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trevor_nemeth
Reviews
The Road (2009)
There is Never Nothing to Live For
To be alive means something in The Road. It isn't so much the why or the how or the what for as it is just the unapologetic fact that you don't give up on life, even when it seems to have given up on you. It forces us to ask ourselves what we would do if everything were just stripped away from us? Different characters in the film answer that question in different ways. Perhaps you just give up. After all, the world you know has been altered beyond recognition, how are you to start over when survivalists lose all regard for the life of another? It is the impossible task of a father to decide if this is a future he wants to allow his son to grow up in.
The desolate landscape is the backdrop of the film, and it is symbolic of the seeming hopelessness of the world. The Road itself is something to be avoided because to my mind it represents the linear progression of the old world, the world destroyed. This path is no longer an option and spells doom for any who choose it, any who can't see their way to the current reality and let go of the past. The pacific coast is hope. It is a goal. It provides meaning and direction in a world characterized by chaos and madness. In an America unrecognizable, a Man and a Boy embark on a journey no one else sees as worth taking.
So beautifully acted is the film that it is easy to take for granted the performances. There isn't a moment of artifice in the two leads' portrayals. Their chemistry is quiet and powerful, and it becomes difficult to watch the film towards the end in large part because we are forced to imagine a life for one without the other. It is an unbearably sad truth of the world that is heightened by the tragic nature of its post-apocalyptic condition.
If the mother's final gift to her family before she abandoned them was the coldness of her departure, then the end of the movie undermines her by showing the actions of a true parent. The man dies by the side of his son and refuses to take the boy with him because that's what the movie is about, living life until your last breath and not a moment less. That is the wisdom he imparts before his passing, that you can choose life when it forsakes you, and that love extends beyond the grave to provide meaning and strength to loved ones. The boy will always carry the fire, because the fire is his love for his father, and it burns on even once the Man's physical presence is wiped from the landscape.
Trevor Nemeth
P.S. To those who have read the book. This is a movie well worth seeing as it succeeds on its own merits and captures the essence of the narrative. I feared it would be over wrought, but Hillcoat did a great job.
The Box (2009)
Why Wouldn't You Push the Button?
Forget about Donnie Darko. I open with this because it seems that a good portion of the reviews I have read on The Box amount to the simple but weak argument that it doesn't hold a candle to Darko. It isn't that I disagree with that necessarily, I just feel that this movie is a different animal altogether and deserves its own analysis. There are points of comparison to be sure, but they are peripheral concerns when you consider that the key to the heart of each movie is different. In Darko, the driving force of the narrative is existential. In The Box, the driving force of the narrative stems from a moral dilemma. Believe me when I say that I understand the inclination to compare an innovative filmmakers'movies by looking for trends and patterns, but for me it is more important to approach each new film as a self contained entity first, and then broaden my gaze afterwards.
The Box is one of those films you get mixed feelings about because it seems to be in some sort of identity crisis. It isn't always sure what it wants to be. The twists are numerous, but easy to follow if not to predict. James Marsden and Cameron Diaz play a relatively believable pair of newlyweds who are in financial straits. A Box containing a "button unit" arrives on their doorstep and they are informed by a horribly burned man that if pushed the button will cause the death of one person whom they don't know, and they will receive one million dollars. One of the things The Box achieves is to conjure up this invisible fear that somewhere out there our actions have moral consequences. Before the button is pushed it has an eerie and seductive quality, alluring yet sinister. Once it has been pushed, events are set in motion that make the two leads question their own morality and deeply regret their fateful decision.
The notion that the Box is an experiment is interesting because for me it provides the movie with a paradox. If there are external beings developing an "altruism coefficient" based on data gathered by couples pushing and not pushing the button, then as the conspiracy unravels, we notice that ultimately it is a forced altruism: Be selfless or the species will be wiped out. I suppose the couples don't know the consequences of their actions when they are faced with making the decision, but they have no reason to suspect that The Box can do anything, so why would they choose altruistically? Is altruism devalued by the fact that we only care about it when presented with a problem in our own lives?
The psychological hurdles in this movie are everywhere. Push the button or don't, it's likely someone is messing with you. Take the money or don't, no one gives anything away for free. Search for the truth, the answers you find slowly reveal your demise.
I propose that The Box is an ironic work because it offers the false choice of free will while revealing that we are trapped in many metaphorical boxes. You can only choose to be free at the expense of another's life, is that freedom? No, it is only another box because then you become trapped in the consequences of your own morality. There is no escape for us because we live on earth and that is another Box. This is precisely why the external beings in the film are ultimately antagonists. They demand we conform to moral standards which rob us of our freedom. We made it to Mars, and we were burned for it and turned into slaves in a sick game.
The references to Jean Paul Sartre illustrate this point rather well. "You can only enter the final chamber free, or not free." Sure, but no matter the form in which we enter the chamber, it is a chamber nonetheless.
Trevor Nemeth
Seven Pounds (2008)
A Convincing Tale of Redemption and the Love that Drives it
This movie was mesmerizing. I have to say that it was one of the most powerful films I have ever seen, not because it has a particularly unique message, but because it is so heartfelt and genuine. The acting was to say the least superb, Rosario Dawson and Will Smith are so believably damaged. Their chemistry might at first seem forced but I believe that is only because they hold each other at a distance because of her condition and his past. The conclusion of the film makes all of that earlier distancing all the more eerie and impactful.
One of the very genuine aspects of this movie is that it isn't a conventionally told redemption story. Smith's path to redemption is a commitment he made to himself to make up for the harm he caused, and what he lost, and he doesn't deviate from what he knows to be the end for himself. One of my friends said to me that there was no character development and that even though he felt the impact of the movie he didn't really see any reason to care about the character Ben Thomas. I thought about this for awhile and realized that there are two types of character development as I see it, and that we are rarely lucky enough as viewers to watch the impact of one of those forms on screen:
In most films characters evolve as certain things change their life and force them to change the way they think about the world around them, and sometimes this type of development leads to some sort of epiphany or realization on the part of a secondary character that a change has occurred within the main character. In Seven Pounds we are blessed with the gift of seeing a character fully developed and on a mission, and only waver for an instant as his path for redemption brings him to another place he might finally be able to take solace, in a new found love. I truly believe that the most powerful way you can develop a character is to show the audience instead of telling them what he/she stands for in their actions. The brief hesitation Ben Thomas experiences with Emily Posa when they spend the night together makes this story all the more powerful because the audience is heartbroken by the realization that this broken man truly deserves another chance at a normal life, and that this woman is his only chance at that. It is ultimately this fact that makes the conclusion almost unbearably sad as Ben opts to take his original path and sacrifice himself for Emily. He dies so that she might live, just as his wife died so that he might. The circular motion of events and the limited time frame in which Ben has to accomplish what he needs to forced me to consider whether or not he ever had a chance to be with Emily at all, or if he was just living on borrowed time.
Twilight (2008)
Twilight is a roof in need of thatching, but the cast manages to keep dry.
Twilight was one of those rare movies I went into with no preconceived notions and only what the trailer offered for background information. Maybe that fact made it a more accessible movie for me than others. As I watch any movie I always try to bear in mind the questions (especially if it is a film adaptation of a book): Who is this movie speaking to and who is it being made for? Like many good movies with rabid devotees Twilight was targeting a certain demographic...for the most part young adult females and teenage females. After I had processed this I started to look for things that the movie brought to this target audience that they were not expecting and benefited from. For the most part, Twilight seemed to deliver on all the main issues dealt with in the book, with the obvious emphasis on the forbidden love aspect to the relationship between Edward and Bella. What I felt made the movie a convincing love story was that the main actors (Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) managed to nuance their characters and move them away from lustful teenagers in a strange relationship into people exploring something forbidden with an obsessive desire. Kristen Stewart makes a hard to believe character believable in Bella, and Robert Pattinson adds a humanity to the character Edward that makes him relatable rather than the static one dimensional vampire he could have been. The one issue I had with the movie that I ultimately forgave was the pacing. It wasn't hard to believe that Edward and Bella were in love, it was just that the pacing of the movie was such that the audience never could fully understand how far along their relationship was. The most obvious example of this for me was towards the end in the hospital when we are to believe (for all of 8 seconds) that Bella will move to Jacksonville. I was under the impression at that point that there would be some touching interaction between Edward and Bella that would reveal what happened did not change her feelings for Edward, but what followed was an over too quickly dialog about how Edward shouldn't suggest things like that. At that point I decided that the pacing of the movie had obscured my sense of how far along I was supposed to believe their relationship was. When a movie is relatively low budget like Twilight (compared with other big screen adaptations of books) there is more pressure on the actors to deliver convincing performances, and any of this films faults were not as a result of poor acting, but rather a too brisk pacing leading the audience to sometimes fill in the blanks and suspend disbelief even more.