. He checks into a motel, but takes two rooms, one in back of the other. He hides the money in the hotel vent in one room, then makes sure he can retrieve it quickly from the adjacent room. The plan being the people on his tail will go to the wrong room and he can high tail it out of there from the other room, with the loot.
Ed Tom Bell and his deputy find the dead bodies in the desert. It’s a drug deal gone bad and when they see Moss’ truck Bell, who knows Moss casually, figures that Moss wasn’t involved with the drug sale, but took the money after things went downhill. The deputy wonders if Moss knew what he was getting into. Well, Bell reasons if Moss saw all the carnage that they did, it probably left an impression on, because it sure impressed Bell.
Anton is hired by the people who put up the money for the drugs to find the person who took it. Once he gets the assignment, he promptly kills the people who retained him, traces Moss’ vehicle registration and heads to Moss’ trailer. It’s empty, but reading Moss’ mail, Anton sees the number most frequently called on the phone bill. That number belongs to Carla Jean’s mother. So Anton immediately knows where to find the wife, but better still, he knows how to find the money. It seems that it was packed with a transmitter inside the brief case that Moss never bothered to rifle through. Once that transmitter starts beeping, it will lead him directly to the brief case. Anton opens Moss’ fridge, takes out the milk and sits down to drink it, watching his reflection on the black tv screen before him.
Ed Tom Bell comes along so soon after Anton has left that the milk glass is still sweating. They just missed him and “that’s frustrating,” he exclaims. But also life-saving. When they entered the trailer, Ed instructed his deputy to have his gun drawn and ready, but what about Ed’s gun? He tells the deputy that he’d rather just hide behind him! But considering all of the dead people they found in the desert, their two guns would not have been enough to defend themselves against multiple shooters – or even one shooter with a powerful enough weapon. So, why DOES Ed go in without his gun drawn? Does he want to be like the sheriffs of old who didn’t wear one? Why. That approach only works if crime rates are low or the criminals easily outsmarted. Ed already knows that neither is the case in this situation. Does he just think death is inevitable and evil something that you can only defeat if you never meet it? Otherwise, don’t bother trying.
Ed takes a swig of the still cool milk and also looks at his reflection in the blank television screen. Are he and Anton both just playing roles? If Anton’s role is evil personified, what is Ed’s? He’s not justice. He’s chronicling wrong, but not correcting it or even warding it off. He’s not a narrator because the audience knows more than Bell ever does. Moss challenges Anton in this movie, no one else comes close. Jones’ great acting aside, one wonders what Bell’s purpose in the story is. Does he represent humanity? No more than Anton’s victims do.
Anton’s transmitter tracks the money to Moss’ motel, but the way it’s situated, hidden at a curve in the vent, it seems to be in a different motel room than the 2 that Moss has rented. Anton busts into that third room and finds three men inside who also have a transmitter. He blows them away. They were apparently hired to do the same job as he was.
Moss hears the gun shots and quickly runs away, briefcase in hand. At the next motel, he wonders how he was tracked and FINALLY looks in the briefcase and finds the transmitter. He removes it and I think maybe if he throws it out the window, Anton will think the money is across the street, but Moss knows he doesn’t have time for that. He calls down to the front desk and gets no answer, quickly concluding that the motel attendant has been killed. He sees footsteps outside his door and waits gun at the ready. The feet under the door move away. Was it a false alarm, a fellow guest who has now gone on down the hall? I hope so, but Moss knows better. The hall light is turned off, so that Moss can no longer see the feet under the door. Anton wants him to know as little as possible about when it’s going to happen. The door bursts open. Anton enters blasting. Moss throws himself out the window and runs down the street with his case.
There’s a chase and a satisfying turn when suddenly it is an armed Moss who is after Anton, rather than the other way around. He fires and hits Anton, ending the showdown briefly. Bleeding he buys an overcoat and beer from college kids and crosses the border into Mexico, pretending to be a drunk. I didn’t know that it was that easy for drunks to cross the border, without any proof of citizenship, but maybe so.
He throws the money over the railing near the immigration checkpoint and checks into a Mexican hospital. Anton doesn’t. He explodes a car to distract pharmacy employees, steals the drugs he needs and treats his own injuries.
In a high rise office in the business district, a corporate exec wants his $2 million back. He hires Carson Wells to find the man who has taken it. Carson tells him its easier said than done, because Anton will be after Moss too and Anton plays by a different set of rules. Money doesn’t mean anything to him. He has his own principles and adheres to them in a way that gives him a strange type of honor. Unlike the exec or Carson, Anton can’t be bought, which makes him all the more dangerous. Knowing this, Carson heads off after Moss anyway.
He says it took him only 3 hours to find Moss in the Mexican hospital and if he can find him, he tells Moss that Anton surely will. If Moss lets him know where the money is, he can save his life. Moss won’t. He’s willing to die. But is he willing to see Carla Jean die, Carson wonders. He knows she’s in Odessa and so does Anton. Moss is quiet, but unyielding. He gives Moss his card and tells him he’ll be staying in the hotel across the border.
All roads lead to Odessa. Ed Tom heads out that way too and tells Carla Jean to contact him when she hears from Moss. He can keep Moss safe, he assures her. How so? And why doesn’t he try keeping Carla Jean safe? Ed Tom may not know that the bad guys are after her, but if he knows that Moss will make contact with her you’d think he’d realize that others know the same. By keeping tabs on her, he’s closer to capturing both Moss and the killers, but instead of guarding them Ed leaves Carla Jean and her mother to their own devices.
He goes to visit an old family friend. His grandpa’s deputy, Ellis, who is now paralyzed. He asks him what he would do if he could confront the man who put him in that chair. Probably nothing. There wouldn’t be a point. Ed is surprised. Ellis says all the time you spend trying to get back something that’s been taken from you makes you lose even more. Hmmm. That’s one way to look at things, but Anton’s trying to get back money that’s been taken and he doesn’t seem to be suffering much. As the two men converse, Ellis recalls his Uncle Mac who was shot down on his own front porch in 1909. Ellis hears from Ed’s wife that Ed will be retiring. Ellis wants to know why. At first I think Ed will deny that it’s true, but he tells Ellis that he’s retiring because he feels overmatched. Well, that’s fine but I have not seen him really ENTER the match. He’s not stayed one step ahead of Anton or tried to catch up. He’s been content to follow him, rather than chase. Is he a coward? A man who has entered the wrong profession, one that he inherited rather than chose? I don’t know. The gas station owner that Anton terrorized with the coin had inherited that shop from his father-in-law. He married into it. Maybe we are all heirs to our own destiny, not something that we shape, but that those who shape US do. I don’t know why Ed is there or what I am supposed to learn from his perceptions. If he’s changed, dwindled, if he used to put killers away and now he can’t, then I need to see him trying and failing. I just see him watching.
Carson spies the briefcase that Moss tossed aside over the guard rail. He plans to retrieve it later. Although he was the one who told Moss just how close on Moss’ heels Anton was didn’t bother to watch his own. Back at his hotel Anton waylays him. He tells Anton he can get the money, says, “You don’t have to do this,” and Anton replies that’s what they all say. You don’t have to do this. Woody turns in a fine performance, sweating with fear, but never losing his used car salesman swagger. Carson’s hotel phone rings. Anton answers it, then casually kills Carson so he can give the caller his full attention.
“Who is this?” Moss asks on the other end. Anton knows that Moss knows who it is. He tells him to give Anton the money now. Then, he’ll still kill Moss, but he’ll spare Carla Jean. If Moss doesn’t surrender now, then Anton will treat Carla Jean as if she’s just as guilty as Moss is. Moss refuses. He says that Anton will go to Odessa, but Carla Jean won’t be there. Huh? She’s there in Odessa now. Who’s to say that Anton can’t easily get to wherever she might be in the future?
In the movie’s stupidest turn, Moss calls Carla Jean and tells her to go to El Paso where he will give her the money, put her on a plane and then he’ll confront Anton. Since Anton is, presumably, more concerned with the money than Moss (as far as Moss is concerned, even if the audience knows better), why does Moss figure that Anton won’t go after her, wherever he sends her? Plus, since everyone in the world already knows she’s in Odessa, how does Moss think she can get out of there safely and live long enough for him to put her on a plane to ANYWHERE?
Carla Jean wonders about her mother. She can’t just leave her behind. Sure she can Moss says, the old woman’s so aggravating that she’ll be perfectly safe alone. No one’s going to harm HER. It’s a funny line, but also shows how little Moss knows about Anton. He doesn’t just kill when he has to, for a purpose or to gain an objective. If Moss knew this would it make him more effective against Anton? Well, it didn’t help Carson.
Speaking of which, Anton heads to the skyscraper where the business exec who hired Carson is and kills him, angry that the guy hired another team of assassins and gave the transmitter needed to do ANTON’s job.
Carla Jean proceeds to El Paso on Moss’ orders. Moss charms border patrol by telling him he’s a Vietnam vet (Carson was too) and crosses back into the US. He gets to El Paso first. A woman by the pool flirts with him, but he tells her he’s married. Is that why he keeps looking around? Is it his wife he’s waiting for, the woman asks? That’s half of it. The other half is just him looking at what’s to come, he replies. Well, why did he arrange to have his wife meet him at the same place where danger would be? I don’t understand it. If part of him fears Anton’s arrival, how does he think she will be safe? She’s more worried about Moss and calls Ed Tom to El Paso too, because her husband is in over his head.
Here it seems like a piece of the movie is missing. It’s not the finale we expected, perhaps because this a movie about reaction, not action. Dusk comes we see a dead body floating in the pool. It’s the woman who flirted with Moss. Flash to an open hotel room, with a dead Moss inside. We don’t even get to see him lose. Carla Jean pulls up in a car, sees the yellow police tape and screams.
Ed Tom talks about what went down with the local police chief. The chief thinks that crime is different today and it all started when kids dyed their hair and stopped saying sir and madam. It’s not just one thing. It’s a whole tide of bad things that changes society for the worse. Ed agrees with this, only his history should tell him that society has always known the worst. The chief says that Anton not only killed Carson at the hotel, but the day before he’d killed the desk clerk. He must love to return to the scene of the crime.
This is ridiculous because we had not seen Anton exhibit a pattern of doing any such thing. In fact, in returning to the desert in the first place once he’d already had the money (and could not be traced to its source), Moss seemed more like he was determined to revisit the scene of the crime than Anton. Secondly, if there had been a murder there the day before, in a small town like that, surely there would be evidence of it remaining 24 hours later. Carson would have heard about the desk clerk being killed, known it was Anton and would never have returned to that hotel. He should have been on better alert anyway, but now that we’re told there was another murder besides his at that same location, there’s no excuse for him being caught off guard left.
This return to the scene of the crime plot device is just thrown out to give ED a reason to return to the El Paso motel. He does and stops outside the hotel room where Moss died. It’s still cordoned off with yellow tape. Inside we see Anton lurking in the shadows. Ed draws his gun (oh, he decides to use it THIS time) and enters with trepidation. The room appears to be empty. He goes into the bathroom, turns on the light. It’s empty, with the window locked. He sits on the bed, sighing in relief. He's missed Anton by minutes again, just as he did when he got to Moss' trailer and drank the still-cool milk. Back then, he said being minutes behind Anton was "frustrating," but was it? Was he thankful to have gotten there too late for a confrontation?
He looks down and sees the vent in the room. The cover has been unscrewed and lies on the floor, there’s a discarded coin beside it. We must assume that Moss hid the money inside that vent (as he had before) and Anton found it. But where is Anton now? He was too big to climb into the vent? Wasn’t he? How did he escape?
I assume Moss rented to hotel rooms this time as he had the first time and maybe we thought Anton was in the room that Ed Tom entered, when he was actually in the adjoining one.
Time passes. Carla Jean buries her mother who was surprisingly only 58 years old. For some reason she was portrayed as an older woman and I wonder if there's something significant about her true age. Carla Jean returns home from the funeral only to find Anton waiting for her. She knew he would come, but she doesn’t have the money. He says he will kill her anyway, he promised Moss he would. He promised her husband he would kill her?? Yes. Moss had the chance to save her, but chose to save himself. Even though Anton’s explanation is supposed to be perverted, I somewhat agree with what he says. Whether it meant giving up the $2 million or not, I think Moss unnecessarily put Carla Jean’s life in danger.
Carla Jean doesn’t beg. Anton offers her a way out. He’ll flip the coin and she has to call it. She won’t. She won’t call it. It’s him. He makes the choice whether she lives or dies. The coin doesn’t. Cut to the house exterior, Anton is exiting. He made the coin’s choice.
He is leaving in his car and is hit by a random car. He’s hurt badly, bone extruding from his arm. Moss couldn’t bring him down. Law enforcement didn’t catch him. Mercy never stopped him. But he’s driving away on a peaceful residential street when he’s hit by a car out of nowhere. There are police sirens in the distance. He waves down two boys and buys a shirt from one of them. Tells them they never saw him. Then, he’s gone, injured but alive. We don’t know why he didn’t kill them. He killed 2 men to steal their car. Killed two hotel clerks, but let the woman at the trailer office where Moss lived survive. Urgency doesn’t dictate his victims. What does?
Ed Tom is at home breakfasting with his wife. He’s retired and aimless. He had a dream. Two of them, both about his father. In one he had money and he lost it. He can’t remember the details. In the other, his father was still a young man, younger than Ed was. He was passing by with a horn of fire and he rode his horse into the distance and Ed knew that his father was going somewhere to make a fire out in that unknown dark and cold and when Ed got there, his father (and the horn of fire, I guess) would be waiting. This dream is reminiscent of Moss and his dead mother. He expected to go someplace where he could tell her he loved her himself. But in the end, Ed’s father offered him protection, something none of the other characters – except Anton – ever had.
Ed told Ellis that he’d always expected to find God later in life, but never did. Why does he think that? Because he feels there’s no justice? That right does not prevail over wrong? Maybe he wasn't overmatched by the criminals, but by the evil that propels them, so that good can never conquer bad. That might explain his lackluster efforts to apprehend Anton, but even so why retire? Death doesn’t approach when you’re overmatched, then halt if you retreat. It just comes anyway. He asked Ellis when his Uncle Mac died, after being shot on his own porch, while his killers casually looked on and watched him bleed? Was it right after he was shot or was it later? It was later that night and his Aunt buried him the next day. So, it seems that any escape is only temporary. Unhurried, unworried, death always catches up with you, which is the same lesson Moss learned.
He sent a man to jail for killing a 14 year old girl. They called it a crime of passion, but the killer told him it wasn’t passion. He’d been planning to kill someone all of his life and if he got out of jail, he promised Ed he’d kill again.
Evil is old. Bell knows it, so did his father and his father before him. Evil’s unreasonable, unpredictable, and inexorable. It’s not invisible, just unnoticed. It takes you by surprise or it comes while you’re waiting. You deserve it or you don’t. You grasp its logic or grapple trying. It’s slow, it’s fast, it’s inescapable.
Here evil is embodied by Anton Chigurh. With his pageboy, oxygen tank and deliberate reticence, his weirdness is obvious, but not frightening. Not at first.
We first see him being arrested and cuffed, but inexplicably, he’s not chained to anything. His movement is restricted, but not prevented. When the deputy turns his back while talking on the phone to describe his capture, Anton easily comes up and kills him from behind. Their bodies spin on the floor as Anton strangles. The blood swirls and the killer’s intensity is almost sexual.
He steals the deputy’s car, police lights whirring, he pulls over a motorist who thinks the oxygen tank by the “cop’s” side is strange, but not troubling. “What’s that he asks.” “Can you please step out of the car?” Anton replies and even though Anton is dressed as a civilian, the driver doesn’t begin to think anything is wrong, until perhaps the very end, when Anton raises the hose on the oxygen take and uses it to propel a lethal pellet into the man’s head. My friend thought it was a stupid weapon, but for a serial killer who murders more for psychological art than necessity, it’s perfect. Anton does not prefer this tank over a shotgun because it’s less conspicuous, as he has no trouble parading massive rifles in public places. Rather, the tank gives him the opportunity to watch the fear and certainty of death dawn, then spread, then end, while a gun or knife would have put his victims on instant alert, shortening the game. Cat and mouse is more layered, when you see the mouse just discovering he is prey.
Anton stops off at a gas station and, oxygen tank in tow, he teases the owner. Twisting his words, taking offense where none was meant, until the man soon realizes there’s no answer he can give this stranger that will keep him safe. Anton takes out a coin and asks the man if he’s feeling lucky. This moment was part of the movie’s famous trailer. Its tension is part of what kept me away from the film for 6 years. I didn’t want to know what happened when that coin stopped spinning. I can watch violent scenes, but don’t like seeing them approach. A shoe on the floor is nothing, compared to watching it drop, in slow motion. If you’ve never been assaulted, you can’t empathize with the injury, but hopeless, helpless waiting is something we’ve all experienced in one form of another and it’s stomach-turning. If the shark doesn’t get you, his theme music will. But things end well for this shopkeeper. Anton tells him to call the coin. He delays, saying how can he call it if he doesn’t know what he stands to win or lose. Anton insists. Head or tails? He chooses head. He wins. Anton gives him the coin as a prize, but orders him to keep it in a special place. Don’t let it mingle with all the other coins, because then it won’t matter.
I wonder about the shopkeeper though. He’s in an unpopulated part of Texas. Near the Mexican border. He’s got merchandise, money and few places to hide. If urban 7-Elevens are dangerous, surely isolated road stops are. How’d he protect himself before Anton? And if he didn’t, surely he knew that the day would come when he might regret it. Ed Tom Bell saw trouble on the horizon and this man should have seen it too, but instead of preparing for it, they both seemed to just wait to see what would happen when it came.
Meanwhile we see Llewelyn Moss out hunting in the desert. He comes upon a slew of dead bodies and abandoned vehicles. There’s one man still alive, bleeding, begging Moss for water. “I ain’t got no water,” he answers unapologetically. He notices that the man’s truck bed is full of drugs. They were transporting an illegal load across the border and obviously got double-crossed during the exchange. Moss asks the fast failing man who was the last one left standing. There was a fight, but it seems that that the attacked killed as many people as the attackers did. There are drugs, but no drug money. Where’d it go? Moss decides that whoever took the money would have gone to the shade. He sees a big tree in the distance and stealthily heads over. There’s a dead man there and a brief case. It’s loaded with money and Moss takes it and hurries off.
Back at his trailer home, he eludes his wife Carla Jean’s questions about where he’s been and hides the money, still in the briefcase, under his trailer.
I appreciate that the lead characters in this movie are all smart, but they do some really dumb things. This is one of them. This is a world where people where dirty jeans to a funeral. It’s hot and dusty and no one carries a brief case. Why would Moss have kept the money in there. It draws attention and it’s heavier than a back pack would have been. Plus, he seems to know that there’s $2 million in the case, but he apparently never bothered to count the stash. It’s a ridiculous point that runs the plot and I’d like to tell the Coens that they could have told the same story, only with a more believable cash container. But I guess avoiding the strange and unlikely has never been their strong suit.
Moss goes to bed, but then decides to return to the desert. He lets Carla Jean know that he’s going off on a fool’s errand and may never return. “Tell mama I love her,” he says as he departs. She reminds him that his mother is already dead. Oh, then he’ll tell her himself, if anything happens. He fills a jug of water before he leaves. So, did he return only to take water to the man he left dying? Did his conscious prick him? Is this gesture supposed to tell us that at heart he’s a decent man? Since he scoffed at the man and had no qualms about abandoning him in the first place, I’m not moved by Moss’ belated compassion, especially since the guy was in such bad shape that I’d hardly expect him to live for 12 more hours waiting for Moss to take pity and help him.
Moss finds his way back to the scene of the shoot out and the man he’d left in the car is now dead. He survived the first round of gunfire only to die later. You're never really spared, only suspended. Aqua came too late to save him. Moss sees vehicles in the distance and as they start shooting at him, he has to leave his truck behind. He makes it home wounded and tells Carla Jean that his truck is registered and can be traced back to him, the Department of Motor Vehicles opens at 9:00 a.m. and that’s how much time they have to get away. She needs to pack everything she can, because she’ll never see any of it again.
He puts her on a bus to her ornery mother in Odessa. But once his vehicle paperwork reveals his identity to the killers, they’ll know who his wife is too. They can easily track down her relatives, so sending her to this destination for protection was crazy. He should have sent her anywhere Greyhound goes where she would have no roots that could be trailed.
He sends her off and rather than getting on a separate bus himself, he gets a car and tries to lay low in the local area. He checks into a motel, but takes two rooms, one in back of the other. He hides the money in the hotel vent in one room, then makes sure he can retrieve it quickly from the adjacent room. The plan being the people on his tail will go to the wrong room and he can high tail it out of there from the other room, with the loot.
Ed Tom Bell and his deputy find the dead bodies in the desert. It’s a drug deal gone bad and when they see Moss’ truck Bell, who knows Moss casually, figures that Moss wasn’t involved with the drug sale, but took the money after things went downhill. The deputy wonders if Moss knew what he was getting into. Well, Bell reasons if Moss saw all the carnage that they did, it probably left an impression on, because it sure impressed Bell.
Anton is hired by the people who put up the money for the drugs to find the person who took it. Once he gets the assignment, he promptly kills the people who retained him, traces Moss’ vehicle registration and heads to Moss’ trailer. It’s empty, but reading Moss’ mail, Anton sees the number most frequently called on the phone bill. That number belongs to Carla Jean’s mother. So Anton immediately knows where to find the wife, but better still, he knows how to find the money. It seems that it was packed with a transmitter inside the brief case that Moss never bothered to rifle through. Once that transmitter starts beeping, it will lead him directly to the brief case. Anton opens Moss’ fridge, takes out the milk and sits down to drink it, watching his reflection on the black tv screen before him.
Ed Tom Bell comes along so soon after Anton has left that the milk glass is still sweating. They just missed him and “that’s frustrating,” he exclaims. But also life-saving. When they entered the trailer, Ed instructed his deputy to have his gun drawn and ready, but what about Ed’s gun? He tells the deputy that he’d rather just hide behind him! But considering all of the dead people they found in the desert, their two guns would not have been enough to defend themselves against multiple shooters – or even one shooter with a powerful enough weapon. So, why DOES Ed go in without his gun drawn? Does he want to be like the sheriffs of old who didn’t wear one? Why. That approach only works if crime rates are low or the criminals easily outsmarted. Ed already knows that neither is the case in this situation. Does he just think death is inevitable and evil something that you can only defeat if you never meet it? Otherwise, don’t bother trying.
Ed takes a swig of the still cool milk and also looks at his reflection in the blank television screen. Are he and Anton both just playing roles? If Anton’s role is evil personified, what is Ed’s? He’s not justice. He’s chronicling wrong, but not correcting it or even warding it off. He’s not a narrator because the audience knows more than Bell ever does. Moss challenges Anton in this movie, no one else comes close. Jones’ great acting aside, one wonders what Bell’s purpose in the story is. Does he represent humanity? No more than Anton’s victims do.
Anton’s transmitter tracks the money to Moss’ motel, but the way it’s situated, hidden at a curve in the vent, it seems to be in a different motel room than the 2 that Moss has rented. Anton busts into that third room and finds three men inside who also have a transmitter. He blows them away. They were apparently hired to do the same job as he was.
Moss hears the gun shots and quickly runs away, briefcase in hand. At the next motel, he wonders how he was tracked and FINALLY looks in the briefcase and finds the transmitter. He removes it and I think maybe if he throws it out the window, Anton will think the money is across the street, but Moss knows he doesn’t have time for that. He calls down to the front desk and gets no answer, quickly concluding that the motel attendant has been killed. He sees footsteps outside his door and waits gun at the ready. The feet under the door move away. Was it a false alarm, a fellow guest who has now gone on down the hall? I hope so, but Moss knows better. The hall light is turned off, so that Moss can no longer see the feet under the door. Anton wants him to know as little as possible about when it’s going to happen. The door bursts open. Anton enters blasting. Moss throws himself out the window and runs down the street with his case.
There’s a chase and a satisfying turn when suddenly it is an armed Moss who is after Anton, rather than the other way around. He fires and hits Anton, ending the showdown briefly. Bleeding he buys an overcoat and beer from college kids and crosses the border into Mexico, pretending to be a drunk. I didn’t know that it was that easy for drunks to cross the border, without any proof of citizenship, but maybe so.
He throws the money over the railing near the immigration checkpoint and checks into a Mexican hospital. Anton doesn’t. He explodes a car to distract pharmacy employees, steals the drugs he needs and treats his own injuries.
In a high rise office in the business district, a corporate exec wants his $2 million back. He hires Carson Wells to find the man who has taken it. Carson tells him its easier said than done, because Anton will be after Moss too and Anton plays by a different set of rules. Money doesn’t mean anything to him. He has his own principles and adheres to them in a way that gives him a strange type of honor. Unlike the exec or Carson, Anton can’t be bought, which makes him all the more dangerous. Knowing this, Carson heads off after Moss anyway.
He says it took him only 3 hours to find Moss in the Mexican hospital and if he can find him, he tells Moss that Anton surely will. If Moss lets him know where the money is, he can save his life. Moss won’t. He’s willing to die. But is he willing to see Carla Jean die, Carson wonders. He knows she’s in Odessa and so does Anton. Moss is quiet, but unyielding. He gives Moss his card and tells him he’ll be staying in the hotel across the border.
All roads lead to Odessa. Ed Tom heads out that way too and tells Carla Jean to contact him when she hears from Moss. He can keep Moss safe, he assures her. How so? And why doesn’t he try keeping Carla Jean safe? Ed Tom may not know that the bad guys are after her, but if he knows that Moss will make contact with her you’d think he’d realize that others know the same. By keeping tabs on her, he’s closer to capturing both Moss and the killers, but instead of guarding them Ed leaves Carla Jean and her mother to their own devices.
He goes to visit an old family friend. His grandpa’s deputy, Ellis, who is now paralyzed. He asks him what he would do if he could confront the man who put him in that chair. Probably nothing. There wouldn’t be a point. Ed is surprised. Ellis says all the time you spend trying to get back something that’s been taken from you makes you lose even more. Hmmm. That’s one way to look at things, but Anton’s trying to get back money that’s been taken and he doesn’t seem to be suffering much. As the two men converse, Ellis recalls his Uncle Mac who was shot down on his own front porch in 1909. Ellis hears from Ed’s wife that Ed will be retiring. Ellis wants to know why. At first I think Ed will deny that it’s true, but he tells Ellis that he’s retiring because he feels overmatched. Well, that’s fine but I have not seen him really ENTER the match. He’s not stayed one step ahead of Anton or tried to catch up. He’s been content to follow him, rather than chase. Is he a coward? A man who has entered the wrong profession, one that he inherited rather than chose? I don’t know. The gas station owner that Anton terrorized with the coin had inherited that shop from his father-in-law. He married into it. Maybe we are all heirs to our own destiny, not something that we shape, but that those who shape US do. I don’t know why Ed is there or what I am supposed to learn from his perceptions. If he’s changed, dwindled, if he used to put killers away and now he can’t, then I need to see him trying and failing. I just see him watching.
Carson spies the briefcase that Moss tossed aside over the guard rail. He plans to retrieve it later. Although he was the one who told Moss just how close on Moss’ heels Anton was didn’t bother to watch his own. Back at his hotel Anton waylays him. He tells Anton he can get the money, says, “You don’t have to do this,” and Anton replies that’s what they all say. You don’t have to do this. Woody turns in a fine performance, sweating with fear, but never losing his used car salesman swagger. Carson’s hotel phone rings. Anton answers it, then casually kills Carson so he can give the caller his full attention.
“Who is this?” Moss asks on the other end. Anton knows that Moss knows who it is. He tells him to give Anton the money now. Then, he’ll still kill Moss, but he’ll spare Carla Jean. If Moss doesn’t surrender now, then Anton will treat Carla Jean as if she’s just as guilty as Moss is. Moss refuses. He says that Anton will go to Odessa, but Carla Jean won’t be there. Huh? She’s there in Odessa now. Who’s to say that Anton can’t easily get to wherever she might be in the future?
In the movie’s stupidest turn, Moss calls Carla Jean and tells her to go to El Paso where he will give her the money, put her on a plane and then he’ll confront Anton. Since Anton is, presumably, more concerned with the money than Moss (as far as Moss is concerned, even if the audience knows better), why does Moss figure that Anton won’t go after her, wherever he sends her? Plus, since everyone in the world already knows she’s in Odessa, how does Moss think she can get out of there safely and live long enough for him to put her on a plane to ANYWHERE?
Carla Jean wonders about her mother. She can’t just leave her behind. Sure she can Moss says, the old woman’s so aggravating that she’ll be perfectly safe alone. No one’s going to harm HER. It’s a funny line, but also shows how little Moss knows about Anton. He doesn’t just kill when he has to, for a purpose or to gain an objective. If Moss knew this would it make him more effective against Anton? Well, it didn’t help Carson.
Speaking of which, Anton heads to the skyscraper where the business exec who hired Carson is and kills him, angry that the guy hired another team of assassins and gave the transmitter needed to do ANTON’s job.
Carla Jean proceeds to El Paso on Moss’ orders. Moss charms border patrol by telling him he’s a Vietnam vet (Carson was too) and crosses back into the US. He gets to El Paso first. A woman by the pool flirts with him, but he tells her he’s married. Is that why he keeps looking around? Is it his wife he’s waiting for, the woman asks? That’s half of it. The other half is just him looking at what’s to come, he replies. Well, why did he arrange to have his wife meet him at the same place where danger would be? I don’t understand it. If part of him fears Anton’s arrival, how does he think she will be safe? She’s more worried about Moss and calls Ed Tom to El Paso too, because her husband is in over his head.
Here it seems like a piece of the movie is missing. It’s not the finale we expected, perhaps because this a movie about reaction, not action. Dusk comes we see a dead body floating in the pool. It’s the woman who flirted with Moss. Flash to an open hotel room, with a dead Moss inside. We don’t even get to see him lose. Carla Jean pulls up in a car, sees the yellow police tape and screams.
Ed Tom talks about what went down with the local police chief. The chief thinks that crime is different today and it all started when kids dyed their hair and stopped saying sir and madam. It’s not just one thing. It’s a whole tide of bad things that changes society for the worse. Ed agrees with this, only his history should tell him that society has always known the worst. The chief says that Anton not only killed Carson at the hotel, but the day before he’d killed the desk clerk. He must love to return to the scene of the crime.
This is ridiculous because we had not seen Anton exhibit a pattern of doing any such thing. In fact, in returning to the desert in the first place once he’d already had the money (and could not be traced to its source), Moss seemed more like he was determined to revisit the scene of the crime than Anton. Secondly, if there had been a murder there the day before, in a small town like that, surely there would be evidence of it remaining 24 hours later. Carson would have heard about the desk clerk being killed, known it was Anton and would never have returned to that hotel. He should have been on better alert anyway, but now that we’re told there was another murder besides his at that same location, there’s no excuse for him being caught off guard left.
This return to the scene of the crime plot device is just thrown out to give ED a reason to return to the El Paso motel. He does and stops outside the hotel room where Moss died. It’s still cordoned off with yellow tape. Inside we see Anton lurking in the shadows. Ed draws his gun (oh, he decides to use it THIS time) and enters with trepidation. The room appears to be empty. He goes into the bathroom, turns on the light. It’s empty, with the window locked. He sits on the bed, sighing in relief. He's missed Anton by minutes again, just as he did when he got to Moss' trailer and drank the still-cool milk. Back then, he said being minutes behind Anton was "frustrating," but was it? Was he thankful to have gotten there too late for a confrontation?
He looks down and sees the vent in the room. The cover has been unscrewed and lies on the floor, there’s a discarded coin beside it. We must assume that Moss hid the money inside that vent (as he had before) and Anton found it. But where is Anton now? He was too big to climb into the vent? Wasn’t he? How did he escape?
I assume Moss rented to hotel rooms this time as he had the first time and maybe we thought Anton was in the room that Ed Tom entered, when he was actually in the adjoining one.
Time passes. Carla Jean buries her mother who was surprisingly only 58 years old. For some reason she was portrayed as an older woman and I wonder if there's something significant about her true age. Carla Jean returns home from the funeral only to find Anton waiting for her. She knew he would come, but she doesn’t have the money. He says he will kill her anyway, he promised Moss he would. He promised her husband he would kill her?? Yes. Moss had the chance to save her, but chose to save himself. Even though Anton’s explanation is supposed to be perverted, I somewhat agree with what he says. Whether it meant giving up the $2 million or not, I think Moss unnecessarily put Carla Jean’s life in danger.
Carla Jean doesn’t beg. Anton offers her a way out. He’ll flip the coin and she has to call it. She won’t. She won’t call it. It’s him. He makes the choice whether she lives or dies. The coin doesn’t. Cut to the house exterior, Anton is exiting. He made the coin’s choice.
He is leaving in his car and is hit by a random car. He’s hurt badly, bone extruding from his arm. Moss couldn’t bring him down. Law enforcement didn’t catch him. Mercy never stopped him. But he’s driving away on a peaceful residential street when he’s hit by a car out of nowhere. There are police sirens in the distance. He waves down two boys and buys a shirt from one of them. Tells them they never saw him. Then, he’s gone, injured but alive. We don’t know why he didn’t kill them. He killed 2 men to steal their car. Killed two hotel clerks, but let the woman at the trailer office where Moss lived survive. Urgency doesn’t dictate his victims. What does?
Ed Tom is at home breakfasting with his wife. He’s retired and aimless. He had a dream. Two of them, both about his father. In one he had money and he lost it. He can’t remember the details. In the other, his father was still a young man, younger than Ed was. He was passing by with a horn of fire and he rode his horse into the distance and Ed knew that his father was going somewhere to make a fire out in that unknown dark and cold and when Ed got there, his father (and the horn of fire, I guess) would be waiting. This dream is reminiscent of Moss and his dead mother. He expected to go someplace where he could tell her he loved her himself. But in the end, Ed’s father offered him protection, something none of the other characters – except Anton – ever had.
Ed told Ellis that he’d always expected to find God later in life, but never did. Why does he think that? Because he feels there’s no justice? That right does not prevail over wrong? Maybe he wasn't overmatched by the criminals, but by the evil that propels them, so that good can never conquer bad. That might explain his lackluster efforts to apprehend Anton, but even so why retire? Death doesn’t approach when you’re overmatched, then halt if you retreat. It just comes anyway. He asked Ellis when his Uncle Mac died, after being shot on his own porch, while his killers casually looked on and watched him bleed? Was it right after he was shot or was it later? It was later that night and his Aunt buried him the next day. So, it seems that any escape is only temporary. Unhurried, unworried, death always catches up with you, which is the same lesson Moss learned.
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