Well, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett sell that story. After all, they're not only excellent actors, they're also uncommonly great to look at. Their scenes once they're out of all the computer-generated make-up are a welcome heart of the story -- their ages meet, but the visual path director David Fincher surrounds them with is all Orson Welles meets Mark Twain -- elegance with a riverlike pulse, the story almost a corrective to Welles' own tale of unrequited love over many decades of societal change, The Magnificent Ambersons.
I'm not sure the ultimate significance of the film, but it's just lined with diorama time pieces, moments that play off the gentle loneliness of the age-flipped protagonist and, without too much pain, lull you into reflecting on your own journey, what moments are more poignant for being lost, but mainly what happens when all that you are slips away, and how do you slip out of history.
The answer, of course, is when everyone who ever knew you, who knew you well, passes on as well. We seek mates in large part because we seek witnesses. If we choose it constancy it may be for that reason alone, a desire for the line, a metaphor spoken by Blanchett in the dance studio, the dancer's neverending quest to be the perfect line.
Death, however, breaks a line every time, and maybe the movie is germane to our moment because it is the scope of the 20st Century, from WWI getting us out of the 19th Century, through Hurricane Katrina turning the page on that failed ideology and burying the 20th Century in her wake.
Has it been nine years? Just a memory.
2 comments:
One of the things I don't get about this movie is how to relate it to our own. You end your blog with all these events and then ask if it is a memory.. it makes for a harder read on the movie itself... must be why it gets mixed reviews all the time: http://www.everhype.com/?utm_source=bc
I'm wondering if it's a movie that most viewers have to be over a certain age to appreciate, since it does traffic in loss. What I mean to say about "significance" is on one hand how the movie relates to that which we experience as precious has to be made peace with as impermanent, and on the other hand is about a century where we reached more completely for permanence than ever possible in world history (thanks to film), with Katrina as a great marker for the actual end of the 20th Century -- submerging a lot of collective illusions when it made landfall.
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