Film Splatter

Jane Eyre

(dir. Cary Fukunaga)

The least exciting idea is another adaptation of Jane Eyre would be forthcoming. Not only is the history of classical novels on film worn most sense of use, but Jane Eyre has already bypassed Hollywood romanticizing and saw its norm become hallmarked by PBS production of what a small budget can entail when the look of the film screams “made for television movie.” All qualities aside (mainly due to some actors), the films aim to just project a straight interpretation of the novel in condensed fashion. The principle belief is that the novel should be enshrined and any corresponding film should be just a support to lift up whatever the interpreter believes is the best qualities of the original work. Since the novels are best as just being novels, the hope does not merit much and compelling cinema is typically lost. A bevy of films from a number of talented filmmaker have tried to curb stale expectations. Not new to the party is a fascinating interpretation of Jane Eyre by relative newcomer, filmmaker Cary Fukunaga.

The principle evolution in the film is the structure of the story. Instead of slot the story into a chronological coming-of-age story (typical for classical novels of the period), the film immediately breaks up the story by varying the order of what scenes are shown. No random order, the realignment is aimed to better project the emotional states in the story. The film begins with Jane Eyre in desperate measure when she is wandering through an endless series of meadows. Drenched down by rain, her body begins to give out. A passing by carriage spots her and the people inside come to assist. As they take her home and supply her with food, things become apparent she is not typically poor. A curious story must be the reason why she ended up in the straits they found her. With use of various first person perspectives, the film begins to take on a multi-layered drive to lay credence to an emotional history for young Jane.

During the hysterics of Jane’s physical rebuilding, the film allows her to remember childhood moments of estrangement from an overbearing aunt and heartbreak at an orphanage when a fellow classmate died in her arms. The friendly strangers are asking her about where she came from and all her emotions can circumference is blips of painful memories. Instead of extend out these early scenes, they are capsized in searing emotional moments. The first dramatic tone the film establishes is not to doll the emotions but find ways to make the darker themes more subjective. In classical films, implied emotions in characters exist around the exterior of a tone in the story that is more focused on exhibiting realism of day-to-day life during the time period. By choosing not get cozy with a standard realism code, Jane Eyre establishes its filmmaking as more workable for some intrinsic themes in the novel.

I have always believed too many historical films relied on historical filmmaking methods to align emotions with a dumb sense of what history would have felt like. When Francois Truffaut imagined how a film about Jesus Christ would look like, he famously opined how it would be need to be black-and-white film since that is what color a film back then would have been made of. Other filmmakers have followed in similar assumption by steadying all camera work and keeping certain realism methods flow throughout the films. Jane Eyre continuously changes the emotional juxtaposition of the scenes by switching from handheld cameras to hybrid dolly shots that speed up the pace of the action but feel like a character in a hallucinatory state. Instead of try to just be experimental all around, the approach is more economical. The better result is a film that borders more on an Ingmar Bergman intensity instead of a Jane Austen comfortable.

But abandoning a linear narrative also keeps the story from general heroic angles. A trend of literature in England at this time was to write books that were critical of certain social patterns but also equip the story with plot requirements of a romance and coming-of-age mentality. From Dickens to Austen, tracking a character through evolutions and seeing their point of personal completion made for more translatable narrative. By breaking up the story into sections and most notably diminishing Jane Eyre’s early years, the film wants the viewer to see story as less heroic and more of a meddling into a psychological condition. Every stage of her life is broken into moments of scars. The depth of character comes from how the film depicts the moments and sequesters the emotions to darker corners. Even though the original novel played against romantic archetypes than what Jane Austen ever dared to, the final scene of Eyre returning to a disfigured Mr. Rochester has a horrific aspect to it in this film.

In the film, the relationship between Eyre and Rochester is a memory. Eyre is still lingering with the kind people who have taken her in and she is trying to convince them she has found peace in her new setting, but time and isolation allows the memories of what happened to come roaring back. The film digs a trail to her past by showing how coming to work for Mr. Rochester as a tutor after experience with her aunt and the orphanage was almost a godsend. At first Eyre is hesitant to open herself up to Mr. Rochester. He’s smitten by her unique gift for gab, but the audience understands her history has to make her shy about trusting anyone. The portrayal of Mr. Rochester leans on his intimidating presence and failure to be fully welcoming or clear in his personal intentions to Eyre. Unexpected warmth endears Eyre to Rochester when she saves him from a fire. Still, they share tumultuous conflicts and betrayals of trust when past secrets come roaring back. The relationship is antagonistic to the cogs of film romance.

The principle development for Eyre during this tempestuous engagement is that she develops a sense of independence and becoming of herself. The courtship between the two is very short on screen, but Eyre imagines a future with Rochester and holds firm to the idea of being with him. Saving his life and being a tutor/role model to the children of the house feels like things she has accomplished and will continue to do. An unruly lie drives her to leave Rochester and flee a dream. The development of a new menial life seems to be a nice change of pace. Eyre tries to convince her relations she is at full peace in her surroundings. Still, her memories of Rochester continue to haunt. Days look lazy and even a new teaching job for local children isn’t enough. When someone tries to propel a romantic relationship with Eyre, the feeling drives her to search out Rochester again. Memories have clouded the peace.

Using modes of editing that are essential to cinema, Jane Eyre structures a feeling of loss and emptiness around blips of memories. The new narrative bend to this story allows it to be perfectly housed in a new environment. Film has to methods to curtail the depths of detail and length in novels. An excellent example is the experimental Passages From Finnegan’s Wake (1966). Adapting James Joyce’s impossible last novel, the film curtails scope issues by structuring the film to be about some elements of the novel. At the same time, a film adaptation was made for Ulysses. Seemingly an easier adaptation possibility (at least for a Joyce work), the film tried unsuccessfully to portray the entire story. All it did was take an excellently deft novel and make it into a simple moral work. Even the implied morality from the film hardly feels existent in the novel. A full fabrication.

The revolution around the themes of the film is found in the back-and-forth moments in the story. Certain relations and character developments are given traditional measure to be drawn out. Left out conclusions and implications of tense scenarios do not find realization until the history is enlightened upon. Instead of make missing details any real bigger clue, the film seems to leave out details just so it can get to a few transcendent scenes at the end when all the emotions of the film come to a head. After Eyre is left soulfully lost and returns to Rochester, she learns his brutal fate in a fire. Still alive, Rochester suffers from burning and disfigurement of vision. Our emotional conclusion is when she finds him and simply caresses his face, hands and motions her body next to him. He understands who she is calls out her name. The film has reached climax.

Even complimented by a structure that understands how to compact a bigger story, the film does need other reasons to instill belief in the characters and story. The main benefit of the wonderful sub settings of the film is the two lead actors, Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. Playing Eyre and Mr. Rochester respectively, the two combine to paint a thorough depiction of torn love erupting from sequestered surroundings. With the aid of close camera proximity, the performance of Wasikowska focuses on her intent focus and diligence. Part of her coming to independence is her social opening up and the muscles in her face beginning to blossom in some variation. Fassbender is allowed to do more generics because he moves from stern overseer to smitten gentleman and adds his dose of nuance by going into a performance of regret. Nothing is wrong the performance, but the camera only really knows Wasikowska’s Eyre. She is the actor who goes through every stage and ends her performance in the poetically unexplainable when we wonder what her character must be feeling when she is reunited with Rochester under regrettable circumstances.

It’s hard to make more out of this film. Mia Wasikowska is a talent on the rise and while she has star potential, she isn’t giving herself up to cheap roles to make a brand name yet. The director, Cary Fukunaga, had little reel history before and there is little way to forecast his future. Michael Fassbender is making his acting name in better performances and will continue to be spotlighted when he isn’t detouring for summer blockbuster movies. However, if more movies continue to take fragmented approaches to classic novels like this Jane Eyre does, a healthy tradition could be in the making. This isn’t the first film to do it, but it was a spotlight work in American release this year. A trend can find almost any tide to cast itself from. Here’s me more hoping adaptations get this thoughtful and adventurous with their endeavors.

Miral

(dir. Julian Schnabel)

A level of expectation went into what Julian Schnabel would do when he announced his intentions to make a film about the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Past efforts and his incline of ratcheting up the filmmaking decibel to interrogate truth of difficult subject matter seemed to indicate personality and controversy may come to a head if Schnabel sight-lined a tenuous issue (like the strained Middle East dilemma) with the right amount of fervor. Time progressed after the announcement and when it came for Miral to finally debut, the film tracked up enough production mud to get delayed a few times and stunt momentum for any headlining world cinema controversy. The film also did something more off putting and disenchanting by skirting most controversial issues and going more down the social middle of the road with its story.

The good news is that there is much merit in what Schnabel does. Miral, an adaption of a novel by the same name from Rula Jebreal, is a fictional story about a historical situation of philanthropist Hindi Hussein and the results of her efforts in trying to create a school haven that would allow Palestinian girls to grow up in Israel without feeling any second class citizenry that came with the creation of Israel and disjointing of land around Jerusalem from locals nationalities already living there, namely the Palestinians. Because Hindi was a successful politician in swaying Israeli political interest, she maintained peace at her school for years. The story is history of characters involved with the school and how things came to a breaking point when Palestinian protests pushed for independence and a girl from Hindi’s school put both her family’s interest and the school’s by joining in on the political crusade.

The narrative of the story has a novel feeling of backtracking the history of the school and the main figure of Miral from the respective history of different characters and how their dramas shaped the events that revolve around later portions of the film. At the beginning Hindi Hussein finds herself accidentally helping out orphaned children. Subsequently, her housing means allows for a floodgate of more orphaned children. The accident turns into a cause. Years later, the narrative gets to know Miral’s mother and her unlikely chance of meeting her father while in prison. The story bends even more by telling how Miral got her namesake (named after a common flower on the side of the road) and how she grew to adapt Hindi as a second mother after her biological mother ended her life. The suicide does not have an immediate plot necessity to helping understand Miral herself, but it underpins many social dwellings. Many facts in the story have a sweeping curiosity that have no easy plot peg to fit into.

The eventual moral discussion is framed around the struggle for independence and acceptance of compromise by protesting Palestinians. For many Palestinians, it is not enough. The film registers their complaints on the faintest level. It directs the focus through Miral and the school and their safer desire to find peace. There is insuniation that Hindi wants peace but she also wants her school to be protected. When the agreement means that only 22% of the disputed land will be recovered, Hindi seems happy to go to her grave with that achievement. The dismal reality (supplied in a footnote) is that Israelis still have not given Palestinians even that, but the belief it will happen will be lasting solace for Hindi’s efforts. The nice notion of a contained independence being given a level of credence is controversial because it bow ties an enormous and ongoing argument with deep history into a smaller struggle. If I was going to rate Miral’s political deft, the film would flunk. However, I believe the film has an interesting level of apolitical morality and finds some interesting (and relevant) emotional strands by trying to be something else.

There is no reason to think Julian Schnabel short changes the novel. The slim work gets consistent criticism for being light on political issues, but what this story has going for it is an air of authenticity into a sidebar historical issue. As a biography of Miral until her early adulthood, the film is a tracking of how she was able to get the means to leave Israel and study with a full scholarship in Italy. The thanks is to Hindi Hussein and her school, but since both had unique ways of both coming into existence and finding each other, the narrative relies on anecdotal quirks to detail how both could evolve in the same universe. Unlike Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the quirky facts are not friendly for a clever plot construction. They just exist and conclusion does not find most stories or characters in the film. The only story in Miral with solid beginning and end is Hindi Hussein herself. Whatever size her school has in the region’s bigger political picture, the validation of doing what she did is still a rational dramatic stronghold. The result is the creation of a memorial work in the midst of a controversy.

An intimidating road to travel is to successfully navigate a difficult subject that has too many ends to cover. Topics and subjects have intimidated artists in various fields before. It does not even have to be an unresolved situation. Stanley Kubrick abandoned Aryan Papers and his dream of ever making a Holocaust picture when he realized no work was going to speak for the millions who died. The fear is trying to avoid short sighted moralizing that does not register with people who have experience with the event. The history of Hollywood and commercial art relying on fictional narratives has almost expunged film from getting any benefit of a doubt. Exceptions exist, and Miral gets a plus because Rula Jebreal based the character of Miral on her own life. Hindi Hussein was her real mentor and the path they took together grew into a mother-daughter relationship. Since Jebreal wrote the screenplay, the film is kept biographical.

There are some unique prisms to Miral. Rula Jebreal is acting on Hindi Hussein’s account to include the entire history of the school in her own biographical work, but she is also acting on author-subject accord to make the relationship between the writer and the subject feel interconnected in ways that cannot be rationed down to a formula. The simulation is metaphysical because the reader/viewer is thinking about processes in-and-out of the work, but specifically, the story shows an ongoing history of semi-political works that understand the inability to address full topics so compress their focus to facts more interpersonal to characters in history. The greatest biography of the 20th century was also one of the most compelling accounts of the Spanish Civil War, The Forging of a Rebel. Its author, Arturo Barea, was mainly re-telling his life but his identity to have a life became forged in the war. The creation of an identity is what became the main focus of the enormous book. Instead of self experiences, Miral road maps a theoretical history around the protagonist’s parameters of life to show how her school and other people in her life were a lead in to finding her identity through the Israeli/Palestinian situation.

Perceived political deft of a subject is based on a version of hindsight intelligence. Since the abject commentator has every published account to go on, they have the resources to say how a work is limited in its vision. The clemency for a work like Miral is that it makes a shrine for Hindi Hussein and allocates ideas of her beliefs and hopes. She is a historical figure who lived a full life within the struggle. Her dying hopes may come off as naive in greater schemes, but the film pays higher debt to her cause by hunkering down with her basic hopes and dreams when she was still alive. As much as the second guesser wants to point out limitations in her beliefs, they cannot put themselves in her day-to-day reality of what she felt was attainable and important progress between Palestinians and Israelis. Her entire life is moderating on give-and-take between both sides so the idea she could feel positive thoughts over a conservative settlement isn’t too surprising.  Since political notions are created by outside forces and make up imaginary narratives about a situation, the film’s measured political commentary goes back to its biographical focus.

Last but not least, the director needs to be regarded. Julian Schnabel is continuing on a path with few doubts. So far in his career, he is trademarking his approach with veracity over style engagement. Isn’t to say he can’t delve into styles, but he isn’t genre conscious like other filmmakers. Whatever moods and tempos Schnabel warms to, they seem to exist on an individual basis of what he thinks what will just help the emotions in a scene. Other structures and considerations seem to be damned. In Miral, a consistent production technique is to over saturate the light. The locale is Middle East so brighter scenes inhabit the visual senses even more. A moderate cliche is that light is abundant in happier scenes while light is dimmer in tenser scenes. It’s an easy mood swing. Difference with Schnabel is he distils so much light radiation onto the film in many ways that the lighting feels like a veneer on the surface of something larger. In the “film is most like painting” argument, Schnabel’s predisposition to lighting seems to make it qualify here.

The other overwhelming technical stroke is the precision of the compositional storytelling. For a film that travels over 30 years of story, the running time is under two hours. Instead of laboring through a methodical tone, Schnabel minimizes the amount of scenes and scenery the audience gets to see. After a while, it becomes evident the film wants locations and people to stand out in the audience’s mind. No physical alteration to adjust their reality and the school is the only place consistently shown throughout the film, but Schnabel tries to make visual cues the focal point. For a travelogue story, it reduces the identity of Miral’s mother to a broken person who has little technical characterization and existed for the specifically traumatic moments in her life. The thematic link harkens back to Miral’s third and first-person narrative of her life. For moments she cannot specify, Rula Jebreal just elaborates on the telling parts for the story. Schnabel assists by making the scenes emotionally traumatic and fitting the disjointed narrative into an almost seamless memory.

Julian Schnabel is continuing to separate himself. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) felt like a full mind meld of Schnabel’s realism potential from before. Some filmmakers sees decibel levels to push their filmmaking up to and call every new notch progression. Schnabel fully pulls back in his long awaited follow up. The result is not only fascinating history, but it is also a success in revamping my expectation levels. I saw visions of images to come after Diving Bell and now I see the same for Miral. Before one tries to catch up to Schnabel and play Nostradamus, all I hope is that his willing audience gets to see his next effort sooner instead of later.

An Argument Against Saving Private Ryan

During the first ten years of Steven Spielberg’s career, there was hope among some he would lose his childhood cap and start making a string of serious films for adults. Quality or not, the wear and tear of a Peter Pan filmmaker fighting every vested interest to commit himself to articles of emotional seriousness was a little troubling. To many, Spielberg was finding better capabilities of making his filmmaking more profitable for distribution in an increasingly changing box office landscape. With the freedom of CGI becoming normalized, a simple story with a few effects like Jaws (1975) was no longer going to do it. To prove his direction continued to accommodate for the times, Spielberg granted himself marketer of CGI norms by making Jurassic Park (1993) its first credited box office smash. After making Schindler’s List in the same year, the winds of perception apparently started to change.

When Spielberg approached Saving Private Ryan (1998), he was dealing with an old hat subject in American lore. Not only was World War II the only historical subject with enough mileage to be almost considered a genre, but the story of soldiers looking for a lone soldier who had every other of his brothers killed in combat was close to being done before. In 1944, The Fighting Sullivans commemorated a war that was still going on by fictionalizing an odd historical fact of a family who saw all of its male children killed in combat. The film is based on a true story and honed on good propaganda of American patriotism by showing how a grieving family could be reimbursed with a facile rendering of heroics of their fallen in combat. The film fit the culture of other war propaganda movies being made to support the World War II and were better at celebrating generic heroics over depicting brutality and anguish. As a sales pitch to the American public to be exciting, war movies have not changed much since.

Spielberg did not settle for this nostalgia. To notch up dramatic implications, Saving Private Ryan was framed around Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1953). Like his better efforts, Kurosawa retooled a typical samurai story into the a moral challenge against the excess of violence and culture of sacrifice for honor. Seven elite samurai are hired to protect a small village and to accomplish what turns out to be a thankless feat, they give up almost all of their members in battle. In an epic 3 and half hour story, Kurosawa finds meaning and back story in all the characters to remove their guild of honor and create a personal history worth caring about. The tragedy is the blossom for life just wastes away on the vine of their profession. The film could be considered an anti-action exploitation but because Kurosawa was cutting edge in his editing to enliven the limited number of action sequences, the film was pegged with generic action acclaim. Since action films mean to compartmentalize story and character for effects, a 3 and half hour story isn’t welcoming. A full understanding discloses the deeper layers of the film.

In Saving Private Ryan, a small band of soldiers sacrifice all to bring back the Fighting Sullivans-esque soldier. Instead of any of them surviving, the soldier meant to be brought back to his family is the only one left standing. He wonders why they went to the costs they did. Still feeling his duty to serve, he even pleaded with the small unit to assist him with a dangerous assault oncoming by German soldiers. They reluctantly agree and die for their service in combat. The final shot of the saved soldier is him overlooking the body of the lead soldier in charge of his rescue. The image cuts to a later cemetery scene when he is elder age and now overlooking that soldier’s grave and still remembering what he did to save him way back when. Spielberg flanks the scene with patriotic imagery and music. The implied symbolism of unnecessary sacrifice is there, but a higher aesthetic plateau is made to dignify the duty in war and pains of fighting a greater evil.

Francois Truffaut once said there could not be an anti-war film because war invariably looks exciting on screen. The quote is true to a large extent, but Kurosawa had a story in Seven Samurai that was a full revolution around story archetypes of a war film and Kurosawa consistently favors showing more dour and dire moments of personal pain in contrast to moments of excitement. Since Kurosawa also wanted to re-work universal elements of story (in early days, he wanted his films to play for world audiences instead of just in Japan),  he wanted to play with genre boundaries to play against their expectations. On the other hand, Spielberg is fixated on bringing a new strand of hyper realism in his battle sequences. Instead of shy away from making war look exciting, Saving Private Ryan wants to go beyond our cognitive notion of exciting in war and make a war film that looks other worldly for how intense the battle sequences are. More negatives than positives are a result of this.

An idea of why Spielberg would fixate on war brutality is because every American film beforehand underscored the devastation of war. It was not technically manageable. Like making CGI plausible for first time, Spielberg had a degree of claim in saying the same for realism in war depiction. The most stunning sequence is the D-day invasion is at the outset of the film. If allowed to stand by itself, the fifteen minutes would make an amazing short film. The impeccable start is just a tone setter for the rest of the film. For a dramatic film, what is surprising is that Spielberg finds a plot structure that is eerily similar to action films. Mixing in standard story, Saving Private Ryan has an up tempo push of action sequences until a dramatic battle finale. Generally, films outside genre conventions find ways to make these things different flavors in their story, but Spielberg commits himself to pushing up the bar for honoring realism. It’s familiar to Mel Gibson’s belief in the importance of Christ’s passion by dedicating much of The Passion of the Christ (2004) to exploring the brutality of Christ’s bodily harm.

The perfection of a possible short film for Spielberg’s rendering of the D-day invasion is that the wavelength of the gravitas filmmaking is tolerable because the burst is short and succinct for a specific event. Dragged out, the effects oriented shooting of a number of theaters of war becomes a little redundant. A simple technical buzz kill came a few years after the film was released and every Jerry Bruckheimer produced movie started to copy the simple mechanics of the first person oriented vision of Saving Private Ryan’s action and mainstreamed it for every action film. Steven Spielberg even contributed some producer credits to help recall the feeling of whatever uniqueness his film had going for it. Now the social reality is that most people probably forget Spielberg’s original simple technical innovation since video games are also doing their share to expand on the technological feature.

Going back to the film, the feeling of boredom is only added because the story around all the wartime scenes mainly plays into every World War II cliche in American movies. Tom Hanks plays an everyman school teacher who isn’t a professional soldier but represents the idiom of the typical soldier. Then a number of other characters represent different backgrounds of life. It isn’t that their histories cannot be interesting, but mainly the film has little interest in them. They get enough characterization to be identifiable yet the film is still more interested in the generalized duty of war and memorial feeling for a bygone generation that did something great. Saving Private Ryan is not The Fighting Sullivans since it deals with a story outside the history of the family, but its story is no more generic in how it attributes any level of personal characterization. The modern re-telling effort has more to do with the style and permissiveness of content.

Spielberg does not always have this problem. If seen as fiction, the bulk of Schindler’s List is a welcome look into only the daily life of a holocaust camp and has enough patience to project the personal idiosyncrasies of two characters on opposite ends of a personal and political spectrum. The film devalues itself at the end with an unnecessary and unbelievable charitable message. Considering Spielberg was closely aligned with World War II memorial building in Washington D.C. around the time of making Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg seems to feel the need to over extend his memorial hand. Terrance Malick made his own sweeping film at the time with The Thin Red Line (1999). Like Spielberg’s film, the radar of the film is focused on the greater effort. To Malick’s small credit, he revolves the humanistic message around more ambiguous ideas of feeling lost in a war greater than the individual self. But Malick is always more of a structural filmmaker and his efforts rely less on moral content and more on prisms of how his style renders the feeling of different experience onto screen.

From The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) to Eastwood’s recent two tier effort in Flags of our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), if you want to border a World War II story around the strength of your content from within the style, you have to create a thorough story that evades generalization and can still be interesting after hundreds of films have been made on the subject. The reel weight of World War II on our collective senses is that people who have not experienced the effects of World War II during their lifetime can still smell every fiber of generalization and hammed message in Saving Private Ryan. Whatever inspiration Spielberg actually got from Seven Samurai was discarded after the simple plot carry over. Since his early detractors complained about his reluctance to embrace serious subjects, Spielberg has varied his output and added new levels of color to a now storied filmography, but Spielberg’s worst version of an adult sensibility is when he traffics cliche something meaningful.

(Click on picture for trailer)

The Documentarian’s Take

For a documentary filmmaker, the choices of subject objectification have more ethical weight. More than just a critical theory, the idea has been felt by filmmakers since the beginning of our version of documentary filmmaking. Before he fully got into making feature fictional films, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski spent a number of years making short documentaries. The developmental interest owed to his film school rearing and what was required, but Kieslowski also had a genuine interest in provoking and honest stories about everyday people. The objection came when Kieslowski got into the editing room and had to make choices about what would see the light of the film’s day and what would be disregarded. The notion of truth flooded his thinking and eventually he wondered if it was even possible. Even more, since Kieslowski was filming some grizzly stories, he wondered what foundational role he could even have for the situation. So, off to making feature films.

The moral situation of the documentary filmmaker continues to this day. During the previous decade, one of the more interesting documentaries was Capturing the Friedmans. The subject of a family under fire for alleged sexual child abuse is certainly a terrifying story, but the Friedmans removed one anchor of the potential filmmaker by recording all the interactions between each other themselves. The film is set during the trial stage and accounts for the toll it takes on the defendents and their family. Some reel extends before and after to clear up left out bits of crucial information, but the majority of the traumatic details were handed over by the characters. For the eventual director, Andrew Jarecki, the main ordeal was how to deal with a trial situation that was going to have continuous implications after the release date fact. How will two Friedman men accused be portrayed? Will it be reality compared the trial’s version of how the criminals acted? What consideration is giving them a starring film do for survivors of the tried crimes? The quality of the overall production and exclusivity of the filmmaking scenario helped make it a stand out for a spotlight diminished genre.

The follow up to Capturing the Friedmans isn’t a documentary, but it follows suit in some unique ways to what Jarecki previously faced by making a topical film with controversial viewpoints about a real life murder. All Good Things is a fictional re-telling of a real murder case. It begins in the 1970s began with the strange disappearance of a wealthy businessman’s wife and ends with his odd trial over 20 years later for the possible murder of a close friend. Beholden by the story and history of the case, Jarecki recounts the life of Robert Durst (played by Ryan Gosling) and how he believes he not only had a hand in his wife’s disappearance by making it a murder situation with an undiscovered body, but that Durst also was the unfortunate cause of a murder over 20 years later. That trial was real and Durst was acquitted of any wrongdoing. By Durst still being alive today, Jarecki was putting himself into a compromising situation by creating a new sordid history for an affluent citizen. If Capturing the Friedmans was rife for protests and possible lawsuits, All Good Things basically was going to be begging for legal repercussion.

The history of Robert Durst is rife for investigation and apparently Jarecki spent years doing research before he committed to filming the story. Instead of just a factoid account, All Good Things does make an attempt to transfer a documentary subject into a full fictional look. The bylines of documentary filmmaking make facts a paramount story driver, but fiction allows someone to find more emotional levels to base the story on. For the first half of the film, the main purpose is to develop an emotional strain in Robert Durst that can be considered a pre-cursor to a murderous identity. The nature of his character is surrounded by social anxieties, a rough history with his father, childhood traumas left blemished and unacknowledged, plus a push to work a career he never had much interest in. The tilt-a-whirl maneuvers Durst is forced to endure during the early parts of his adult life when he wants to lead an independent life with his new wife (played by Kirsten Dunst) but is thrust to abandon it and commit to work a business life before attaining personal security is a large emotional set up for some element of tragedy. Jarecki’s vision sees these ingredients as the paramount drama.

Structure-wise, the films plays out like an unraveling drama. An initial meeting by Durst and his future wife plays up his oddness and her characteristic for finding charm in what feels like genuine awkwardness. They bond in hopes for a small future and find enough conformity to make a marriage. As the plans fall asunder, she gets closer to his original social circles and discovers more of high uncharacteristic highlights having dangerous breeding. A Hitchcockian-level normalcy to his menace begins to filter through and erupt in manners indicate abuse, but also make grounds for more. Since Hitchcock was a fan of playing up torment in conformed social settings, the film continues to project Durst’s level of menace by allowing him to act out against his father (more non-substantiated allegations) and seeing his continued abuse against his wife in the vein of him representing the trust of his corporation. As she begins to lose remembrance for her husband and how they met on humble terms, so does the audience. It’s a transformation process.

When the third act happens and the film jumps twenty years where Durst is no longer living by identity instead dressing as a woman in anonymous terms in Texas and keeps in contact with no one from his past, it feels like our killer has made his full Norman Bates transformation to being his mother and is living under the disguise. It’s an odd departure (but true for reality) so the story is kept fresh, but the dilemma is still entrusted to the rest of the film. A woman from his past who helped Durst kill his wife starts to contact him again with new demands and ultimatums of what she will say if he doesn’t follow through. The blackmail sends Durst back into action and he gets a despondent neighbor to kill the woman and because they are strangers in a strange town, no one should suspect anything. Strangers On a Train analogy aside, Durst made promises to his neighbor as well and a heated argument ensues which leaves the neighbor dead. Instead of just hide the body and claim a second disappearance happened, Durst banks on accidental terms of death. The eventual trial agrees with his hope but the court’s version of reality has been spoon fed by Durst’s best interest to clear his name and every bad marker of his past.

In the 1990s, James Ellroy had a biting remark on the book tour market: he was intent on outliving Bill Clinton so he could write about him. Having dealt with a number of historical figures in his novels, Ellroy had to remind readers they were available for his possible denigration because they were dead. Clinton, on the other hand, was both public and alive and could file suit against Ellroy for a number of reasons if his fiction crossed with suspected real situations. When All Good Things premiered in late 2010, the normal procedure of lawsuits were filed by every expected party. They went nowhere for a number of reasons and since the film topped out as a critical darling for the year, there wasn’t too much public animosity. The interesting dynamic is that filmmakers invited Durst to a private screening of the film. He attended and said he disagreed with the obvious parts, but found elements of the film to like. He even marveled at the filmmaker’s ability to translate a lot of how his wife was really like. According to people around him, Durst was brought to tears over Dunst’s performance. This transaction and others were recorded in a number of publications like the New York Times.

Getting past Jarecki’s luck to avoid real legal penalty, the active and continuous discussion of his film about a real subject is marking a new era in documentary ethics. Michael Moore made the most famous documentary of the last decade in Fahrenheit 9/11 and he could not have made a more heavy handed film which promoted an ideological thinking over evenly distributed facts. Not only was the film slanted, but slanted in a stupid and insulting manner. Moore moved on to other documentary subjects after, but he continued to be active in arguing his points from the film in other areas of media well after its debut. All he was rewarded with is a number of accommodations for making a great documentary, including the Palme D’or at Cannes. Jarecki has had to remind interviewers in the press about his real interest in the history of the case and Robert Durst, but Jarecki knowingly invited a scandal by both making the film now and inviting the subject to view the film. If Jarecki wanted similar exclusivity to make a film about a trial during its process, none better than to film his own.

Errol Morris continues to be a stalwart in classic documentary ethics, but when Morris handles hotbed subjects, he tends to depict the side of the less popular opinion and just record their thoughts. He will give some counter balance in facts to show objective presence, but Morris’s interest is to take viewers to a different point of view. Whether it is a retired Secretary of Defense or Holocaust denier, Morris wants to make his films about the subjects first. Jarecki and Moore feel more active in recording the evolution of the discussion and trying to be thoughtful commentators. Considering news gets more ideological all the time and old standards are falling everywhere, I take less exception. And considering Jarecki is specifically labeling his film as fiction, he’s mainly inviting discussion or new legal movement. Oliver Stone got assassination documents about John F. Kennedy released after he made JFK. It was real progress. It wasn’t the end of the discussion, but the new documentary filmmaker seems to be about being pushers of their discussion points.

(Click on poster for trailer)

An Appreciation

When the Triplets of Belleville premiered in 2003, high appraisal of the film was easy. It was a debut animated film for French director, Sylvain Chomet, that was free wheeling in imagination and full of continuous amounts of twists. Instead of bowing to the interests of children, this new foreign film reminded people of earlier animated films that were more even keeled in honoring its subject matter. Before Hayao Miyazaki was just Miyazaki on covers of his films, Grave of the Fireflies was the most lauded Japanese animated export. Other countries were also in the act. Poland had experimental animation and Soviet cinema began it all with their experimental short animated movies in the 1920s. They are readily available on DVD now and many animators refer back to their simple interactions between characters and figures as a marker for inspiration. Out of the blue, french animators and filmmakers were able to plant a flag on what felt like a mostly barren animation landscape.

Save for a straight drama like Grave of the Fireflies, Triplets of Belleville had a hand in referencing every kind of mature animation interest. The emotional kinks in the story suggested off culture stories and the simple narrative involving many kinds of characters entangled in many simple problems of interaction suggested an idea of what early Soviet animation could have looked like if the shorts were bridged together to be one film. As far as execution goes, the film was flawless. The only loss is identity is because the story is so multiplied and preoccupied with showcasing talents over making a complete work, the film does not come forward with building an identity to what kind of story would interest Chomet. It felt like a reward film that a director makes when their talents are at a top tier and they are combining various artifacts from all of their works. Chomet may be a chameleon director and continuously change in radical ways with every film, but his new work, The Illusionist, has the full feel of an organic story bridged to meet the best abilities of animation. It’s simplicity is also what makes me more interested in Chomet than his excellent first film.

The pedigree change for Chomet is that the film is based off a Jacques Tati screenplay. For me, this is the first time a major animated film tried to sincerely adapt a script by an established filmmaker and make it be shaped to real form of animation and the previous filmmaker’s interest. For those who don’t know, Jacques Tati is a famous mime-actor-director of films from the 1950s and beyond. What he contributed to cinema was a return to silent era comedy. As his filmmaking developed, he became more of a structuralist and his famous Hulot character (his version of Chaplin’s tramp) started to go from being involved in simple misadventures to being representative of social criticisms. The main difference is that Tati firmly implanted himself in utilizing European structural methods to exhibit intentions. As a script, The Illusionist was never made into a film. Tati dedicated the script to his estranged eldest daughter and wrote it in between making Mon Oncle and Playtime. It’s impossible to know what changes Chomet made considering on paper, many of Tati’s later films would look standard. The result in the new animated film is that it looks like the filmmakers kept early Tati in higher regard while implanting their own sentimentality in as well.

The beginning of the film is simple enough: a story follows the everyday travel schedule of a touring magician. Like most magicians, he has to broker with a limited number of tricks so the act gets repetitious as does the sights of lowly venues and small crowds. As a figure, he’s very Hulot like. Keeps to himself and avoids serious entanglements with people in meaningful ways. He can talk and finesse small deals, but true to the form of a Tati work, the film is interested in keeping the story simple so whatever cannot be highlighted in basic actions and play like a silent film won’t actually work. The structure of the story helps to keep the character entrenched in situations that make him come off as provincial. The static character drawing of the typical silent film prototype begins to be dislodged when the magician comes into contact with a young girl. She starts out as an admirer when he plays at the hotel she works at. She begins to develop trust in the visiting magician when he extends kindness to her. She takes the affection to the next level when she admits herself as a stowaway in his travel. Still just kind and considerate, the magician takes her in and begins to pay for her lodging and clothing.

In a standard silent version, the relationship between the two would hit a few rough edges over trust issues (or something) but end up back to whole where both characters are united in a full father-daughter relationship. As far as sentimentality goes, Charlie Chaplin wrote the book about digging into the sympathy of an audience to feel the plight of characters but be rewarded by relief by the end when all ends well. However, as the background details say, Tati wrote this about his estranged daughter. I’m not a full biographer to know how their story ended, but when Tati wrote this script, it’s obvious the relationship was fractured. In the film, their relationship starts out well to do, but since he is not her parent, has no legal guardianship, and has to continuously be on the move to work, reality begins to impede on whatever their best hopes were. She begins to be a drainage on him financially and as she gets to know new areas, she wants to see and do more things. The breaking chord is when she starts to see a boy. By this time, the magician just wants to ignore her and move on with his life. Mutual disinterest is how their story ends.

If this is the only way the way the story ended, one may be able to wonder if the film went about the typical plot lines of a relationship comedy and just threw the third act for a loop. However, since the film is animation and has little interest to bylaw the story to every genre requirement, the texture of the story takes everything a bit deeper. The skeleton of the story is an invitation to a meditation on the growing pains of life. As the magician hustles from job to job, we get to know the fatigue of his life. As a struggling performer for a low wage income, the magician is supposed to delight in making other people happy, but not all shows are welcome or pleasant. Besides, the magician travels with an elder age. A typical comedic moment of being next in line to go on stage after a rock group but always being stopped by a never ending series of a impromptu encores by the group is funny considering the magician always tries to go on earnestly. It is also sad because by the time he can go on, he has given up on even trying to be ready. The enthusiasm of the rock band still giving themselves high fives and him walking with a slumped over disposition is the highlight discrepancy.

Considering the film also plays down that comedic joke and over emphasizes its dull sadness, the texture of the story is built around quiet moments like that. When Roger Ebert reviewed Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro and pinpointed a shot by Miyazaki of an empty bottle in a small river as an identification of Miyazaki’s patience and introspection for story, he was correct, but Miyazaki always will play up a plot by the end of the film. He will always have stories that juggle highs and lows in so his introspection isn’t territorial for just quiet moments. Extending out an entire animated film to just be about the quiet side of life and still be interesting is a little harder to do. Balancing a story off quieter small moments allows the film to have a sweeping sense of experience of two people quietly growing together but eventually just falling apart. Since every film has to have a protagonist or focus, the deicision The Illusionist makes is to build up an experience filled story. Schtick comedy hides behind the tumbleweeds of the heavy realism tonal structure.

The Illusionist isn’t like a normal Jacques Tati film. Tati was more of a structuralist and kept his Hulot character cornered in the comedy routine or the style choices outside the action of his character. The Illusionist bases a lot of the stylistic decisions on how it sees this version of Hulot. The characterization is more personal in that it takes the standard Hulot-like antics and juxtaposes it with an emotional center. The sighted interactions of a Hulot figure will always keep him from being a three dimensional character, but making the character more formed would also enhance the definition of the plot. Being specific about the actions of “why” and “how” would erase many of the bends of realism that is going in the story. like a poem, the film has a number of specific moments about things that do happen, but a lot of wonderment in between the lines that connect everything together. A review cannot sum up all of the better moments in The Illusionist. Lets bet thankful for our memories. The Illusionist should stand the test of time.

(Click on poster for trailer)

Peter Weir’s Return to Visual Footing

Before editing became identified as the unique feature in a multi-faceted art film like movies, viewers awed at the moving picture for being able to take them to places unknown and never felt before. In early 1900 press clippings, article after article commemorated the motion picture as the art which could take a well written description from a book of a place around the world and make it fully felt on an immediate and visceral level. When the moving picture normalized to becomes movies and films in our minds, the viewer naturally looked for more. Today it is hard to compliment any movie for just the images it records, but sometimes a filmmaker will take steps to make travelogue films that do harken back to a previous era. After a seven year hiatus, Peter Weir returns to remind us of some admirable bearings in filmmaking. His approach hasn’t really developed. He’s still his everyday self. Still, there is a lot of decent history behind what he does.

Peter Weir has name recognition as a director. What he doesn’t have is continuation between films that befits most auteur labels. His cinematography continually gets acclaim, but it is hospitable for most stories. If a high tier exists for Weir, it may be planted in the historical drama realm. From his early days with the Australian war epic Gallipoli to Master and Commander and then with social dramas like Picnic at Hanging Rock or Dead Poet’s Society, Weir’s graceful disposition at making his films look beautiful allow his ability to photograph the past more apparent. The realm of vision feels classical and mirrors other traditional filmmakers of the past, but since most younger filmmakers today do not even have the patience to challenge themselves to film these stories at his level of concentration or patience, Peter Weir making a film like The Way Back seems more than appropriate.

Initially set in Poland during World War II, the wife of a Polish POW is forced to turn her husband in to Soviet authorities. They have charges against him. Whether they are true or not is not clear or unnecessary, but his guilt gives him imprisonment in Siberia. While he is there, situation becomes understood very early on that life for Siberian prisoners does not last longer than 6 months. The extreme climate eventually kills off most prisoners. Road of that fate is documented by prisoners who do not attend to any orderly function and just hover in destitution. Our protagonist, played by Jim Sturgess, is scapegoated as idealistic for caring about other people. The story transitions out of the first act when a number of prisoners bandy about to consider the possibility of escape. Sturgess is honored leader since his idealism comes off as hope to others, but he is also joined by an American soldier played by Ed Harris and a Soviet convict played by Colin Farrell.

In travelogue films about unlikely company coming together for a journey, the stories tend to focus on the differences of the travelers. Weir takes time to consider some unlikely bonds and play up mistrusts angles between prisoners, but Weir is more about pacing himself through the environment of the climate. For that regard, Weir compliments the story by settling down ambitions and just making action and conservation between prisoners be about how they get from point A to B. A helpful historical fact (yes, this is based on a true story) is how the prisoners did not know where in Siberia they were so when they are projecting the best routes out, they are mainly relying on hearsay of what other prisoners said. A major early junction is whether or not a large lake exists. It’s considered the best passageway to China where political freedom exists. The flock of prisoners is already to a starving point so Sturgess sets sail alone to see if it exists.

At the outset of their journey, it becomes apparent that Weir is going to stay traditional with a lot of his filmmaking choices. If David Lean is accepted as the modern forefather for classical epic filmmaking, the establishment of stunning visuals goes along with a number of common set ups between interaction and travel. Instead of find a tone in the editing, Lean prefers to meander through his stories by playing into the generalities of whatever the scene requires. Since Lean established his filmmaking pedigree in the 1940s with traditionally beautiful adaptations of classic pieces of literature, Lean seemed to embrace cinemascope by taking a widescreen format and show how it was perfect for vista views of beautiful landscapes. Lean’s transition from smaller format stories to epics tried to maintain many avenues of an invisible style that predominated most filmmaker’s interests in the 30s and 40s. A film like Lawrence of Arabia goes down in history for its visuals, but because it took interest to film the Arab world and density of sunlight on its barren landscape with visual flair. In the film, the flair has little to do with editing or tone. Lean’s production behind him and choice of subject does a lot of work for itself.

The compensation of wonderful visuals usually points back to inadequacy of a standard epic film to make its length feel like it really honors the mileage of its story. Thanks to literature, film is always sighted for being short in scope potential. The more telling reason why some filmmakers still fall short with making epic films is because they do not give into a tone signature to draw out the length of their stories. When you try to make the style invisible and play it by the scene’s ear, there is no chance to lull the viewer into a mindset for dragging out the scenes. It isn’t just about slowing down the story either. In music, musicians start to repeat beats or melodies and the repetition puts the viewer into a wavelength in simpatico with the story’s expected length. Robert Bresson created the rules for structural length (or tone) in modern film by just making a simple prison escape feel epic in A Man Escaped. With nothing peripheral to the film beyond what I just said, Bresson instituted tone as the main proprietor of what can make an epic film feel like an epic. Considering Weir never had interest in any measure of tone before in filmmaking besides maybe Picnic At Hanging Rock, it isn’t surprising that The Way Back got some marked down consideration by critics and viewers for feeling a little too standard.

Does Weir find counterbalance to a general shortcoming? Yes. At the outset of the review, I said the film began by a woman being forced to incriminate her husband which sent him off to Siberia. The film has character drawings of every character during various interactions, but this is the only scene which precedes the prison landscape. Sturgess makes vague reference to her while away. She is mainly illustrated by his insistent desire “to get back.” Their relationship isn’t a real subplot, yet it is our memory of him before he’s imprisoned. As soon as he gets there, he separates himself from others by his idealism. There is no settling down to prison life so Sturgess is immediately earmarked as someone who could make a prison escape possible. When he comes through with unflinching determination and spirit, Sturgess’s character is carrying with him the same spirit he came into prison with. The audience is allowed to track the development of a refrain and see how it wavers between changes of situation and peril. Weir has no intuition for structural tone, but he does have an unflinching regard for Sturgess as a character and how he handles himself through every new tribulation.

Then if the overall history of the story is taken into light, semblance is granted with this film to Weir’s better efforts. Sturgess and company are searching to find a country for political asylum. Their travel eventually takes them to India. After getting there, the film jumps 40 plus years to when Poland is no longer part of the Soviet bloc. The final scene in the film is the simple scene of Sturgess’s character in elder age returning to his home to be with his wife. This dry sentimentalization is consistently found in other films by Peter Weir. He never makes overtly romantic films, but he does seek to take sight of reality that edges toward sentimentalization over brutality. Generally, filmmakers stress one doctrine over the other when making historical works. Master and Commander is about a brutal time in naval war-faring history and the overwhelming emotional strand is the bond between fellow sailors in turbulent times. Truth in art always is wavering. Weir generally sides the lighter side of history, but Weir never sours against an intelligent approach by doing so.

Peter Weir is never going to headline an front table discussion for major filmmakers. His existence in a high marker era for stylist filmmakers guarantees him second billing in many regards. He’s not my favorite filmmaker, but I’ve categorized his career to expectations and he’s managed to have a career in and out of Hollywood and there feels little lost from his Australian New Wave beginnings in the 1970s. With every new wave era, audiences want to keep tabs on filmmakers and see how much they steer downward later into their career. Since a new wave movement only lasts a few years, the newness is bound to dissipate immediately anyways. For good or bad, most filmmakers change. Peter Weir now has a number of films from different genres done in different eras of Hollywood and his interests feel relatively steady. When people look back at Howard Hawk’s career, they take consideration of someone who also maintained a steady ship through different eras of Hollywood and filmmaking. The Way Back may not be the greatest feather in Weir’s cap, but it does remind viewers of someone who exemplifies his own version of what it means to be a pillar for something in filmmaking.

(Click on picture above for trailer)

Continued Transparency in Science Fiction

The novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, is now a feature length film. If someone did not know anything though, by evidence of just the trailer, the story is a retreat back to the whereabouts of 1950s-looking English countryside. Set in the appearance of a boarding school, schoolchildren are raised from adolescence to adulthood and groomed for their expectations of life. The simple semblance of this notion recalls a million other stories of fostered life under the guidance of traditional school rearing. The distinct difference is that this version of the past has a scientific anomaly. Instead of typical subjects, the children are human clones and are being bred so they will produce healthy organs that can donated to human beings when the clones are properly aged. The boarding school environment is to better enclose their experience and tunnel vision life to suit its grim outlook.

The fantastic underline of this simple story set up would normally be easy reason to send the subsequent film into the atmosphere of not only higher scientific theory coding, but also special effects. When stories generally take interest in the area of any gray matter of what could be our future, they also heed use of a believable vision of a future world. Our collective imagination believes things will be different so the more the encompassing the change of the societal decor, the more serious the film is. A closely similar story in The Island from a few years back prove this design is considered natural and essential by filmmakers and writers alike. The director for Never Let Me Go, Mark Romanek, is given a happy chance to not see things that way by adapting a story that has the dominion of a science fiction subject but is firmly planted in a past environment. The film hosts a science fiction dilemma in a boarding school environment like it is a simple school policy that just exists and needs no introduction.

The story highlights three main portions of the children’s life from adolescence in the boarding school to youthful teen years away where they settle in apartments and await their call to become organ donors. From the outset of the story, established rule about how donation goes is unknown. In the early years, a new teacher protests the whole idea by trying to tell the young students what awaits them and how immoral it is. Her protest is noted as disruption to the norm by the children, but they don’t know the implication of what she means. Neither does the audience. As years pass and a romantic interlude develops between two students (respectively played by Keira Knightely and Andrew Garfield at older age) at the turmoil of a third (later played by Carey Mulligan), the hushed noise about their fate continues to bemoan the whole school environment. The tension is not akin to heightened theatrics in other science fiction tales. It sweeps into the atmosphere like other historical stories about boarding school life. Since the location is remote and repressed, the children exhibit their stunted output by mimicking the norms they grew up to display. It’s the tension to push free that is the real ongoing drama.

A cheap dramatic allusion is that the film is trying dramatize cloning by highlighting how boarding school life nulls all possible individuality. For surface conservation, it does flow into the story because an ongoing matter of discussion is the idea of real love between clones or painting ability being enough to convince their human superiors that they should be spared for organ donation. Instead of theorize heavily, Never Let Me Go is more concerned about staples of realism and specificity about the character’s experience. They are tied down to the fate they were dealt and oblige by pitting moments of despair and anxiety with searches for normalcy and love. The concept alone of the film is unnerving since it is easy to sympathize with clones if they are presented as humans, but the film goes even further by documenting every inch of their aspiration for normalcy in life by presenting it with close and unflinching candor.

The focal plot is about involves two school girls and their affection for a male classmate. The film follows the interests of one girl and her affection feels genuine from the outset. However, without understanding or cause, her good friend swoops in and physically romances the boy who was not in tune with the original girl’s emotional affection. Time passes and the spurned girl just has to live with the ongoing romance in full sight. Instead of find her own love, she becomes a bystander. While everyone else looks like they are doing their best to catch up with the pleasures of life while they still can, she stands back in silence. The distant look in her eye is enough to see how is starting to check out from hopes of finding the original normalcy of love she yearned for. So, in her early 20s, she signs up to help patients donate organs instead of donate herself right away. It will allow her to immediately be separated from her classmates, but she continues to be a bystander by witnessing the fate of organ donation. Surely, someday, she will have to do the same.

Plot wise, the travel past the initial donation stage allows her character to come around and revisit her two former classmates in very different states. Now broken up, both are donating and not doing so well. The female chum comes to terms with her past romance not being sincere and done out of spite to her classmate while the former classmate does return feelings. They make a last ditch effort to find some level of romance, but fate steps in. A few secondary plot conveniences make the third act in the film feel a little too tidy in understanding some important unspoken tensions in the film. It tries to explain a little too much of our protagonist’s quiet tension. An important development is that her coming around to meet her past allows her to develop some understanding of her past. Her narration (it is sporadic throughout the film) does not enlighten every situation in the story, but it allows the audience to discern why at the end of the film she prefers to donate and meet death instead of continue on. It is a better place to start for theoretical pondering.

The film started out with a lackluster boarding school analogy to cloning existence. By the end, the film allows its close parameters to the characters transform the subject matter. A science fiction subject is relayed through the full circumference of a human experience. While too much science fiction tries to relay the decoration elements of a futuristic world, Never Let Me Go is concerned with how science fiction can transform the human experience. The characters aren’t human, but it’s hard to not imagine their experience as our own. It’s also not hard to imagine ourselves in a similar prison going through the perils of an unimaginable fate. The story does have emotional history to draw on because it is not very different from someone who has to grow up terminally ill and meet their fate right before a social life can actually begin. On understated levels, Never Let Me Go takes a basic aspect of our reality and makes it clinically fruitful for a futuristic possibility. Instead of try to wrap its head around the legal rationalizations for the program exist in theory, the film is mainly concerned with how it would emotionally punish all involved.

There is cinematic precedence for this concept. When Andrei Tarkovsky made Solaris, it was a protest against what he saw in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. While many marveled at the visuals and a new level of space reality being projected onto their senses, Tarkovsky saw a removal of the human element in science fiction. Coincidentally, Solaris is about the condition of human cloning on the psyche of a human in mourning over a lost loved one. While cloning can provide a perfect template for human study, other science fiction stories can do so as well. Most avoid relationship with full human inspection because sociological decoration is considered mandatory for visions of a futuristic world. Paying huge concern over this can be problematic because if you take science fiction for what the fantastic visuals can offer, there is not much difference between it and fantasy as a genre. Tarkovsky and Romanek find a way to differentiate their generalities.

Within the details of the film, there is much to ponder by just the words of the characters. Their relationships breed specific enough situations which should entangle any discerning writer for at least the length of a healthy article. This one does not do that. Since science fiction has become spectacle work in today’s dry film landscape, I feel happy and relieved I can just introduce the elemental differences that Never Let Me Go gets to stand for by just existing. Hopefully the words within the text become the bigger focus in a future article to update this one, but until then…