Monday, May 21, 2007
The Invisible: A Movie ReviewNick, an aspiring poet and writer whose father has recently died, presents his mother with his opportunity to study writing in London. She dismisses the endeavor without discussion and Nick is left to decide weather or not he will leave his home or remain with her in an unwitting, yet pathetic internal enmeshment. Meanwhile, Annie, whose mother has recently passed, wrestles with the meaningless of a life of crime, violence, and lost love.
The movie opens at a birthday party with Nick Powel, our hero, being toasted by his mother. She presents him with a beautiful watch that becomes a symbol of their relationship, and later, a tangible clue that could lead police to her son’s dying body. I knew I was in for a healthy dose of new Hollywood’s ugly bastard child, Annhilism, when Nick cut the eyes out of his likeness birthday cake, ate them, and then fantasized about swallowing some saltpeter and a couple of spent shotgun cartridges. Nick’s friend, Peter, then gets a fingernail excised by our heroin, Annie, a beautiful high school wannabe gangstress, via Stiletto knife, who wants payment for loaned “merchandise.” Nick meets Annie by attempting to pay Peter’s debt in cash, but the gesture is unappreciated, prompting Nick to whisper, “You are broken!” to the stoic and eerily-detached femme fatale. It is easy to assume she is the either the victim of—or willing participant to—causeless anger—Hollywood’s handsome bastard child, but we find that the whisper resonates in our heroin at a deeper level. Unfortunately, like many of the teens of our time who aspire to paint their fingernails and souls an empty and meaningless black, she lacks the magnanimity to confront her existential malady with something other than rage. We are left contemplating the usual suspects of the origins of our heroes’ challenges: Europeanism, the evil clergyman, patriarchy, and/or the absent father. However, my presumptions were happily wrong! It was the loss of a beloved parent, a trauma portending some existential collision between the grieving children.
Annie and boyfriend/car thief, Marcus, steal a Mercedes and impulsively, Annie decides to swipe some jewels for added pleasure. When Marcus demands to keep the jewelry because of Annie’s growing impulsivity, Annie dissents. Her defiance prompts Marcus to place an anonymous call to police, turning Annie in and setting up the motive for the redemption-impetus—a misplaced revenge. Annie confronts Peter, thinking he had been following her and that he had seen the incident. Believing his friend had flown to London, and fearing for his own life, the beaten Peter provides Nick’s name to the angry Annie. Our hero, who has sought the contemporary counsel of alcohol, agonizes over his decision not to go to London and the possibilities of becoming a taxidermist and opening a Hotel—hints of Norman Bates, the quintessential puer eternus. An anonymous girlfriend finds the watch in his pocket and asks why he is wearing the old watch (given him by his deceased father) instead of the beautiful new watch. Since "everything good is dead," Nick tosses the plane ticket to her breast, and we observe him walking angrily down a darkened street kicking trash cans over as if he is welcoming the fate he has been poeticizing about. Annie and a group of thugs approach him and Nick is brutally beaten and left for dead in a storm drain at the bottom of a wood. Nick soon reappears and quickly discovers that no one can see him, save the dying, and he realizes that he is still alive. He begins the urgent task of working for his would-be killer’s redemption, hence his physical salvation, and the mystery turns on the hand of weather or not the troubled Annie will lead police to the sewer/tomb.
I found the story believable, in a troubling sort of way. One wonders why this teen girl, an Alissa Milano lookalike/fugitive wears a ski cap 24/7, whose long locks are revealed only twice: while showering in the high school locker room (where she has broken into to sleep), and during resolution. The transition from covering one’s locks to letting the hair down could be a visual metaphor for Annie’s spiritual transformation, if it is to occur. Behind this emotional trainwreck seems to be Annie’s unresolved grief of her mother’s recent death, and her father’s relationship to a woman that finds no necessity in nurturing, for example not preparing supper for her or her little brother. Who wouldn’t be troubled with a beautiful girl gouging her bedroom wall with the same Stiletto she’s just ripped a fingernail off with, in sight of her 8 year-old brother as she listens to acid rock on an MP3 player? This is the prototypical annihilist-in-short waiting, who seems to prefer punting a stranger’s head like a football to flying a plane with her little brother.
Fortunately, the line to hell called annihilism is cordoned with a redemptive rope, albeit a heavy one, guarding people from the abyss to each side, of which Heaven--in this case, redemption--lies on distant ground. Annie does go to the trouble to make her hungry brother a peanut butter sandwich before a little nighttime “football.” As well, her tears over her mother’s grave add to her redemptive potential. The guilt over what she has done to Nick also develops as Nick’s body slips closer toward death. Driven by faint ghostly admonitions, Annie seems attune to Nick’s plight, suggesting she herself is near-death. She is merely in line. Still toying with the confessional lifestyle, she breaks into her victims home and rummages through his old photos and papers, displaying her newfound empathy by appreciating the photo of a place where they both spent time with their lost parent. One can almost hear hell’s waiting line shrinking. But, when she realizes she attacked the wrong person, she attempts to correct matters by shooting the real nark, and in quasi-Shakespearean fashion, is shot near the womb as if Satan's sentinals had spotted a runner. In fact, the believability in this series of events is that an insatiable grief can drive anyone to desperation, irregardless of gender, irrespective of religious convictions dare I say; and without discernment, the most accomplished man or woman can fall prey to folly as easily as the troubled teen. This we see most remarkably in Nick’s grieving mother, who must wrestle with her own conscience in the face of losing both husband, and son.
I recommend the Invisible if you are willing to put yourself in the shoes of our troubled teens who have lost someone very special to them and have found themselves in a world where solutions are often dispensed like advice from oracles at the end of some long, sinister waiting line. If the path seems long and the faces exiting, sullen, perhaps one is standing in the wrong line. The angst of living near death is what Heidigger called the Abyss, that empty, forboding space that surrounds each of us at difficult times. Sometimes critics forget that we may be on one side of this chasm, by good fortune of by merit of possessing the rappelling, hiking, and scuba apparatus that was needed to cross. Let us not forget those that have been raised without preparation or warning are the fools that we hate, but their folly is not a death sentence or even a judgment. Confession needs to be made, for the things that we were given that we did not deserve—grace, and for the salvation of those that lacked that which they did deserve—mercy. My prayer tonight is that I be more gracious and more merciful, and for the Annies and Nicks of this world—God help us all out of line and into the Abyss where atonement awaits.
The movie opens at a birthday party with Nick Powel, our hero, being toasted by his mother. She presents him with a beautiful watch that becomes a symbol of their relationship, and later, a tangible clue that could lead police to her son’s dying body. I knew I was in for a healthy dose of new Hollywood’s ugly bastard child, Annhilism, when Nick cut the eyes out of his likeness birthday cake, ate them, and then fantasized about swallowing some saltpeter and a couple of spent shotgun cartridges. Nick’s friend, Peter, then gets a fingernail excised by our heroin, Annie, a beautiful high school wannabe gangstress, via Stiletto knife, who wants payment for loaned “merchandise.” Nick meets Annie by attempting to pay Peter’s debt in cash, but the gesture is unappreciated, prompting Nick to whisper, “You are broken!” to the stoic and eerily-detached femme fatale. It is easy to assume she is the either the victim of—or willing participant to—causeless anger—Hollywood’s handsome bastard child, but we find that the whisper resonates in our heroin at a deeper level. Unfortunately, like many of the teens of our time who aspire to paint their fingernails and souls an empty and meaningless black, she lacks the magnanimity to confront her existential malady with something other than rage. We are left contemplating the usual suspects of the origins of our heroes’ challenges: Europeanism, the evil clergyman, patriarchy, and/or the absent father. However, my presumptions were happily wrong! It was the loss of a beloved parent, a trauma portending some existential collision between the grieving children.
Annie and boyfriend/car thief, Marcus, steal a Mercedes and impulsively, Annie decides to swipe some jewels for added pleasure. When Marcus demands to keep the jewelry because of Annie’s growing impulsivity, Annie dissents. Her defiance prompts Marcus to place an anonymous call to police, turning Annie in and setting up the motive for the redemption-impetus—a misplaced revenge. Annie confronts Peter, thinking he had been following her and that he had seen the incident. Believing his friend had flown to London, and fearing for his own life, the beaten Peter provides Nick’s name to the angry Annie. Our hero, who has sought the contemporary counsel of alcohol, agonizes over his decision not to go to London and the possibilities of becoming a taxidermist and opening a Hotel—hints of Norman Bates, the quintessential puer eternus. An anonymous girlfriend finds the watch in his pocket and asks why he is wearing the old watch (given him by his deceased father) instead of the beautiful new watch. Since "everything good is dead," Nick tosses the plane ticket to her breast, and we observe him walking angrily down a darkened street kicking trash cans over as if he is welcoming the fate he has been poeticizing about. Annie and a group of thugs approach him and Nick is brutally beaten and left for dead in a storm drain at the bottom of a wood. Nick soon reappears and quickly discovers that no one can see him, save the dying, and he realizes that he is still alive. He begins the urgent task of working for his would-be killer’s redemption, hence his physical salvation, and the mystery turns on the hand of weather or not the troubled Annie will lead police to the sewer/tomb.
I found the story believable, in a troubling sort of way. One wonders why this teen girl, an Alissa Milano lookalike/fugitive wears a ski cap 24/7, whose long locks are revealed only twice: while showering in the high school locker room (where she has broken into to sleep), and during resolution. The transition from covering one’s locks to letting the hair down could be a visual metaphor for Annie’s spiritual transformation, if it is to occur. Behind this emotional trainwreck seems to be Annie’s unresolved grief of her mother’s recent death, and her father’s relationship to a woman that finds no necessity in nurturing, for example not preparing supper for her or her little brother. Who wouldn’t be troubled with a beautiful girl gouging her bedroom wall with the same Stiletto she’s just ripped a fingernail off with, in sight of her 8 year-old brother as she listens to acid rock on an MP3 player? This is the prototypical annihilist-in-short waiting, who seems to prefer punting a stranger’s head like a football to flying a plane with her little brother.
Fortunately, the line to hell called annihilism is cordoned with a redemptive rope, albeit a heavy one, guarding people from the abyss to each side, of which Heaven--in this case, redemption--lies on distant ground. Annie does go to the trouble to make her hungry brother a peanut butter sandwich before a little nighttime “football.” As well, her tears over her mother’s grave add to her redemptive potential. The guilt over what she has done to Nick also develops as Nick’s body slips closer toward death. Driven by faint ghostly admonitions, Annie seems attune to Nick’s plight, suggesting she herself is near-death. She is merely in line. Still toying with the confessional lifestyle, she breaks into her victims home and rummages through his old photos and papers, displaying her newfound empathy by appreciating the photo of a place where they both spent time with their lost parent. One can almost hear hell’s waiting line shrinking. But, when she realizes she attacked the wrong person, she attempts to correct matters by shooting the real nark, and in quasi-Shakespearean fashion, is shot near the womb as if Satan's sentinals had spotted a runner. In fact, the believability in this series of events is that an insatiable grief can drive anyone to desperation, irregardless of gender, irrespective of religious convictions dare I say; and without discernment, the most accomplished man or woman can fall prey to folly as easily as the troubled teen. This we see most remarkably in Nick’s grieving mother, who must wrestle with her own conscience in the face of losing both husband, and son.
I recommend the Invisible if you are willing to put yourself in the shoes of our troubled teens who have lost someone very special to them and have found themselves in a world where solutions are often dispensed like advice from oracles at the end of some long, sinister waiting line. If the path seems long and the faces exiting, sullen, perhaps one is standing in the wrong line. The angst of living near death is what Heidigger called the Abyss, that empty, forboding space that surrounds each of us at difficult times. Sometimes critics forget that we may be on one side of this chasm, by good fortune of by merit of possessing the rappelling, hiking, and scuba apparatus that was needed to cross. Let us not forget those that have been raised without preparation or warning are the fools that we hate, but their folly is not a death sentence or even a judgment. Confession needs to be made, for the things that we were given that we did not deserve—grace, and for the salvation of those that lacked that which they did deserve—mercy. My prayer tonight is that I be more gracious and more merciful, and for the Annies and Nicks of this world—God help us all out of line and into the Abyss where atonement awaits.
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