Posts filed under ‘movie review’
Movie Reviews: Sherlock Holmes v. Avatar
January 9, 2010
in re: Sherlock Holmes v. Avatar
I preferred Sherlock Holmes. Both these movies are tremendous, painstaking works, but Holmes is easier to take in that it’s far more lighthearted and cheerful as against the grim, irritable humorlessness and embarrassing preachiness of Avatar. Additionally, Holmes is activated by a more traditional moral compass (more reassuring to me in this) as against the radically PC and gullible moral compass of Avatar. Both these movies degenerate into a pretty gratuitous fight at the end, with good (according to the respective scripts) pitted against evil.
In Holmes, civilization, settled history, and tradition are the bases of decency, and the villain Blackwood is brought to grief eventually for his transgressions after an extended battle royal. But in Avatar, on the other hand, civilization and its drill sergeant, American capitalism, are the enemies of decency. This is the chief difference between the two, and after the dust settles, thus I cannot prefer Avatar.
Now, it was a great idea to jazz things up a bit in Holmes from the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, in much the same way Star Trek was jazzed up in 2009. It was fully justified to rock the boat in both these movies. Good idea. And in general, this boat-rocking does not get out of control in Holmes, to its credit. The familiar theme of one man determined at all personal cost to go up against evil on behalf of good is intact. That’s the whole point, for me, of mystery stories: that someone would do something noble, unasked. This cinematic Holmes is true to the spirit of the original stories, and is very well-read in the stories. It’s a fantastic movie.
But I have one small criticism of this movie, though. There is an entirely unnecessary scene in which Holmes and Watson are bickering about “our dog, our rooms,” etc. I didn’t mind the bickering, but merely that Watson was made effeminate. He plays the wife to Holmes’ husband. But Dr. Watson of the original stories is in no way effeminate — he is, rather, the precise opposite. Fortunately, this unfortunate scene is mercifully short. The end of the movie leaves things open for a sequel, which I would await enthusiastically. Keep all the good (talking to Guy Ritchie now, our director) and just jettison that one stupid, disrespectful mistake.
Avatar is a mixed package. It’s the problem child. On the one hand, there is an extremely moving love story as a subtext to the main plot, and I admit freely I got choked-up all through the movie, so evocative it was at times. This is really a tear-jerker, no kidding. Also, there is an exhortation running throughout this work to “become who you are,” and this exhortation emerges as the main strain or theme of the film. This exhortation, too, is extremely moving and inspiring. You have to be a block of wood not to be affected by it.
The problem here, though, is that you have to take sides against civilization in order to find that true self of yours. Writer, director, producer James Cameron gives us a completely over-the-top caricature of American capitalism and its depredations so as to justify his surprisingly radical agenda of absolutely shredding anything that isn’t completely of nature. The result is that the protagonist, Jake Sully, a former marine now working for the Company, starts shooting and killing his former coworkers in the last half-hour of mayhem the movie descends into. The momentum of all that went before sort of dictates this. But I felt considerably disconcerted that the script here equates becoming who you really are, that is, finding your true self, with a rabid, blood-thirsty, anti-Americanism. Isn’t there any other way to nail it? I think Cameron is taking the hyperbolic rhetoric of the environmental movement a tad too seriously.
Another concern I have with Avatar is the encouragement it provides to develop a victim-based identity. The movie is relentlessly telling you that you are a victim, your true self has been stolen from you through brain-washing and profit-motive, and that you must get it back through the exhilarating, stirring acts of courage that are your natural lot in life. This movie clearly seeks to persuade the heart rather than to convince the mind. And fair enough, nothing wrong with that a priori. But the disingenuousness, the appeal to gullibility, is definitely culpable. At times this film appeals to the base instincts of revenge and petulance.
Avatar reminds one, naturally enough, of Dances With Wolves, given the get-back-to-nature motif. But Avatar is far more virulent in its irritability and irascibility. The occasional humor, the life-loving heart in spite of it all of Dances, is completely gone by the time we get to Avatar. Also, that scene in Dances With Wolves towards the end, where Kevin Costner is slowly riding away with his wife up the mountain trail, a man who is a double exile now from nation and tribe, is unbelievably moving, and Avatar does not ever rise that high. In that scene, the Indian brave, who previously had given Costner’s character a lot of trouble, is now yelling up at him as he goes: “Dances With Wolves! Do you know that you are my friend? Do you know that we are brothers? Do you know…..” I couldn’t hold back the waterworks watching that scene if I tried. As a get-back-to-homeboy movie, Avatar is not the equal of Dances With Wolves.
Ironic, too, that this movie, Avatar, which harnesses the most spectacular technology in movie history, actually has the nerve to advance an anti-technology message. Huh? We’re all grown-ups now, though. We all know that there are many movies with an anti-American bias. This one is just one more, and I can easily live with it. I’ll pull through. But, in the end, to be sure, Avatar certainly captures the imagination, certainly stirs the blood and the circulation, certainly causes the yearning heart to soar, and surely dreams a beautiful dream of a perfect world. I’ll just remember those parts and simply forget the remaining nihilism.
Movie Review: Hollywoodland
November 7, 2009
I really love this movie. It’s a period piece (which I love to begin with) set in 1959, and revolves around the death of the actor who played Superman on TV, George Reeves. This work gives us an ultimately sad portrait of the Hollywood lifestyle, in spite of the unholy fun, and even asks us solemnly, and convincingly, to grow-up by the end. All the performances are great, the sets are perfect, and the script is a labor of love, so detailed, so rich in inspiration, so nicely paced, so intertwined in its plot like a Jane Austen novel, it can only be marveled at.
Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), a private investigator, is hired to look into the death of George Reeves. But while the official story called it a suicide, certain irregularities have been unearthed by Simo and lead him to the conclusion it was actually murder. He encounters considerable resistance for this conclusion along the way from the LAPD and the studio executives. It’s tough going: he gets beaten up a couple of times, his girlfriend cuckolds him, his ex-wife shuns him, his young son of about five withdraws further and further from him, and a separate client in a separate case murders his own wife, leaving Simo shattered emotionally. It’s a constant struggle for Mr. Louis Simo against the world.
Brody plays Simo as an in-your-face tough guy, a gum-chewing, gum-spitting-out, cigarettes-addicted, wife-cheating, seedy, 24-hour-stubbled sharp-dressing rogue with a heart of gold. Brody pulls it off perfectly, and captures the imagination. Ben Affleck, too, is great in his portrayal of George Reeves. Affleck gives us a very moving, evocative, poignant, and even elegant picture of an actor who never made the really big-time and who despises himself for it. Affleck’s portrait is plausible and well-done.
Diane Lane plays the September half in her May-September romance with Reeves. She provides a perfect illustration of the insecurity and pain of loving someone completely who unfortunately doesn’t feel quite as passionate in return. Lane gets the jealousy and the anguish of romantic abandonment just right. For example, in one scene, she’s arguing about career stuff with Reeves, and she tells him basically that he’s out of shape. She then taps him under the chin to demonstrate his growing portliness, and she does it a little harder than necessary to make the proximate point. If Reeves so much as talks casually to another woman, Lane writes that pain on the face of her character.
The movie ultimately belongs to Simo/Brody, however. His investigation leads him further and further into a cascade of revelations that disillusion and embitter him. Even the very purpose of the investigation loses its meaning: his original client in the case has made an utter fool of him. In addition, he suffers several emotional upheavals in his personal life during the case. Every so often, Simo runs through in his mind another of the various possibilities as to the manner of Reeves’ death. By the end, however, he seems to consider that suicide, in spite of the murderous depravity of the Hollywood world he finds himself in, is actually just as plausible an explanation as the several murder scenarios. He realizes he’ll never prove the corrupt studio-head (played perfectly by Bob Hoskins), has murdered Reeves in some kind of bizarre revenge for Reeves’ having left Diane Lane.
Simo has become a more sober and better man by the end. He overcomes self-absortion and its convincing lures, and gets in touch with the reality of how deeply he’s been hurting people he cares about by his manner of living and attitude. He realizes, in spite of his ability to charm women, that he has not even begun to live up to the responsibilities of manhood. He realizes that he is a part of the very decadence that he’s investigating! His reward is that he finally regains innocence through these insights into himself and the world.
In this regard, then, this movie is a bit like The Hustler, wherein Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) finds grim redemption in solitary, unbearable suffering and moral reformation after the grisly suicide of his girlfriend. For this commitment to growth, both these movies are valuable and irreplaceable. Hollywoodland, however, is ultimately not as tragic as The Hustler, since the protagonist hears the voice of doom in time.
No Country for Old Men (movie review)
July 18, 2009
The Coen Brothers specialize in being confusing and exciting. This movie is no different — in fact, it’s tailor-made for the purpose. Thus, in one sense this movie is a sincere lament on the tragic self-destruction of human moral choice, but in another, competing sense, it’s an empty academic rumination on the role of chance in our lives. This tension in the movie between moral choice and chance is resolved in favor of chance, to the detriment of the film. On the other hand, it’s a thriller of great achievement at times, but with an unsatisfying ending even there.
Echoes of Ancient Greece reverberate throughout this movie, but unfortunately, those echoes don’t ring true: it’s a case of misinterpretation. That is, in the old Oedipus plays of Aeschylus, our royal protagonist is prophesied by the oracle at Delphi to kill his father and marry his mother. In response, Oedipus flees, so as to make it flat-out impossible for the prophesy to come true: just don’t show up, and then it can’t happen. But it does happen anyway, he does fulfill the two prophesies, doing both unwittingly by wild chance.
But the point in these Oedipus plays is not that mere blind chance wholly rules our lives, that chance is a dragnet one can’t escape. The point is rather that the logos, the rationality of the moral system underlying the chance occurrences, is the really decisive part. Since Oedipus has answered the riddle of the Sphinx correctly, something no one else had ever done, Oedipus has thereby put himself outside human society and outside human morality, and he is manifestly a prodigious moral freak beyond nature.
The ineluctable logic of moral consequences, then, will bring it about that Oedipus will live a truly monstrous life, as Nietzsche pointed out, since he is a man without compass psychologically. He can see what’s behind the veil of nature’s secrets, he can see behind the riddle of nature’s mystery, and therefore he is beyond the pale, not one of us. So it is not precisely chance that makes him do monstrous things so much as the grinding wheel of punitive comeuppance, the Furies, that is. (Don’t mess with them!)
To return to our movie, it is, in short, a misinterpretation of all the Greek stuff, to the point of farce. The Oedipus-like character here, Anton Chigurh, compared to Oedipus, is about what a candle is to the sun: not much. The Coen Bros. are experts in this type of brilliant vapidity. Their movies are very entertaining, to be sure, lavish, sumptuous, a feast for the eyes and ears and sensibility, but ultimately they’re empty due to their failure to stand for something besides barren, wandering intellectuality.
Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, the old sheriff who is worn down and eventually broken by a world increasingly violent and out of control. It could be said his character is a good candidate for the central consciousness of the movie, since the plot spins out his inability to live up to his opening voice-over, wherein he pledges to keep on fighting the good fight. But the sheriff’s defeat in the plot represents the defeat of moral choice’s efficacy, and the defeat of responsibility and accountability. He must lose so the movie can have some fun with juvenile profundity.
Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a welder, out hunting pronghorn in the middle of the day for some reason, when he happens upon the very bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. He finds dead bodies galore, and, wouldn’t you know it, two million bucks in a big black satchel. (We learn a new vocabulary word, too, the word “transponder,” which device tracks the whereabouts of the satchel.) Fatefully, Moss decides on the spot to take the money, and by so doing he puts himself outside of conventional ethics.
His grisly outcome is to be eventually killed by the dealers who want the money back. (He had no idea what he was up against.) It is blind chance, of course, that gives him this opportunity, as has happened in so many previous movies (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Simple Plan), but it is still straight forward moral consequences that deliver him to perdition. So the treatment of his character by the plot is one of the bright spots of the movie, since chance is here relegated to its true place as a triggering cause only, not promoted foolishly to an underlying cause. That latter type of cause in this case is provided by Moss’ choice to take the money.
Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, the most bizarre creation in the plot by far. He carries the chic haute couture of the movie on his shoulders, he’s got the cachet. He is vaguely Asian, or Native American, or Eastern, or…..something — something vaguely out-of-this-world, in sum, not Westernized. This L’Etranger aspect of Chigurh gives him a sense of moral authority (according to the movie-makers, that is), but it fails miserably in the artistic long run. It degenerates into the usual and tiresome Coen weirdness-gratia-weirdness. Chigurh’s dialogue is peevish, irritable, confusing, purposely self-contradictory, and full of half-baked Sartrean existentialisms to snare the unsuspecting. He does everything but wink at the camera. It is definitely funny at times, the Coen Bros. know a good joke when they see it, but the pretentiousness of having a retarded psychopath claiming to know something profound is ludicrous and cliché. Chigurh delights childishly in intimidating the down-to-earth Red State types with his Socratic banter.
The movie opens with a beautiful, evocative montage of desolate, pure, lonely, deserted countryside, accompanied by a magnificently gravelly voice-over by Tommy Lee Jones talking about the good old days. But he is confused about these bad new days, and the growing level of violence, and he vows naively to continue to do his job in this brave new world of mayhem, that “he’ll be a part of this world.” In fact, though, the plot will spin out his inability to live up to those words: the forces of disorder win in this script, and Ed Tom Bell, the symbol of order, loses. There’s very little music in this movie, but there’s plenty of moody sound effects: lonesome wind rustling through the sage, ominous, crunching footsteps, lightning, and cars whizzing by past the various roadside motels, like so many harbingers of something or other. There’s also a lot of silence, evoking yet more moods. The narrative gets under way and switches cleverly back and forth between Bell, Moss, and Chigurh.
Moss finds the money and puts it away at home, and then implausibly goes back to the scene of the drug war to give water to one of the drug-deal guys who had been asking for agua. The guy is gone when Moss gets back. (No kidding?!
Didn’t see that one coming!) Is this Moss’ attempt to remain within conventional ethics? It certainly bespeaks a contradiction within him, and an innocence in believing he could survive the excursion. There are many implausibilities like this in the plot: another is when Moss forgets that his mother is dead, and has to be reminded by his wife. He comically stops to think about it, as if he’s realizing, “Oh, yeah…..that’s right!
You know, you’re right!” There are too many pointless things like this in the movie, apparently designed to give it a little psychological texture.
But most of the crazy stuff is for Bardem/Chigurh, though. At first, he’s being arrested; somehow a cop has got the better of him. (That’s implausible right there, given the preternatural powers the movie ascribes to him.) In the station a little later, the cop foolishly turns his back on him to make a phone call, and just as the cop is saying, “I’ve got it under control,” Chigurh walks over and strangles the cop with the handcuffs manacling Chigurh’s hands. The motif that everything is now out of control in our civilization, despite our best efforts, is thus introduced. We are put on notice that the forces of disorder are stronger than the forces of order. The camera slowly pans over the murder scene, revealing to us a million or so black scuff marks on the floor from the shoes of the sheriff as he desperately struggled against his assailant. This is a portrait and image (like a Jackson Pollack painting) of the violent randomness that emerges victorious in this movie — the Coens are giving us an emblem of the Dionysian limitlessness that joins battle with, and defeats, order and measure.
Later, on the trail of Moss and the money, Chigurh pulls out a quarter at a gas station, and demands of the station owner that he call it. The man delays. This eventually prompts an irritable, and pointless, “You’re a bit deaf, aren’t you?!” from Chigurh. The man, being normal, is confused by the unprovoked aggression, and by the opaque, shell-game style of conversation Chigurh engages in. The man finally calls the coin-toss out of fear of the consequences if he refuses, and he fortunately gets it right, thus saving his own life.
Chigurh then says to him, “Don’t put that back in your pocket — it’s your lucky quarter. It’ll get mixed in with the other coins, and then it’ll just be another coin…..which it is…..” This confusing, back and forth philosophizing demonstrates the tension in the plot between chance and necessity. The quarter should be saved, since it saved the man’s life, and is thus a non-contingent, necessary thing. But, on the other hand, it’s still just a random quarter, a contingent, non-necessary thing. The whole scene is too cute by half, though, and is characteristic of the whole movie — having fun being sadistic, juvenile, and intellectually superior towards decent, non-insane, country folks. Moreover, there’s a curious elegance to Bardem’s portrayal of this remorseless murder, an elegance which can only be made up, not taken from real experience, and which can only be explained by the script’s conscious desire to make an innately antipathetic character look sympathetic and chic.
There’s lots of strange interludes in the movie, too. For example, Chigurh at one point is driving alone across a bridge out in the bright emptiness of nowhere, whereupon he slows down to shoot at a crow he sees sitting on the railing, but misses somehow, and then continues his driving back at regular speed. Oh…..I get it…..this is heavy stuff…..back at the gas station, while he’s torturing the owner with fear, he munches on some snack, like peanuts or something, and puts the squished cellophane wrapper back down on the counter — then the camera, in all seriousness, focuses solemnly and luxuriously on this stupid, irrelevant candy wrapper re-opening and uncoiling. This was a close-up. What are we supposed to do with that? Do these film artists just put a bunch of stuff like that into the movie because they feel like doing so, and then we have to figure it out for them? There’s a lot more of that type of stuff, not worth going over.
Woody Harrelson arrives in the plot, tracking the money, but the hunter becomes the hunted. At first, Woody finds the money in a not-believable way, yet another major implausibility in the sometimes sloppy script. Somehow Woody has tracked Moss to a hospital where Moss is recovering. Then Woody is outside after the interview with Moss, walking over a bridge and looking around at random, and just happens to look down at the right moment to see the satchel far below on the ground where Moss threw it earlier for safekeeping. (That’s how it works when you’re a pro, kid.)
But Chigurh is also in town, and he knows Woody from before. By ESP, evidently, he knows where Woody’s hotel is, and gets the drop on him in the lobby, and they adjourn to Woody’s room. He’s going to kill Woody, but he has to torture him first with philosophy: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” (…..indeed.) Chance rules all, you see. No sense in trying. This is an example of the sophomoric nature of this psychopath the movie seems to think is a cool guy. Woody suggests a deal whereby they go to an ATM (in 1980?), take out $14,000, and “we all just walk away.” (Can you take out $14,000 from an ATM in one visit? I don’t know about y’all, but my bank limits me to $20 a day.) Chigurh looks off into the distance beatifically, and says, like a half-wit, “A-T-M.” Then he kills his friend Woody.
Towards the end of the movie, Moss is dead, too, at the hands of the original drug dealers, and Chigurh has gone to see Moss’ wife, because he made a promise to Moss. He tries to make Carla Jean feel as though Moss wanted Chigurh to kill her, but she doesn’t fall for it. In fact, Chigurh has a lot of trouble throughout the movie getting people to fall for his philosophizing. He pulls out a quarter again and demands that she call it, which she refuses to do. She says, “You don’t have to do this,” quite intelligently introducing the concept of moral choice into his empty life. He responds with his usual self-deceit by scoffing and saying, “People always say the same thing. They say ‘you don’t have to do this.’ But I got here the same way the quarter did.” He means to say that his being a murderer is just a chance occurrence, like a coin-flip, or just like the quarter being in exactly that spot, instead of somewhere else. The script seems to take this seriously. But then Carla Jean says, “It’s just you, the quarter ain’t got no say.” That’s the most intelligent line in the script, but he kills her anyway.
Chigurh gets admonished finally, and by his own principle of chance. He’s driving away after killing Carla Jean, driving very safely, in fact, when he gets hit by a reckless driver. He makes a sling for his broken arm from a kid’s shirt and walks off, remorseless as always. He has suffered a minor injury compared to the fatal ones he inflicts. Why is he made so fashionable? The penultimate scene in the movie is the worst. Bell the sheriff goes to see his lawman mentor, who tells him about the old days, as if Bell is some kind of rookie cop when he’s actually a crusty old veteran. The mentor does a lot of looking off into the meaningful distance as he speaks, a lot of pauses for silence to catch up, a lot of baritone voice, a lot of respectful deference. It’s a masterpiece of crap, totally unspontaneous and phony.
The last scene has Bell in retirement, at the breakfast table with his cheerful wife, who knows nothing about what goes on in the world. The contrast is extreme. He tells her about his dreams. They had his father protecting him. Then we hear the inexorable sound of a ticking clock, so profoundly, as the screen goes black. Now, this movie is very entertaining most of the time, to be sure, but it needs to stand for something clearly. The purposely confusing nature of the moral sensibility of this work is a major flaw.
Movie Review: “Groundhog Day”
June 30, 2009
This movie is very high both in quality and in purpose. It has a sweet, but exacting plot: it gets its pound of flesh in the end. It deserves a detailed treatment. Bill Murray plays a sarcastic, resentment-addicted T.V. weatherman who must cover the tiresome (for him) Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, PA. Initially, his character is overwhelmed with contempt for everything human – no mortal foible goes unnoticed, no peccadillo is forgiven. Cynical disdain governs his attitude.
Once he gets to Punxsutawney, it’s established that he can’t escape. Groundhog Day repeats endlessly. The same things happen, the same words are spoken. He lives the same day over and over. Only he knows it’s happening, only he remembers the previous cycles. He has been chosen by fate for this trial because of his repeated encroachment upon decency, and Groundhog Day becomes the venue of the courtroom since he has become a groundhog himself in his blind tunnel-vision and cave-like life of chewing on others. (His name is Phil, just as the official groundhog.)
Interestingly, in ancient Greek myths, an abiding theme of many stories was the purification the soul undergoes in the travails of psychological suffering. The main moral text of this movie is precisely this unfolding of Phil the Weatherman’s suffering, and his various reactions to it. He can’t be allowed to leave the nightmare until he has earned it and gone beyond.
Back on the first day in Punxsutawney, as the crew of three (Phil, Andie MacDowell the producer, and the cameraman) had finished its work, and was starting out to return to Pittsburgh, a blizzard starts. Phil gets out of the van to talk to a state trooper. “What’s going on?” Phil asks. The trooper responds with the utmost in stern replies: “Nothing’s going on! I’m closing this road! You can go back to Punxsutawney or stay here! What’s it gonna be?” Phil has been found guilty – caught in his getaway. You will not be allowed to diss Punxsutawney and then just take off. Thus starts the Eternal Recurrence of the Same for poor Phil the Weatherman.
The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche developed a concept he called “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same.” Put briefly, it was a gloomy test: could you live your life over again, the same details, infinitely many times? Of course you couldn’t, I’ll help you out here. That’s why it’s the supposed supreme test for Nietzsche of life-affirmation. The only way to approach the task would be to free yourself completely of all and sundry resentments, and thus you will have maxed your will-to-power, baby. Nietzsche saw the human race as shooting itself in the foot with its pettiness.
Now, Phil the Weatherman has been put in exactly this test of overcoming resentment, disdain, and contempt. He can’t leave Groundhog Day until he so overcomes. But he has been put into this trial by his own attitude, it’s a self-imposed catastrophe. The course of the movie spins out his various attempts to escape.
First he has fun with the situation, once he figures it out, by stealing money, driving crazy, trying to snag some free tush,etc. He also finds he can set himself up in previous cycles for the subsequent cycles: in other words, since only he remembers the cycles, he can blatantly seek useful info from people for use against them in the next cycle. But his wittiness mostly goes awry – he rarely hits a home run because his attitudes are obnoxious and off-putting. So, in despair after awhile, he tries to commit suicide. It turns out he can die in a current cycle, but then he’s magically alive again at 6:00am the “next” day, the new repetition of Groundhog Day. Nothing he does matters or has meaning since he has put himself outside the code of decency.
But eventually, as he notices things and remembers them from the previous cycles (in order to navigate better in the current cycle), he also begins to notice the suffering of others, prompted in this by his own suffering. He turns to good works. For example, he buys an old homeless failure a humongous dinner, and later even gives him mouth-to-mouth when the old man collapses in the snow. Phil’s emotions have evolved from the self-absorbed to the noble. He starts to use his not inconsiderable talents and powers to enrich others’ lives. They are enormously grateful to be taken seriously by such a man, and also prove themselves quite capable of appreciating his elite ability.
Finally, the new sincerity impresses Andie MacDowell’s character, and they become lovers again. The first time, though, she had been swept away fatefully and had disappeared at pumpkin time, 6:00am, when the clock radio alarm went off, playing Sonny and Cher’s “I got you, babe.” The song was meaningless to Phil, alone in bed. It was just another cycle beginning, another Groundhog Day. But now, this second time, 6:00am arrives, and she’s still there. It’s not Groundhog Day any longer, since fate, life, and the Furies have allowed him now to move on from the nightmare. He has paid his debt with the currency and coin of decency and sincerity.
This movie has a real redemption on offer, as did “Memoirs of a Geisha,” given that the protagonist has to go through real trials, with all the human mistakes made, before reaching true life. This is in contrast to the epically abysmal crap of “The Da Vinci Code,” where the protagonists are mollycoddled by the script into believing themselves victims of an arbitrary totalitarian society that they must overcome with their badass “courage.”
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