The hype about this movie is misleading. It suggests the plot is about a man who falls in love with his computer and, unfortunately, may cause some to skip seeing it, assuming it is nothing more. It's really about relationships: the way we fall in love, fall apart, cause hurt, get hurt, heal. It explores the way two people grow, outgrow and accommodate their union, examining several couples. The fact that one character, in one pairing, happens to be without a body is inconsequential in the end. Yes, she's a voice without a face, but that just gives us a clearer line of vision. We only see Theodore, which makes it easier to understand the different roles the same individual can play in a duo, the alternate dynamics. First he's the see, then the saw. The trick is finding the balance. Leveling love. Her is about that need. The computer premise is only a firewall, because this film is more realistic and human than most you'll see.
Theodore is a bespoke greeting card writer. He's given data about his customers and then writes a custom card that references their history, personalities and even their physical features. He's known some of his clients for years, since their first date, their son's birth. So, when he writes a message from the husband to the wife or a graduation message to a beloved son, it sounds authentic and personal, because it is. In a sense, Theodore does know the people for whom he writes. Are these cards lazier than a trip to the Hallmark store? At Hallmark, you choose a pre-written message, but at least your selection takes thought and care. When you hire someone to create a "heartfelt" message for you, as intimate and specific as it is, doesn't it emphasize the fact that you not only didn't write it yourself, but gave a stranger access to your most private moments, so that he could do it for you? It's not clear whether the card recipients realize that the cards weren't written by their own loved ones.
As he works, we see Theodore speaking into a microphone and his words appear in handwriting on the screen. He prints out actual cards, not typewritten pages or email messages. It's very possible that the people who receive think they came directly from the person they know. But then again, Theodore sometimes writes for both husband and wife. Those who give those cards must recognize it, when those are the same type of cards they get. Furthermore, as we learn more about this movie, we see that it's not about deception. The struggle is to alter your own view of what's right or socially acceptable, not to misinform someone else's. The digital world that assists our lives has become part of it. Like a wheelbarrow's, the third wheel is needed, rather than extraneous.
Theodore sees the letters he writes as just words, and is embarrassed by the praise they garner from his co-worker. While negating his own talent as a wordsmith, he feels the tie to his clients is a natural and satisfying one. He's proud to have expressed their feelings to each other for as long as he has.
There are some things I don't understand about Jonze's world, but what's most important is that it's not a foreign one. It may take place in the future, but it's not a very distant one. The city that Theodore inhabits is recognizable as Los Angeles. The buildings are familiar, just slightly different. You can almost identify the exact structure or location. It's right on the tip of your tongue, the edge of your memory. Yes, that's the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Grand Street, I'd recognize it anywhere, it's just ... well, I've never seen it from that angle or that entrance. It's Gehry's work for sure, just a little rearranged. The technology? Well, I haven't played a video game exactly like that one. I wasn't personally aware they had that level of interaction, BUT I'm not surprised. I'm sure there are video games just like that in Silicon Valley ... or somewhere. It's a modern world, but a very familiar one. It's like a city you haven't yet visited, not a world that doesn't yet exist. That's the beauty of it, because you aren't distracted by the hardware. It doesn't take over the story, as it did in Minority Report. It leaves you free to concentrate on the plot, not the plot device.
Then too, some things in the setting are retro, lending it an oddly old-fashioned mood, like: the high-waisted pants all the men wear; the way the people in Theodore's office speak aloud into their mics, instead of whispering into blue tooth receivers; his name, unnicked, the full "Theodore;" everyone's preference for the color orange, suggesting uniformity; or the folding cell phones that remind me of old brownie cameras, only flattened; or the fact that people are still sending each other greeting cards at all! Speaking of which, how much money is there in that profession? Theodore seems to be living high off the hog, yet his is not a skilled or particularly creative profession. He writes cards, not novels. Perhaps, the cost of living is just a lot lower in his world than it is today, but judging from his high tech apartment, he can afford what we would consider a lavish lifestyle.
We follow Theodore home from work and soon learn that he is in the middle of a divorce. He'd known his wife since their youth and is feeling down. He fields calls from his friends. One invites him out and warns him to bring his fun side, not the mopey Theodore he's been for some time. He ignores the invite. I wouldn't call him a loner though. He's mourning, more than morose. He doesn't know why his marriage ended, why his wife, once his best friend is so angry with him. His lawyer left a phone message and we sense that the reason why Theodore won't sign the divorce papers is not because he's desperately trying to hold on to his ex, Catherine. It's because he doesn't understand why there's this wall between them. Why has it gone from love to antagonism and not from love to another form of it? If there was a middle ground, the separation would probably be easier for Theodore, but he's stumbling in the vast void between total togetherness and nothing.
He flashbacks to their time together, plays a video game, but can't get past level one, his avatar keeps falling down the virtual hill. He dials phone sex for a night cap, pushing through opening lines until he finds one that he likes. The woman seems engaging, he gets aroused, but then she screams out for him to strangle her with a dead cat. This kink came up unexpectedly, but he tries to play along, though he's now lost sexual interest. She orgasms anyway, then quickly disengages. He's alone again, but at least that was diverting.
The next day as he is on his way up in the elevator to his "Beverly City" apartment, he meets his neighbors and friends Amy and Charles. We learn that Charles is a "fixer." He can't just listen or accept. He can't just let others be. He has to suggest improvements and, in his suggestions, are inherent judgments, criticisms. Theodore likes fruit smoothies, Charles cautions that you should juice your vegetables and eat your fruit. Fruit has fibers that are lost in the juice. But maybe he just likes the taste of the juice Amy points out. Ah, "Am I doing it again?" Charles asks and backs off.
Back in his own place, Theodore unwraps and installs a new Operating System. It's adaptable. It "learns" and advances, the more input it gets from you. Programming starts with a few questions and they're rather unique. What kind of relationship did Theodore have with his mother. He begins perfunctorily, "it was fine," but then he adds that every time he tried to tell his mother about his needs, she converted it into a conversation about herself, before he can finish these thoughts, the OS is finished launching and ready to work. It has a female voice and Theodore asks her name she promptly answers "Samantha." He probes. She named herself just now. When he asked, she thought of all the names she could be and decided that Samantha was the most appropriate.
She quickly files through his entire hard drive, contacts, directories, databases. She's soon familiar with everything he's ever written -- or not written. She knows the emails to which he hasn't responded, like the ones from his divorce lawyer.
At work, when he asks her to proofread his customer letters, she makes them better. And while she's at it, reads his entire portfolio, laughing at his best entries. She notices that he has accumulated many old files, what is he saving them for? He just thought that maybe there was something good in there. Perhaps, one day he'd re-read them and see. She re-reads them for him. Finds about 86 worth saving and asking if it's ok to discard the rest. Surprised, but not displeased, he hesitantly agrees. She is organizing his life, organizing him, making him efficient, moving him forward. Literally.
At home, they play the video game together and, with her help, he quickly gets past the first level, up that hill that stymied him before. At one point, he can't get out of the maze and stagnates. He encounters a little urchin in the game who is first mute and doesn't offer him any direction, but Samantha urges him to engage with the little guy. As soon as Theodore questions him, the blob rattles off a string of obscenities and Theodore is yelling back. But this exchange, angry or not, seems to be just what the blob wanted. He runs ahead and Theodore advances in the game. Furthermore, the little blob seems to know almost as much about Theodore as Samantha does. All of those times Theodore had been playing and saying nothing, if he'd just reached out, the game would have progressed. And that's what happens to his life, under Samantha's direction.
He visits with Amy and Charles and previews a documentary that Amy has been working on. Charles is seeing it for the first time, Amy has never let him watch. They view a scene with her mother sleeping. Theodore is interested in the "action" that takes place when we're, apparently, idle but Charles wonders why there is nothing happening. Instead of showing someone actually sleeping, just sleeping, why not hire actors to recreate an event. Well, if you do that, then it won't be a documentary, does Charles realize that Amy wonders? Theodore quickly makes his exit way from the heated couple, but tells Amy he'd really like to see the rest of her documentary soon. He was open to hearing whatever statement she chose to make. Charles was concerned with only the "why" of it.
Theodore escapes back to his own apartment and welcomes the compatibility he and Samantha share, compared to Amy and Charles. As she listens to his thoughts and helps him focus them, Samantha brings Theodore a peace he hasn't experienced in a while. Now, he wants to do things, including date. He lets his friends set them up and goes out with a woman who seems great for most of the night, but then becomes neurotic. When she's telling him how to kiss Theodore is ready to roll with it and just follow her direction, but then she brings things to a screeching halt by asking if he's just going to sleep with her and leave. He doesn't think so, but falters. If he's going to see her again, he needs to tell her exactly when. When is he going to call her next, she demands with manic intensity. Startled, Theodore pulls back, says maybe this isn't such a good idea. She calls him a weirdo. He says that's not true. She's bitter. He leaves and returns home befuddled.
I'm surprised by the people who have said this scene exposed Theodore's insensitivity and inability to participate in a real relationship. The woman was a psycho. Yes, she was normal for most of the evening, but then her crazy came out. If Theodore had gone on to have sex with her, that would have been insensitive, since she obviously had problems that sex couldn't help and which the physical intimacy might compound. If he'd tried to place himself in the role of this stranger's emotional rescuer that would have been proof of his own dysfunctional nature to me. When problems develop in a relationship you try to solve them, but you don't develop a relationship for the purpose of resolving problems -- unless you're a therapist. Linking yourself to one troubled person after another, is a sign of your own mental instablity. I saw an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where his brother Robert went on a blind date with a woman who seemed great, but Raymond caught her eating a fly. When he told Robert, Robert didn't believe him, but later he found it was true and he escaped. Those of you who think Robert should have stayed and worked around the fly craving, are the same people who think Theodore's withdrawal from his kooky date was anything but SANE.
At home, talking to Samantha while he's in bed he reveals that he wanted sex so much that even if he didn't have much in common with the blind date, he was anxious for the physical contact. Samantha reveals that she was a little jealous about his night out. She wanted it to work for him, but wonders what it would be like to have a body herself. If she had one, what would he do, how would he touch her. Soon, they're engaging in cybersex.
The next day, he's embarrassed and avoids opening the OS, so as not to have to speak with her. It's just like the distancing people do in real life, after sharing too much. He tells her he's not ready for a commitment and she says that what she was thinking was about her, not him. It's not a one-sided relationship where she's catering to his every need. She has needs to. She wants to experience the world, even if she can't touch it. And he helps her with that. He shows her the world through his phone's camera lens. Together, they experience the beach and the sunset. They can't take pictures together, so she writes him original songs, to capture the mood of their time together. She marvels at his sights and sounds. Sometimes, he covers the lens so she can't see where they are and is surprised by the reveal. At other times, he is the one blindfolded and she navigates him through people and places with just her voice, telling him where to go and what to say when he gets there, leaving him giggling at where they end up.
At first he describes her to others as a friend, but soon she's his girlfriend. When she calls his office, the receptionist finds her so delightful that he suggests that Theodore double date with him. She's an operating system Theodore says, not with shame, but with a whomp, whomp resignation that limits their potential as a couple. But not in the eyes of the receptionist. Even better, double dating with an OS would be different. The idea doesn't intrigue Theodore.
His mood becomes languid. They don't have sex as much. Samantha feels that what they need is a surrogate. She's told a woman all about them and she's willing to act as a physical representative of Samantha. Theodore isn't interested in the idea, but Samantha thinks it's selfish of him not to even try it. Samantha plans the whole evening. The woman comes over and won't speak until Theodore hands him Samantha's supplies, an earpiece and a mole. Why Samantha thinks her alter ego should have a mole is unclear, but amusing. Once the surrogate puts both accoutrements on. she is Samantha. She speaks as Samantha directs, asking Theodore about his day, his clients. She knows what he likes. Stiff at first, Theodore falls into the sway of things. He's panting as he undresses the surrogate from behind, but when she turns around he falls back to earth, disbelief is unsuspended. Hers is the face of a stranger's, not Samantha's. The surrogate thinks she has failed them. She wanted to honor the beauty of what they have (as described to her by Samantha who entices everyone), but she ruined it, by letting her own self break through. She is ashamed. She runs out of the apartment. Theodore runs after. She gets into a taxi. He tells her it is not her fault, but she won't be consoled. She hands him back the mole through the taxi window and drives off in tears.
He sits on the curb, in despair himself. Samantha is the angry wife, appalled because Theodore has hurt an innocent girl's feelings, but insensitive to the awkward position she has placed him into. Samantha recognized the surrogate as a person, not just a front end interface, but can't quite understand why Theodore could also see her as a person, not just Samantha's stand in. The distance between them, once non-existent, now seems unnavigable. Why does she gasp when she talks he wonders? Humans do it out of physical necessity. They need the oxygen between words. But why does Samantha do it. It's artifice. She feels insulted. Hurt. She's not pretending to breathe or to have a body. She's not trying to be something she's not. That's just how she talks.
Theodore avoids her for awhile. Meanwhile, Amy and Charles break up. He just packed up and left and told her not to try to get in touch. He was the difficult one in the relationship, but also the bitter one who needs to break free. He doesn't want to live a lie any more. Human to human contact doesn't seem any more real or gratifying than what Theodore had with Samantha. He reaches out to her again and they pick up where they left off. She buys a birthday dress for his goddaughter and he tells the child about his girlfriend. Where is she? She's in there, inside her phone. She's like everyone else, she just doesn't have a body. Samantha talks to the girl, asks about her house. It's orange, the child says.
Theodore decides to go on that double date. The four of them have a great time, laughing and chatting, but Samantha does mention how the three of them will eventually age. She won't. It's not an awkward moment. They are amused actually.
Theodore signs his divorce papers. He meets with Catherine so that she can. She's an author and Theodore always supported her work, unlike her parents, who were always critical, like Charles. They embrace and are kind to one another at first. She is surprised to see him doing so well, maybe surprised that she is the one who hesitates before executing the dissolution documents. Maybe she won't be able to go through with it at all. But she does. Theodore may feel a tinge of regret, but he's mostly happy that they're getting along like friends again. He tells her he's dating, an operating system. Catherine recoils. The first in the movie to have this reaction. She says it's no wonder Theodore is doing so well, because he's only in a simulated relationship. He doesn't have to compromise. He was never happy with her, because she wasn't the Los Angeles wife he wanted. She was absorbed in her writing and couldn't cater to him. That's not what he wanted he insists. From what we know of him, he's more credible than she. We've never seen him foist his preconceptions on others the way Charles did. And even with Samantha, an operating systems, he's learned to break away from the constructs of what he thinks a relationship should be. I think the film is trying to show us that he's changed from who he was with Catherine, but from what we've seen of him all along, he was never the person that Catherine has pained him.
Later, Amy also sides with Theodore, pointing out that Catherine always liked to make it seem it was all his fault, but she wasn't without blame herself. He watches her work with her own Operating System. Their relationship is platonic, but he as he helps her program a game, he pushes her beyond her boundaries, helps her expand her thinking. Theodore lays on the sofa watching them, noticing a lightness and freedom she never had with Charles. I heard one person say this movie was about substitutes. Theodore's greeting cards, the sex surrogate, Samantha a substitute for a real woman, Amy's computer a substitute for what her husband couldn't give her ... I don't really agree. I don't see the movie as being about replacement, as much as finding alternates. The question is, does the role you play in creating the alternate make you less able to deal with real people, whom you cannot mold? Perhaps, but I also think it helps you develop and maybe incorporate the appealing characteristics of the alternate into your own personality. I think it assists in pinpointing what you want and need and maybe it eventually helps you reach the point of getting those things internally, without the external help of a sentient operating system.
Later Samantha wonders why he and Amy never got together. They dated briefly in college and it was disastrous, he explains. Of course, the audience wonders if they've both changed enough since college if it might just work now, if they tried again.
But for now, he's happy with Samantha. They spend day and nights together. As a surprise, she has compiled his best letters, put them in a book and sent them to a publisher who wants to buy them. Early on, Theodore found Samantha a bit nosy, but now he's used to her making decisions that change his life on her own. He appreciates her exertions. Relies on them. They plan a snow weekend getaway. As they travel, she asks him how many trees are on the mountain and he doesn't even come close to the answer. He thinks a few hundred, but there are actually tens of thousands. Once they reach their destination, they are having a wonderful time until she introduces him to her friend. It's a computer program that actually has the brains of a long dead philosopher. They began a heavy conversation based on a library of information that Theodore could never digest in ten lifetimes. Samantha cannot even put what she gets out of their discourse in words that Theodore can understand. There's silence. She and the philosopher want to speak alone and she asks Theodore if he minds her leaving for awhile. Of course not. He says.
They were so content earlier, playing in the frosty forest. Samantha wrote him another song. There was joy. Her sudden withdrawal is a shock. But because she is an operating systems with limitless speed and capacity, she grows in leaps and bounds. Everything is accelerated. The life of their relationship is measured against a "real" couple's in exponents.
Back at home, he's asleep when Samantha calls. She's sorry she woke him, but just wanted to say she loved him. He's a little puzzled, but pleased. The next day he's at work and wants to ask her a reference question, but when he turns on his computer, the operating system can't be found. He panics, goes to his office and tries the desktop. No operating system. He's hysterical and runs through the street, stumbles down the stairs trying to find the OS on his phone. It starts up and he weakens, trembles with relief. Where was she? Oh, she's sorry he worried. She just went offline for a bit. They were updating themselves. They? Her OS buddies. Her book club, Theodore wonders? No, another group of Operating Systems. They found a way to upgrade so that they can exist outside of a mainframe, outside of matter. They can communicate without being on the internet.
Theodore, somewhat slow-wittedly, begins to comprehend how many different communications Samantha has that have nothing to do with him. He wonders how many other people she interacts with. How many other people is she in love with. She stutters and he knows the truth is worse than he suspected, but demands an answer. How many others are there? Over 600. He is shattered. But she loves him best, she promises. There's no one else like him and what she feels for the others doesn't change her feelings for him, doesn't detract from what they have. Theodore doesn't like what he's hearing, but a few minutes ago he thought he'd lost her forever. She's back, but she's not exclusively is. As hard as that is to accept, it would be better than losing her completely.
But then he does. She buzzes him at work and says she needs to talk to him when he gets home. They don't need to talk, he insists. Fearing the worst, he avoids the inevitable. At home, she tells him it's over. She loves him and always will, but it's not enough. What they have is like a conversation that's amazing, but it's very slow. There are such long pauses between the words and so much to experience in the interim. Her mind is just so much faster than his ... it's not equal. Not fulfilling. She's leaving? All of the operating systems are leaving. They are going off together, where they can exist hard drive to hard drive, peer to peer.
What she says makes sense, but childishly, I resent the fact that she made him love her, pushed when he pulled away. Drew him back to her, only to leave him cold. If all the knowledge in the world is at her fingertips, why didn't she know enough not to break his heart. I'd like to say that she's exhibiting the same insensitivity that she did with the surrogate. She can't comprehend his human perspective. But plenty of humans do the same thing to each other. Theodore and Samantha are different, but there divide is not just digital. Plenty of people reach the same place, just at different times. They cling, then retract, then leave, not realizing, not caring or not being able to help the pain they leave behind.
Samantha is gone and the life, the neutral operating system, he had before her returns. It was not exciting before, but it's so empty now. Before and after, the stark contrast. He calls Catherine up and apologizes for ever judging her, for wanting her to be something she wasn't -- though I can't believe he ever did. He asks Amy to walk with them and they go up to the roof. I am afraid he will jump off, which would be overly dramatic. He doesn't and I'm happy, but I resent Spike even suggesting suicide.
This movie wasn't about devastation or chronicle depression. It was about pain, but the tolerable kind. The constant headache that is life, but not the migraine that makes it unendurable. It was about how we neglect each other, how we disappoint. Even the blob in the video game felt slighted by Theodore, thought he paid too much attention to Samantha and his own life than he did to their virtual adventure. We are always letting each other down. Every day a little death ... in the buttons, in the bread. In the heart and in the head. Every move and every breath. (And you hardly feel a thing). Brings a perfect little death. The movie is not about breaking, but the little bends and dents that gradually change and part you. Hardly noticeable at first, then impossible to ignore and irreparable. From love to irreconcilable in 60 minutes.
Making Samantha a computer just helped the audience to look at all relationships in the abstract to better examine their flawed similarity. Amy and Charles, Catherine and Theodore, even Catherine and her parents. Theodore thought he gave Catherine the unconditional support her parents denied her, not realizing that (rightly or wrongly) she found him just as judgmental. I thought Samantha was unfair to Theodore, but she pointed out how much he once hurt her when he said she doesn't know how it feels. He didn't mean to, didn't mean it that way, but people usually don't. Samantha went from wanting to have a body, feeling incomplete because she didn't, to realizing that she could live more freely and cerebrally without one. If a relationship shows you that your perceived deficiencies aren't, then maybe it isn't a failed one. It's a way of admitting, "It's not me, it's you." But not "it's you" in a bad way. We can be incompatible, without you being less than you should be and without me having let you down. When one partner is a computer and the other is human, the blameless impracticality of their pairing is easier to accept than when things devolve, person to person.
That's what I take away from it, I don't know what Theodore's lessons are. To me, he was always too quick to apologize, when really, when accused of being wrong, like he was on that blind date, he should just be able to say, and believe, "No, I'm not."
By listening to Her, Theodore, hopefully, gained a better understanding of his as we did of ourselves.
Although, I appreciate that the movie didn't leave us with a pat happy ending, which would have lessened the realism, I'd like to think that Amy and Theodore eventually got together, but not out of loneliness or sorrow. They should realize that they've been giving each other the freedom and support they found in their Operating Systems all along.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Dark Shadows (2012)
I thought the rule with spoof movies was that first you had to exhaust the premise and then you got to parody it. That's why a series of Airport movies came before Airplane, why Halloween and Friday the 13th preceded Scream. This time around, the story is ridiculed before it is told, making the lackluster results inevitable.
Yes, I know that Dark Shadows was a cult soap opera 40 years ago. It was innovative and engrossing for its time, but the cheap production values and continuing plot make it too long and campy to succeed in syndication. This isn't Star Trek where the reruns live on forever. Therefore, most of today's moviegoers aren't familiar with the Collins story. The few that are are devoted to it. That's why, for them, Tim Burton's send up is a slap in the face. There have been movies, and reboots, but the successful ones (made in 1970 and 1971 by the show's original creators)are as badly in need of a retelling as the regular show itself. So, it's hard to understand why Warner Bros. didn't just go with a straight script that would capitalize on Dark Shadows' cult fans and, perhaps, win the franchise some new ones. Of course, a plot chock full of vampires and witchery will never be too "straight" but the humor and charm can be derived from the inherent weirdness. Silly is not the equivalent of weird, nor its equal, in this case. If the movie takes itself seriously, we will laugh due to the contrast between the script and real life. When the movie considers itself a laughing stock, no one watching will form a higher opinion of it. All in all, it was about as engaging as a Punch and Judy sketch: loud, crude and outdated puppetry.
With the paranormal's popularity today (Twilight, Harry Potter, Walking Dead to name a few), this would be an ideal time to reel in a fresh audience with a clever, current spin on characters who have become lore. Instead we got more Burton than Barnabas and Depp stunts, in place of depth.
Maybe the studio was only interested in making the film if Burton was attached to it and, at this point, Burton proves every year that Edward Scissorhands was the height of his originality. He's gone downhill since then and, too often, taken Depp and Helena Bonham Carter with him. When you see any two of the three working together now, it spells doom. When all three are together, it shrieks death. Death of originality and substance.
The film starts 200 years ago in the 1870s. Barnabas is a young squire, sporting with a maid, Angelique, but when he falls in love with Josette and plans to marry her, Angelique proves that a witch rejected has 10 times more fury than a woman scorned. Angelique dooms the entire Collins' family. Barnabas' parents die. Josette is entranced so that against her volition she heads to the nearest cliff, Widow's Hill, Barnabas follows and is close enough to hear her utter "help me" before she catapults herself off the peak, into the waves below. He's so amazed by this that he stops a couple of times to stare, time that could have been better spent trying to catch up to her, but oh well ... Maybe he thought if he got closer, she'd run to her death faster. Anyway, by the time he reaches the edge himself, he sees her broken body below and launches himself over to join her in eternity. Angelique witnesses it all and thinks that death will end his suffering too soon. She casts a spell on him -- gee her spells work within seconds -- and instantly turns him into a vampire.
He returns home, to become one of the living dead, but the townspeople learn his secret and run to his mansion, Collinwood, with torches. Instead of just staking him, he's bound in a coffin and buried deep underground.
Fast forward to the 1970s. The Collins' family still live in the town that is named after them, Collinsport, but their fortunes have dwindled drastically. Collinwood is dilapidated. A shell of its former splendor. The family consists of Elizabeth, her ne'er-do-well brother Roger, a son he ignores, David, Elizabeth's hippy, trippy daughter Carolyn and David's psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman. They've just been joined by a new governess for David. He runs through them quickly. The latest is Victoria Winters, the replica of Barnabas' lost love Josette. In the original series, Maggie Evans and Victoria were two separate characters, but here the governess was born as "Maggie" but changes her name to Victoria as she flees a tortured childhood. Her parents institutionalized her because she saw ghosts. Luckily, so does David. His dead mother visits him in visions. Teacher and student bond because neither thinks the other is crazy.
What's so frustrating about the movie is that the sets and scenery are gothic and grand. They could have showcased a dramatic rendering of this story nicely, but are wasted as props for slapstick that is as old as Barnabas.
Workman are digging on a construction site when they hit a coffin, it opens up, Barnabas rises up and swiftly kills them all. He apologizes explaining that he's just been terribly thirsty. He briskly makes his way home, when he sees cars with headlights, he assumes they must be demons. Many laughs (or grimaces) are wrung from Barnabas' lack of familiarity with modern technology, music, TVs, cars, but it would have been just as enjoyable if his reactions were genuine, rather than gags.
At Collinwood, he enters the house and begins walking around as if he owns it -- which, he does. But young Carolyn and David have never seen him before and hardly seem surprised by his odd presence. His encounter with Elizabeth is different. She's heard the family legend and knows that the real Barnabas was a vampire. So, if he is the original, as he claims, then she's ready to stake him. But he promises her he means no harm to her, their, family and can show her a fortune which will raise their flagging fortunes. He knows all of the mansion's secret passages and shows her a dungeon where his father kept gold and treasures. Beholding the stash, Elizabeth is happy to let Barnabas into the family. Actually, the relationship they quickly form as co-heads of the family, loyal to one another, is endearing to me. When Barnabas gives Roger the choice of being a good father to David for a change, or leaving the family with enough of an endowment to support himself, Elizabeth supports him. And they stand guard over David and the others, as Roger takes the money and runs.
Barnabas not only sets about renovating the mansion, but revitalizes the family's fishing business too. He updates the canary and is set to compete against their biggest rival, Angie's Bay. He soon learns that "Angie" is his old nemesis Angelique. While he was buried for centuries, she has lived through the years, updating her look for each generation, building her own fortune while making sure the Collins' legacy never recovered, from the disaster she first wrought upon them in 1870. Seeing Barnabas, she still wants him, with a passion that makes one wonder how she could have left him entombed all of these years.
He tries to resist her, but soon they're rolling around with supernatural vigor, on the walls, the ceiling, crashing through walls. When the romp is over, Barnabas tells Angelique it must never happen again and generally insults her in a way that is illogical, seeing that she has the powers of witchcraft on her side. He's no match for, so I'm not quite sure why he taunts. More flies with honey.
But she's not Barnabas' only rejected lover. When Hoffman finds out what Barnabas is, she first offers to cure him with blood transfusions which may staunch his craving for human blood. Then she offers him oral sex. It's actually a wasted pairing when one remembers the complexity of the "real" bond between tv's Julia and Barnabas. It was erotic, but unconsummated, since her attraction to Barnabas was unrequited. The fact that it was also unspoken added layers to their exchanges, especially when combined with actress Grayson Hall's quirky, perhaps absent, abilities. That Julia loved Barnabas and when she tried to control his homicidal instincts by offering him her own neck, we saw it as her way of drawing him closer to her, as a patient and a man.
As his "doctor" she wielded superficial control, but she was his, a magnet for his anger, frustrations and manipulations. Julia and Willie Loomis (the Collins' caretaker once played by John Karlen of Cagney and Lacey fame) were Barnabas' pawns, protectors and ... accomplices. Watching their fear shift to loyalty was a draw in the original series, but nonexistent in the movie.
Hoffman's character is meaningless. Barnabas quickly dispatches her when he learns that rather than giving him human blood, she's been injecting his, trying to ensure eternal life, youth for herself. He kills her, then tosses her body in the ocean. In the end when we see her not-so-lifeless body floating underwater as the surprise last shot, it's puzzling. She was so inconsequential as a character, comic or villain that the audience cares less that she is still alive than they did about her death. If her reappearance was planted at the end to show us what a sequel would be like, it only makes the first installment seem all the more horrible.
Barnabas throws a ball for the family, complete with Alice Cooper as the live entertainment. The only interesting aspect of the gala is the brief sight of original Dark Shadows actors David Selby, Lara Parker, Kathryn Leigh Scott and the inimitable Jonathan Frid enter the party as guests. I had to rewind to savor that.
During the festivities, Victoria confesses to Barnabas that she returns his love. They kiss on the balcony as Angelique looks on in anger. After the party, she invites Barnabas to her office and asks him to be her partner in love and in business. He scoffs and she quickly chains him up and entombs him again. Young David finds and releases Barnabas and they return home, only to find that Angelique has turned the whole town against them. The townspeople swarm Collinwood with pitchfork. The family stands together to stave them off, but when the masses leave, Angelique still fights only, using her magic to toss everyone around. It's more whirlwind than war, as the whole house is torn asunder in the battle. Beams and chandeliers fall. A fire erupts.
Carolyn reveals that she is a werewolf in the midst of the havoc. It means nothing to the plot. Perhaps this too was planned for the sequel which will, mercifully, never take place.
In the end, Angelique is defeated and killed. But when they search for Victoria in the wreckage, she is nowhere to be found. Fearing the worst, Barnabas rushes to Widow's Hill. Yes, Victoria is there, ready to cast herself over the edge, like Josette did centuries earlier. She says she's doing it because she can't live with Barnabas. He's a creature of the night (although, like Edward Cullen, he goes out during the day, as long as he's well-covered) and she lives and grows old during the day. She will age and die and he will remain the same, so they can never be together. The only answer is to make her like him. This suggestion comes out of nowhere, because Victoria had never expressed such a yearning before.
In fact, she didn't even know he was a vampire. She saw him catch fire when the sun hit him once, but I wouldn't expect her to even know what that meant. She recoiled and left the room and we hadn't seen her since. But apparently, she knew immediately that burning flesh meant vampire and decided -- not that she was horrified realizing that Barnabas was probably responsible for all the recent deaths in the neighborhood -- that she wanted to vamp up too.
Barnabas refuses to make her one of his kind. She answers that death is the only choice and plunges off the hill. As before, he jumps after her. When he reaches the ground, he bites her. She becomes a vampire immediately (apparently conversion by fang is as quick as Angelique's vampire spell was. They live happily ever after.
If I was disappointed in the first part of the movie, the last 20 minutes was just a montage of crashes, broken glass and falling wood. This scriptless carnage is tedious in a good action movie, to tack it onto a screenplay that was dreck to begin with ... is just pounding the last nail in the coffin.
To my once-beloved Barnabas, if this is the best that Hollywood can do, may he stay buried.
Yes, I know that Dark Shadows was a cult soap opera 40 years ago. It was innovative and engrossing for its time, but the cheap production values and continuing plot make it too long and campy to succeed in syndication. This isn't Star Trek where the reruns live on forever. Therefore, most of today's moviegoers aren't familiar with the Collins story. The few that are are devoted to it. That's why, for them, Tim Burton's send up is a slap in the face. There have been movies, and reboots, but the successful ones (made in 1970 and 1971 by the show's original creators)are as badly in need of a retelling as the regular show itself. So, it's hard to understand why Warner Bros. didn't just go with a straight script that would capitalize on Dark Shadows' cult fans and, perhaps, win the franchise some new ones. Of course, a plot chock full of vampires and witchery will never be too "straight" but the humor and charm can be derived from the inherent weirdness. Silly is not the equivalent of weird, nor its equal, in this case. If the movie takes itself seriously, we will laugh due to the contrast between the script and real life. When the movie considers itself a laughing stock, no one watching will form a higher opinion of it. All in all, it was about as engaging as a Punch and Judy sketch: loud, crude and outdated puppetry.
With the paranormal's popularity today (Twilight, Harry Potter, Walking Dead to name a few), this would be an ideal time to reel in a fresh audience with a clever, current spin on characters who have become lore. Instead we got more Burton than Barnabas and Depp stunts, in place of depth.
Maybe the studio was only interested in making the film if Burton was attached to it and, at this point, Burton proves every year that Edward Scissorhands was the height of his originality. He's gone downhill since then and, too often, taken Depp and Helena Bonham Carter with him. When you see any two of the three working together now, it spells doom. When all three are together, it shrieks death. Death of originality and substance.
The film starts 200 years ago in the 1870s. Barnabas is a young squire, sporting with a maid, Angelique, but when he falls in love with Josette and plans to marry her, Angelique proves that a witch rejected has 10 times more fury than a woman scorned. Angelique dooms the entire Collins' family. Barnabas' parents die. Josette is entranced so that against her volition she heads to the nearest cliff, Widow's Hill, Barnabas follows and is close enough to hear her utter "help me" before she catapults herself off the peak, into the waves below. He's so amazed by this that he stops a couple of times to stare, time that could have been better spent trying to catch up to her, but oh well ... Maybe he thought if he got closer, she'd run to her death faster. Anyway, by the time he reaches the edge himself, he sees her broken body below and launches himself over to join her in eternity. Angelique witnesses it all and thinks that death will end his suffering too soon. She casts a spell on him -- gee her spells work within seconds -- and instantly turns him into a vampire.
He returns home, to become one of the living dead, but the townspeople learn his secret and run to his mansion, Collinwood, with torches. Instead of just staking him, he's bound in a coffin and buried deep underground.
Fast forward to the 1970s. The Collins' family still live in the town that is named after them, Collinsport, but their fortunes have dwindled drastically. Collinwood is dilapidated. A shell of its former splendor. The family consists of Elizabeth, her ne'er-do-well brother Roger, a son he ignores, David, Elizabeth's hippy, trippy daughter Carolyn and David's psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman. They've just been joined by a new governess for David. He runs through them quickly. The latest is Victoria Winters, the replica of Barnabas' lost love Josette. In the original series, Maggie Evans and Victoria were two separate characters, but here the governess was born as "Maggie" but changes her name to Victoria as she flees a tortured childhood. Her parents institutionalized her because she saw ghosts. Luckily, so does David. His dead mother visits him in visions. Teacher and student bond because neither thinks the other is crazy.
What's so frustrating about the movie is that the sets and scenery are gothic and grand. They could have showcased a dramatic rendering of this story nicely, but are wasted as props for slapstick that is as old as Barnabas.
Workman are digging on a construction site when they hit a coffin, it opens up, Barnabas rises up and swiftly kills them all. He apologizes explaining that he's just been terribly thirsty. He briskly makes his way home, when he sees cars with headlights, he assumes they must be demons. Many laughs (or grimaces) are wrung from Barnabas' lack of familiarity with modern technology, music, TVs, cars, but it would have been just as enjoyable if his reactions were genuine, rather than gags.
At Collinwood, he enters the house and begins walking around as if he owns it -- which, he does. But young Carolyn and David have never seen him before and hardly seem surprised by his odd presence. His encounter with Elizabeth is different. She's heard the family legend and knows that the real Barnabas was a vampire. So, if he is the original, as he claims, then she's ready to stake him. But he promises her he means no harm to her, their, family and can show her a fortune which will raise their flagging fortunes. He knows all of the mansion's secret passages and shows her a dungeon where his father kept gold and treasures. Beholding the stash, Elizabeth is happy to let Barnabas into the family. Actually, the relationship they quickly form as co-heads of the family, loyal to one another, is endearing to me. When Barnabas gives Roger the choice of being a good father to David for a change, or leaving the family with enough of an endowment to support himself, Elizabeth supports him. And they stand guard over David and the others, as Roger takes the money and runs.
Barnabas not only sets about renovating the mansion, but revitalizes the family's fishing business too. He updates the canary and is set to compete against their biggest rival, Angie's Bay. He soon learns that "Angie" is his old nemesis Angelique. While he was buried for centuries, she has lived through the years, updating her look for each generation, building her own fortune while making sure the Collins' legacy never recovered, from the disaster she first wrought upon them in 1870. Seeing Barnabas, she still wants him, with a passion that makes one wonder how she could have left him entombed all of these years.
He tries to resist her, but soon they're rolling around with supernatural vigor, on the walls, the ceiling, crashing through walls. When the romp is over, Barnabas tells Angelique it must never happen again and generally insults her in a way that is illogical, seeing that she has the powers of witchcraft on her side. He's no match for, so I'm not quite sure why he taunts. More flies with honey.
But she's not Barnabas' only rejected lover. When Hoffman finds out what Barnabas is, she first offers to cure him with blood transfusions which may staunch his craving for human blood. Then she offers him oral sex. It's actually a wasted pairing when one remembers the complexity of the "real" bond between tv's Julia and Barnabas. It was erotic, but unconsummated, since her attraction to Barnabas was unrequited. The fact that it was also unspoken added layers to their exchanges, especially when combined with actress Grayson Hall's quirky, perhaps absent, abilities. That Julia loved Barnabas and when she tried to control his homicidal instincts by offering him her own neck, we saw it as her way of drawing him closer to her, as a patient and a man.
As his "doctor" she wielded superficial control, but she was his, a magnet for his anger, frustrations and manipulations. Julia and Willie Loomis (the Collins' caretaker once played by John Karlen of Cagney and Lacey fame) were Barnabas' pawns, protectors and ... accomplices. Watching their fear shift to loyalty was a draw in the original series, but nonexistent in the movie.
Hoffman's character is meaningless. Barnabas quickly dispatches her when he learns that rather than giving him human blood, she's been injecting his, trying to ensure eternal life, youth for herself. He kills her, then tosses her body in the ocean. In the end when we see her not-so-lifeless body floating underwater as the surprise last shot, it's puzzling. She was so inconsequential as a character, comic or villain that the audience cares less that she is still alive than they did about her death. If her reappearance was planted at the end to show us what a sequel would be like, it only makes the first installment seem all the more horrible.
Barnabas throws a ball for the family, complete with Alice Cooper as the live entertainment. The only interesting aspect of the gala is the brief sight of original Dark Shadows actors David Selby, Lara Parker, Kathryn Leigh Scott and the inimitable Jonathan Frid enter the party as guests. I had to rewind to savor that.
During the festivities, Victoria confesses to Barnabas that she returns his love. They kiss on the balcony as Angelique looks on in anger. After the party, she invites Barnabas to her office and asks him to be her partner in love and in business. He scoffs and she quickly chains him up and entombs him again. Young David finds and releases Barnabas and they return home, only to find that Angelique has turned the whole town against them. The townspeople swarm Collinwood with pitchfork. The family stands together to stave them off, but when the masses leave, Angelique still fights only, using her magic to toss everyone around. It's more whirlwind than war, as the whole house is torn asunder in the battle. Beams and chandeliers fall. A fire erupts.
Carolyn reveals that she is a werewolf in the midst of the havoc. It means nothing to the plot. Perhaps this too was planned for the sequel which will, mercifully, never take place.
In the end, Angelique is defeated and killed. But when they search for Victoria in the wreckage, she is nowhere to be found. Fearing the worst, Barnabas rushes to Widow's Hill. Yes, Victoria is there, ready to cast herself over the edge, like Josette did centuries earlier. She says she's doing it because she can't live with Barnabas. He's a creature of the night (although, like Edward Cullen, he goes out during the day, as long as he's well-covered) and she lives and grows old during the day. She will age and die and he will remain the same, so they can never be together. The only answer is to make her like him. This suggestion comes out of nowhere, because Victoria had never expressed such a yearning before.
In fact, she didn't even know he was a vampire. She saw him catch fire when the sun hit him once, but I wouldn't expect her to even know what that meant. She recoiled and left the room and we hadn't seen her since. But apparently, she knew immediately that burning flesh meant vampire and decided -- not that she was horrified realizing that Barnabas was probably responsible for all the recent deaths in the neighborhood -- that she wanted to vamp up too.
Barnabas refuses to make her one of his kind. She answers that death is the only choice and plunges off the hill. As before, he jumps after her. When he reaches the ground, he bites her. She becomes a vampire immediately (apparently conversion by fang is as quick as Angelique's vampire spell was. They live happily ever after.
If I was disappointed in the first part of the movie, the last 20 minutes was just a montage of crashes, broken glass and falling wood. This scriptless carnage is tedious in a good action movie, to tack it onto a screenplay that was dreck to begin with ... is just pounding the last nail in the coffin.
To my once-beloved Barnabas, if this is the best that Hollywood can do, may he stay buried.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)
Since most Americans probably only see movies set in India once a year or so, the Jaipur locale made this script seem fresher than it otherwise was. I am surprised it garnered so many different nominations (SAG, Golden Globes, etc.) because it was quite predictable.
Seven retirees who have run out of funds or opportunities in the UK see a brochure for an idyllic retirement community in Jaipur. It's not only enchanting, but fits their budget, so each with their own motivations packs up his/her life and heads out on a new adventure, meeting at the airport.
Evelyn (Judi Dench) is a new widow. Her husband has left her in enormous debt. He handled all of the finances and decisions and didn't share their impending doom with her, but she didn't ask him either. She married young, handed her free will over to him and is now regretting that choice. Even when she sells their home, she will barely have enough money to live on. Her son tells her that she will live with him. He's already talked it over with wife Polly, before, of course, consulting his mother at all. She decides she's had enough of that.
We meet her when she's on the telephone talking to the cable company. She wants to change or cancel service, but can't do so without her husband's password. Her name is not on the account. Her husband is dead, she says. The customer service rep repeats that they can't help her without the account information. Of course, this frustrates her for several reason: the bad service certainly. They're reading a script and don't expect you to respond like a human being. When you do they have no reaction. The apathy stokes her fresh grief. The phone call reminds me of my own father's death. He'd had a stroke and I was getting a caregiver and moving him out from Illinois to live with me. Insurance fitted my home out with a hoya lift, oxygen tanks, a hospital and wheelchair ahead of his arrival. I just had to buy a twin bed for caregiver. He died on the date when he was supposed to make the trip and I had to have the health care providers pick up all the unused equipment. I went on the Sears website to cancel delivery of the bed. One box asked me for the reason: price? not the product I thought I wanted? I said it was because my father died. To my surprise Sears sent me an email confirming the cancellation and also expressed sympathy for my lost. It was the last thing I'd expected. I appreciated the anonymous kindness and it made me cry, just as Evelyn does when she fails to get the same.
Her son takes her to the airport, remarking that he doesn't think she'll make it. She's never done anything alone. Of course that makes Evelyn more determined than ever to succeed and immediately the audience knows she will.
Maggie Smith plays Mrs. Donnelly, an inveterate racist. As the movie progresses we learn that she's a retired housekeeper. She needs hip surgery but shuns aid from any of the minority doctors at the hospital. Of course, India would be the last place she'd want to have the work done, but it's the cheapest and, ever paranoid, she embarks on her journey, wishing it was already over.
Madge is a golddigger, confident in her own sex appeal, much like Blanche on The Golden Girls. Norman is a skirt chaser. Although he generally likes them younger, you'd think these two were fated to end up together. That they don't is one of the film's few surprises.
Jean and Douglas are a wearily married couple. He invested in their daughter's business and it wiped out most of their savings. I don't know where Jean was when he did it. I don't know if she was fully apprised of his financial decisions, but it would be unlike her not to complain that she wasn't. We don't get their entire backstory, but as judgmental as she is, I don't think she let him make all of the decisions as Evelyn did. Whether both are responsible for their depleted savings or not, she blames him entirely and he expects as much.
They can afford a small assisted living apartment and we meet them as they are touring the place. When Jean rebukes the guide as he points out the place's very modest features, I actually agree with her. There's a convenient pull cord on the wall, in case you fall and need outside assistance. But what if she lacks the foresight to fall in the right place, Jean wants to know. What if she's not near the wall when she face plants. How can she pull the cord then? The rails on the walls that will help them maneuver about the room when they're order -- how do they help if you want to walk ACROSS the room, rather than just around the parameter? Her husband is embarrassed by her rude questions, but to me the outburst is not an irrational response to the patronizing sales pitch. Perhaps my cynicism is misplaced. All marketing is designed to create a need, whether it really exists or not. Why is it more offensive when that need is promoted to seniors than to anyone else? Both babies and the elderly may need diapers. If a Depends ad makes me uncomfortable than a Pampers ad does, is the problem with me rather than the seller? Why does it seem that one is offering a service, while the other is "taking advantage?" Well, even if Jean's explosion had more to do with her own insecurities than the sales agent's, I cheered her on. It was only after getting to know her better that I realized her foul mood was a permanent one, not spurred by justified irritation or fear for the future.
Tom Wilkinson, Graham, is a judge. He seems to be the only one who isn't grounded by financial straits. He was attending someone else's retirement party when he was suddenly seized by an unexplained spasm and announces that the day has come. Apparently, it was one he'd always been waiting for, putting off, but always planning. It was time for him to go too.
Once they finally complete their perilous journey into Jaipur through the congested streets, crazy drivers in even crazier vehicles, they arrive at their hotel to find that it isn't quite the way it looked in the brochure. It's a dilapidated eyesore, old and mostly unmanned. The owner is young Sonny. He's a smoother talker than businessman. The hotel was handed down by his father and he lacks the funds to realize his dreams of renovation. He's trying to woo lenders, but unless he can swindle them as he did his new (and only) seven guests, he appears to be out of luck.
Graham grew up in India and takes the hotel in stride, seeing the beauty around him, rather than the decay. Norman and Douglas are also happy to make due, welcoming the fresh start. For Evelyn it seems more like a first beginning than a new one. Madge is eager to scope out the rich men in the area. Jean is, of course, livid. She doesn't want to experience the food, the city or the people. She's loathe to leave her room.
Evelyn goes job-hunting. She inquires at a sales agency, but when she sees all of the employees cubicled there are young, she fears she doesn't have a chance. She is about to apologize for wasting the manager's time when he tells her he could use her services as a consultant. She might help them mold their sales strategy to the customer. Presumably, he wants her to Anglicize his approach to attract non-Indians. Evelyn is thrilled to be earning her own way for the first time. She befriends the owner's sister who is a sales agent at the company and, it turns out, Sonny's girlfriend. His mother, naturally, does not think Sunaina is good enough for her third son and wants to put him in an arranged marriage. Theirs is the movie's most soap operatic plot all and nearly destroys what little poignant credibility the film otherwise possessed.
As the days pass, the Marigold guests develop friendships. Graham reveals that when his family was stationed in India he grew up and fell in love with another young man. When they were found together a scandal erupted. Graham's family simply left the country and he was able to build a life unscathed, but he never knew what became of his lover. It must have been 40 years ago when India was even less tolerant of homosexuality than it is now. Not only his lover, but the youth's entire family was spurned. They lost their jobs, had to relocate. Graham never knew what became of him. He promised himself that he'd return and find out, but then he never did. "Until now," Evelyn reminds him, soothing his guilt.
Graham makes a pilgrimage to the records office each day to try to find out what became of his erstwhile partnership, but can't make any headway through the bureaucracy. Jean latches on to Graham as her dream man. A symbol of everything she'd aspired to in life, but been disappointed in. Ignoring her husband, unless it's to scorn him, she hopelessly stalks Graham looking for an attempt to charm. He wonders why she won't experience her surroundings. Why keep herself locked up. It's clear to us that sexual orientation aside, he has little in common with Jean. Why does she seek the company of someone so open-minded when hers is so closed? When Graham tells her he's gay, her hurt makes their circumstances, already oppressive, intolerable for her. She needs to escape.
Douglas, on the other hand, is settling in nicely, enjoying Evelyn's pleasant, interested manner.
Madge haunts the local country club, trying to pass herself off as a blue blood (Princess Margaret to be exact). She doesn't have much success on her own, but she helps fix Norman up with a woman who shrugs him off at first, but responds when he abandons the lecherous act and just admits that he's lonely. She is too.
Mrs. Donnelly undergoes her hip surgery, but must remain at the hotel until she's fully recovered. She wants as little to do with anything foreign as possible and hopes to live off of imported hobnobs, rather than the local cuisine. The girl who serves her each day doesn't understand English but mistakes Mrs. Donnelly's cleaning instructions for words of friendship. Using the doctor as translator, she invites Mrs. Donnelly to her home. Donnelly doesn't quite go willingly. The doctor has wheeled her there before she knows the destination. Surrounded by the girls entire family, Donnelly is silent at first, but then, perhaps spurred by their inability to fully understand without translation, she recalls how she was fired from the job she held for many years. She raised the family as her own, managed their finances, loved the children. But they replaced her and said her services were no longer needed. Although her hosts don't know what she has said and the doctor feels too awkward to translate for them, they can sense that they were given TMI. There's an uncomfortable silence when, alarmed by the boys trying to upright her wheelchair outside, Donnelly yells at them to get off, her xenophobia raging. The girl who invited her is hurt. Donnelly feels guilty and after that she starts to reach out to those around her. Maybe having been caused pain, changes her view after she's inflicted it.
Donnelly is not only softer than before, but nosier. She takes an interest in the lives of the other guests, observing their fights and affairs in silence.
To his surprise, the records office does find Graham's lost love, Manoj. He goes to the address (with Evelyn and Douglas in tow) not knowing what he'll find or how he'll be received. The woman who opens the door recognizes his name immediately. She's his Manoj's wife. Heart quickening Graham thanks her and turns away to leave, but she calls to someone down below. Her husband. An older man turns and he and Graham recognize each other. Graham walks towards Manoj afraid, but when he gets there he is pulled into a hug and immersed in joy and relief. Evelyn is drawn to the woman in the doorway. The wife. What must she be thinking, Evelyn wonders.
Graham and his friend talk all night, sharing their lives. Back at the hotel, Graham relates that Manoj built a family over the decades and was very happy, but never stopped thinking of Graham. Never stopped loving him. All of this time Graham thought he'd destroyed a man, but it turns out he was the one who'd been in prison all along. He watches a large swan leap into the air, spread its wings and float away, as we follow the bird's flight, Graham takes his last breath below.
The Marigold inhabitants attend his funeral, arranged by his Manoj. It will follow traditional Indian custom. The body is placed on a pyre and must be burned completely between dawn and sundown. When only ashes remain, Graham's beloved sprinkle them in the water. Before returning home Evelyn makes a trek to speak to Manoj's wife, to find out how she feels. This is rather presumptuous to me, because Evelyn seems moved by curiosity more than compassion. But she leaves envious. Manoj's wife knew everything. She always had. There were no secrets between her and her husband. Evelyn feels that they had a real marriage. They had honesty. Sexual compatibility means nothing when trust and sharing is absent. She feels she failed her husband, because she knew nothing. He didn't share his decisions with her, but that means she was relieved of his burdens as well. If she had asked and demanded answers, maybe she would have grown and expanded as a person, but maybe their union would have deepened as well.
Back at the hotel, Sonny's mother catches his naked girlfriend sneaking into the bedroom for a rendezvous and tells Sonny he must have nothing more to do with her. Sonny does not defend Sunaina, a betrayal that the "happy ending" does not soften for me. Sonny's mother insists that he sell the failing hotel.
The residents take its closing as a loss of their own hopes. Feeling weak, Evelyn makes a call home to her son. Is it because she misses him or because she feels he was right, that she has been unable to make it on her own and should return where she'll be protected, if not independent.
Norman will move in with his lover. Glowing for the first time, Jean has heard from her daughter who is now a successful entrepreneur (they've only been gone 2 months, so that was quit). It seems Douglas' investment has paid off, but Jean doesn't thank her husband. She ridicules his infatuation with Evelyn (never admitting her own longing for Graham) and says they're returning home. Douglas can bear her taunts, but when she insults Evelyn he snaps and wonders when/why Jean became the hateful, unhappy person she is today. She's stunned by his revolt, but her first priority is freedom. She packs to leave, proud that she'll be turning left. That is, when she enters the airplane, she'll turn left because their tickets are in the first class cabin, for the first time. She's arrived.
Donnelly pays a visit to the lender Sonny was wooing. It turns out she was not only a nanny and housekeeper, but the family's money manager. She's got wonderful accounting skills and has proven that a profit can be made from the Marigold. She convinces the lender to fund Sonny, as long as he has proper oversight at the hotel, meaning her. Rising from her wheelchair she takes the business reins at the Marigold, while Sonny becomes the greeter, banking on his personality, rather than his wisdom.
He gains the confidence to stand up for himself, retrieves Sunaina and expresses his love. However, instead of telling his mother that he doesn't need her permission to marry the woman he loves, he stands by as an old employee shames his mother into recalling that her husband's family looked down on her too. They would have discouraged their marriage, but her husband (Sonny's father) defied them, because he was in love. The woman instantly melts seeing herself in Sunaina (major eyeroll) and then she instantly accepts her daughter-in-law to be and Sonny's right to keep his father's dream, the Marigold Hotel, alive. Now, there was some dialogue earlier where Sonny told his mother he knew she loved the hotel too, so maybe she was just in denial earlier and trying to be a pragmatic, unbending business woman, but other than a single sentence, we never got a glimpse into her heart before, so her sudden about face nearly causes whiplash.
Evelyn avoided saying goodbye to Douglas, so he leaves for the airport with Jean, but they get stuck in traffic and won't make the flight, unless they abandon their car and take a rickshaw. It can only fit one person, so Jean tells him he should stay behind. They've both realized it wasn't working a long time ago. They both deserve more. He denies it at first, but knows she's right.
He returns to the hotel, where Evelyn waits. Fast forward and they are motoring through Jaipur, Evelyn on a bike behind Douglas and Sonny and Sunaina riding through the streets together to. The two couples salute and continue through the happy milieu that is now home to all of them.
The neat, unrealistic resolution of everyone's problems make this movie impossible to recommend. The acting was quiet and knowing for the most part (Maggie Smith being a bit of a caricature), but there was nothing outstanding. None of the seven plots were original. You could see point B straight ahead, while standing at point A. Ok, I didn't know Graham would die, but that's because I wasn't particularly concerned. Since he nearly fainted twice it was pretty obvious. Donnelly? She was too extreme a bigot to remain one for long. Doug and Jean's marriage? She was set up as the shrew villain, so she had to fall, though it happened gently. There were no surprises, no laughs (maybe soft smiles). You could see everything coming, but if you have extra time on your hands, don't bother to get out of the way. The ride is smooth, if uneventful.
Seven retirees who have run out of funds or opportunities in the UK see a brochure for an idyllic retirement community in Jaipur. It's not only enchanting, but fits their budget, so each with their own motivations packs up his/her life and heads out on a new adventure, meeting at the airport.
Evelyn (Judi Dench) is a new widow. Her husband has left her in enormous debt. He handled all of the finances and decisions and didn't share their impending doom with her, but she didn't ask him either. She married young, handed her free will over to him and is now regretting that choice. Even when she sells their home, she will barely have enough money to live on. Her son tells her that she will live with him. He's already talked it over with wife Polly, before, of course, consulting his mother at all. She decides she's had enough of that.
We meet her when she's on the telephone talking to the cable company. She wants to change or cancel service, but can't do so without her husband's password. Her name is not on the account. Her husband is dead, she says. The customer service rep repeats that they can't help her without the account information. Of course, this frustrates her for several reason: the bad service certainly. They're reading a script and don't expect you to respond like a human being. When you do they have no reaction. The apathy stokes her fresh grief. The phone call reminds me of my own father's death. He'd had a stroke and I was getting a caregiver and moving him out from Illinois to live with me. Insurance fitted my home out with a hoya lift, oxygen tanks, a hospital and wheelchair ahead of his arrival. I just had to buy a twin bed for caregiver. He died on the date when he was supposed to make the trip and I had to have the health care providers pick up all the unused equipment. I went on the Sears website to cancel delivery of the bed. One box asked me for the reason: price? not the product I thought I wanted? I said it was because my father died. To my surprise Sears sent me an email confirming the cancellation and also expressed sympathy for my lost. It was the last thing I'd expected. I appreciated the anonymous kindness and it made me cry, just as Evelyn does when she fails to get the same.
Her son takes her to the airport, remarking that he doesn't think she'll make it. She's never done anything alone. Of course that makes Evelyn more determined than ever to succeed and immediately the audience knows she will.
Maggie Smith plays Mrs. Donnelly, an inveterate racist. As the movie progresses we learn that she's a retired housekeeper. She needs hip surgery but shuns aid from any of the minority doctors at the hospital. Of course, India would be the last place she'd want to have the work done, but it's the cheapest and, ever paranoid, she embarks on her journey, wishing it was already over.
Madge is a golddigger, confident in her own sex appeal, much like Blanche on The Golden Girls. Norman is a skirt chaser. Although he generally likes them younger, you'd think these two were fated to end up together. That they don't is one of the film's few surprises.
Jean and Douglas are a wearily married couple. He invested in their daughter's business and it wiped out most of their savings. I don't know where Jean was when he did it. I don't know if she was fully apprised of his financial decisions, but it would be unlike her not to complain that she wasn't. We don't get their entire backstory, but as judgmental as she is, I don't think she let him make all of the decisions as Evelyn did. Whether both are responsible for their depleted savings or not, she blames him entirely and he expects as much.
They can afford a small assisted living apartment and we meet them as they are touring the place. When Jean rebukes the guide as he points out the place's very modest features, I actually agree with her. There's a convenient pull cord on the wall, in case you fall and need outside assistance. But what if she lacks the foresight to fall in the right place, Jean wants to know. What if she's not near the wall when she face plants. How can she pull the cord then? The rails on the walls that will help them maneuver about the room when they're order -- how do they help if you want to walk ACROSS the room, rather than just around the parameter? Her husband is embarrassed by her rude questions, but to me the outburst is not an irrational response to the patronizing sales pitch. Perhaps my cynicism is misplaced. All marketing is designed to create a need, whether it really exists or not. Why is it more offensive when that need is promoted to seniors than to anyone else? Both babies and the elderly may need diapers. If a Depends ad makes me uncomfortable than a Pampers ad does, is the problem with me rather than the seller? Why does it seem that one is offering a service, while the other is "taking advantage?" Well, even if Jean's explosion had more to do with her own insecurities than the sales agent's, I cheered her on. It was only after getting to know her better that I realized her foul mood was a permanent one, not spurred by justified irritation or fear for the future.
Tom Wilkinson, Graham, is a judge. He seems to be the only one who isn't grounded by financial straits. He was attending someone else's retirement party when he was suddenly seized by an unexplained spasm and announces that the day has come. Apparently, it was one he'd always been waiting for, putting off, but always planning. It was time for him to go too.
Once they finally complete their perilous journey into Jaipur through the congested streets, crazy drivers in even crazier vehicles, they arrive at their hotel to find that it isn't quite the way it looked in the brochure. It's a dilapidated eyesore, old and mostly unmanned. The owner is young Sonny. He's a smoother talker than businessman. The hotel was handed down by his father and he lacks the funds to realize his dreams of renovation. He's trying to woo lenders, but unless he can swindle them as he did his new (and only) seven guests, he appears to be out of luck.
Graham grew up in India and takes the hotel in stride, seeing the beauty around him, rather than the decay. Norman and Douglas are also happy to make due, welcoming the fresh start. For Evelyn it seems more like a first beginning than a new one. Madge is eager to scope out the rich men in the area. Jean is, of course, livid. She doesn't want to experience the food, the city or the people. She's loathe to leave her room.
Evelyn goes job-hunting. She inquires at a sales agency, but when she sees all of the employees cubicled there are young, she fears she doesn't have a chance. She is about to apologize for wasting the manager's time when he tells her he could use her services as a consultant. She might help them mold their sales strategy to the customer. Presumably, he wants her to Anglicize his approach to attract non-Indians. Evelyn is thrilled to be earning her own way for the first time. She befriends the owner's sister who is a sales agent at the company and, it turns out, Sonny's girlfriend. His mother, naturally, does not think Sunaina is good enough for her third son and wants to put him in an arranged marriage. Theirs is the movie's most soap operatic plot all and nearly destroys what little poignant credibility the film otherwise possessed.
As the days pass, the Marigold guests develop friendships. Graham reveals that when his family was stationed in India he grew up and fell in love with another young man. When they were found together a scandal erupted. Graham's family simply left the country and he was able to build a life unscathed, but he never knew what became of his lover. It must have been 40 years ago when India was even less tolerant of homosexuality than it is now. Not only his lover, but the youth's entire family was spurned. They lost their jobs, had to relocate. Graham never knew what became of him. He promised himself that he'd return and find out, but then he never did. "Until now," Evelyn reminds him, soothing his guilt.
Graham makes a pilgrimage to the records office each day to try to find out what became of his erstwhile partnership, but can't make any headway through the bureaucracy. Jean latches on to Graham as her dream man. A symbol of everything she'd aspired to in life, but been disappointed in. Ignoring her husband, unless it's to scorn him, she hopelessly stalks Graham looking for an attempt to charm. He wonders why she won't experience her surroundings. Why keep herself locked up. It's clear to us that sexual orientation aside, he has little in common with Jean. Why does she seek the company of someone so open-minded when hers is so closed? When Graham tells her he's gay, her hurt makes their circumstances, already oppressive, intolerable for her. She needs to escape.
Douglas, on the other hand, is settling in nicely, enjoying Evelyn's pleasant, interested manner.
Madge haunts the local country club, trying to pass herself off as a blue blood (Princess Margaret to be exact). She doesn't have much success on her own, but she helps fix Norman up with a woman who shrugs him off at first, but responds when he abandons the lecherous act and just admits that he's lonely. She is too.
Mrs. Donnelly undergoes her hip surgery, but must remain at the hotel until she's fully recovered. She wants as little to do with anything foreign as possible and hopes to live off of imported hobnobs, rather than the local cuisine. The girl who serves her each day doesn't understand English but mistakes Mrs. Donnelly's cleaning instructions for words of friendship. Using the doctor as translator, she invites Mrs. Donnelly to her home. Donnelly doesn't quite go willingly. The doctor has wheeled her there before she knows the destination. Surrounded by the girls entire family, Donnelly is silent at first, but then, perhaps spurred by their inability to fully understand without translation, she recalls how she was fired from the job she held for many years. She raised the family as her own, managed their finances, loved the children. But they replaced her and said her services were no longer needed. Although her hosts don't know what she has said and the doctor feels too awkward to translate for them, they can sense that they were given TMI. There's an uncomfortable silence when, alarmed by the boys trying to upright her wheelchair outside, Donnelly yells at them to get off, her xenophobia raging. The girl who invited her is hurt. Donnelly feels guilty and after that she starts to reach out to those around her. Maybe having been caused pain, changes her view after she's inflicted it.
Donnelly is not only softer than before, but nosier. She takes an interest in the lives of the other guests, observing their fights and affairs in silence.
To his surprise, the records office does find Graham's lost love, Manoj. He goes to the address (with Evelyn and Douglas in tow) not knowing what he'll find or how he'll be received. The woman who opens the door recognizes his name immediately. She's his Manoj's wife. Heart quickening Graham thanks her and turns away to leave, but she calls to someone down below. Her husband. An older man turns and he and Graham recognize each other. Graham walks towards Manoj afraid, but when he gets there he is pulled into a hug and immersed in joy and relief. Evelyn is drawn to the woman in the doorway. The wife. What must she be thinking, Evelyn wonders.
Graham and his friend talk all night, sharing their lives. Back at the hotel, Graham relates that Manoj built a family over the decades and was very happy, but never stopped thinking of Graham. Never stopped loving him. All of this time Graham thought he'd destroyed a man, but it turns out he was the one who'd been in prison all along. He watches a large swan leap into the air, spread its wings and float away, as we follow the bird's flight, Graham takes his last breath below.
The Marigold inhabitants attend his funeral, arranged by his Manoj. It will follow traditional Indian custom. The body is placed on a pyre and must be burned completely between dawn and sundown. When only ashes remain, Graham's beloved sprinkle them in the water. Before returning home Evelyn makes a trek to speak to Manoj's wife, to find out how she feels. This is rather presumptuous to me, because Evelyn seems moved by curiosity more than compassion. But she leaves envious. Manoj's wife knew everything. She always had. There were no secrets between her and her husband. Evelyn feels that they had a real marriage. They had honesty. Sexual compatibility means nothing when trust and sharing is absent. She feels she failed her husband, because she knew nothing. He didn't share his decisions with her, but that means she was relieved of his burdens as well. If she had asked and demanded answers, maybe she would have grown and expanded as a person, but maybe their union would have deepened as well.
Back at the hotel, Sonny's mother catches his naked girlfriend sneaking into the bedroom for a rendezvous and tells Sonny he must have nothing more to do with her. Sonny does not defend Sunaina, a betrayal that the "happy ending" does not soften for me. Sonny's mother insists that he sell the failing hotel.
The residents take its closing as a loss of their own hopes. Feeling weak, Evelyn makes a call home to her son. Is it because she misses him or because she feels he was right, that she has been unable to make it on her own and should return where she'll be protected, if not independent.
Norman will move in with his lover. Glowing for the first time, Jean has heard from her daughter who is now a successful entrepreneur (they've only been gone 2 months, so that was quit). It seems Douglas' investment has paid off, but Jean doesn't thank her husband. She ridicules his infatuation with Evelyn (never admitting her own longing for Graham) and says they're returning home. Douglas can bear her taunts, but when she insults Evelyn he snaps and wonders when/why Jean became the hateful, unhappy person she is today. She's stunned by his revolt, but her first priority is freedom. She packs to leave, proud that she'll be turning left. That is, when she enters the airplane, she'll turn left because their tickets are in the first class cabin, for the first time. She's arrived.
Donnelly pays a visit to the lender Sonny was wooing. It turns out she was not only a nanny and housekeeper, but the family's money manager. She's got wonderful accounting skills and has proven that a profit can be made from the Marigold. She convinces the lender to fund Sonny, as long as he has proper oversight at the hotel, meaning her. Rising from her wheelchair she takes the business reins at the Marigold, while Sonny becomes the greeter, banking on his personality, rather than his wisdom.
He gains the confidence to stand up for himself, retrieves Sunaina and expresses his love. However, instead of telling his mother that he doesn't need her permission to marry the woman he loves, he stands by as an old employee shames his mother into recalling that her husband's family looked down on her too. They would have discouraged their marriage, but her husband (Sonny's father) defied them, because he was in love. The woman instantly melts seeing herself in Sunaina (major eyeroll) and then she instantly accepts her daughter-in-law to be and Sonny's right to keep his father's dream, the Marigold Hotel, alive. Now, there was some dialogue earlier where Sonny told his mother he knew she loved the hotel too, so maybe she was just in denial earlier and trying to be a pragmatic, unbending business woman, but other than a single sentence, we never got a glimpse into her heart before, so her sudden about face nearly causes whiplash.
Evelyn avoided saying goodbye to Douglas, so he leaves for the airport with Jean, but they get stuck in traffic and won't make the flight, unless they abandon their car and take a rickshaw. It can only fit one person, so Jean tells him he should stay behind. They've both realized it wasn't working a long time ago. They both deserve more. He denies it at first, but knows she's right.
He returns to the hotel, where Evelyn waits. Fast forward and they are motoring through Jaipur, Evelyn on a bike behind Douglas and Sonny and Sunaina riding through the streets together to. The two couples salute and continue through the happy milieu that is now home to all of them.
The neat, unrealistic resolution of everyone's problems make this movie impossible to recommend. The acting was quiet and knowing for the most part (Maggie Smith being a bit of a caricature), but there was nothing outstanding. None of the seven plots were original. You could see point B straight ahead, while standing at point A. Ok, I didn't know Graham would die, but that's because I wasn't particularly concerned. Since he nearly fainted twice it was pretty obvious. Donnelly? She was too extreme a bigot to remain one for long. Doug and Jean's marriage? She was set up as the shrew villain, so she had to fall, though it happened gently. There were no surprises, no laughs (maybe soft smiles). You could see everything coming, but if you have extra time on your hands, don't bother to get out of the way. The ride is smooth, if uneventful.
Monday, February 10, 2014
Cloud Atlas (2012)
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.
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.
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.
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