life during wartime: my thoughts

I made my way down to the Uptown theater to check out the new Todd Solondz film, Life During Wartime.  It's a pretty darned good film.  I suggest you check it out, but only if you have a basic understanding of its subject matter beforehand and know what you're getting into, as it's not for everyone (intense family drama with secrets so dark the characters refuse to acknowledge their existence, making it challenging for the audience to connect emotionally and follow the story).  There's lots of discussion on suicide, sexual aggression, and incest, just to list a few of the film's themes.  Here are a few of my takeaways from the movie:

 •Trusting The Picture

I'm all about directors who love to mess with truth and play on the audience's gullibility and misplaced trust in the image (Buñuel might be my favorite in that regard).  Solondz sets up several scenes early on that made me suspect that later events might not be real.  But what surprised me was how in crucial, late scenes in the movie, I found myself wanting to believe scenes were made up in the character's mind.  Certain interactions and events that were unfolding seemed so unbearable to view that I desperately wanted those particular scenes to be dreams or someone's imagination.  Eventually, I found myself unable to trust whether acts committed in the past even happened at all.  (That last statement might've been different had I seen Happiness before watching this movie.)

 •Disconnects

There were a lot of scenes in the movie where characters were constantly coming in-between two people who were trying desperately to connect with one another (I'm thinking of at least three restaurant scenes where waiters come right in the middle of very important conversations).  You got the sense that these people were experiencing an internal isolation, but were forced to live out these traumas in the presence of strangers.  Without the comfort of privacy, these public displays denied the characters the chance to grasp their problems in less delusional terms.

 •Misplaced Anger

All of these people seemed to have experienced events so traumatic that they had no language for even approaching these subjects.  But because that anger was still there, they all expressed it in some form that ignored the real problem.  For one, these characters all irrationally feared homosexuality, as if that was the cause of their ills.  And if it wasn't gays that ruined their lives, it was just men in general.

 •Paul Reubens

Is it a coincidence that Pee Wee Herman's in a movie about redeeming oneself from committing taboo sexual acts?  Probably.

Life During Wartime will be at Uptown till Thursday, then moves to Edina starting Friday.