At the
movies Film inspiration
By JOSEPH CUNNEEN
With movie violence and
sensationalism dragged in as pseudo-issues in the presidential campaign, Warner
Brothers may reap an extra measure of favorable publicity by releasing Pay
It Forward at this time. A lightweight inspirational film with a capable
and attractive cast (Haley Joel Osment, Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey), the movie
gets its title from the idea of paying forward to three others a
kind act that someone has done for you.
Eleven-year-old Trevor (Osment), a middle-school student in Las
Vegas, is seen at the outset passing through a metal detector at the same time
as more trouble-prone classmates manage to get a knife through. Paying
forward is Trevors idea, in response to a class assignment from his
new social studies teacher, Eugene Simonet (Spacey), who wants his young
charges to observe the world around them and think of something that might
change it for the better. Simonets easy humor, and perhaps the lines on
his ravaged face, make an impression on the boy. As he rides home on his
bicycle, going past down-and-out areas of town, his project begins to take
shape.
Things soon turn a little too cute when Trevor gives his teacher a
reason to visit him at home: The boy is trying to play cupid for Trevors
mother Arlene (Hunt) and Simonet.
Pay It Forward calls attention to the legacy of
alcoholism, and there are reminders of the marginalization of the poor, but the
film never grapples seriously with the complexities of doing good.
Shouldnt Simonet have related the idea of paying forward to
the dangerous troublemakers at school? Isnt the likelihood of their
brutalized childhood as worthy of treatment as Simonets own story of his
emotionally anguished childhood?
Idealistic audiences may be spurred to attempt acts of generosity
by Pay It Forward, but it is important to help them see the
difference between contrived and authentic emotions. The ending is even worse,
using the song Calling All Angels and the candle-illuminated faces
of a crowd of young people to coerce an emotion that has not been honestly
earned.
Billy Elliot could also be
considered an inspirational film: We identify with a young boys joy as he
expresses himself in the liberating movements of dance. But director Stephen
Daldry avoids the didactic impulse of Pay It Forward, preferring to
show us how the passion of 11-year-old Billy (Jamie Bell), an English
miners son in Durham, leads to a new life at the Royal Ballet School in
London.
Billys mother is dead, and most of the action takes place
during a bitter 1984 strike in the mines in which his father (Gary Lewis) and
older brother Tony (James Draven) are deeply involved. Both strenuously oppose
Billys involvement in ballet.
The strong if somewhat predictable showdown scenes between father
and son are balanced by Daldrys eye for comic elements in the material,
including rough-edged family arguments, the mercurial relationship between
Billy and Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters), his chain-smoking dancing teacher,
and Billys first glimpse of ballet -- in the gym where he sees little
girls practicing in tutus.
There is a danger of sentimentality in Billy showing his teacher a
farewell letter from his dead mother, but when Mrs. Wilkinson exclaims how
wonderful his mother must have been, Billy protests: She was just my
mom. In this film, the sentiment is earned.
The photography is meaningful as well as stylish. Daldry, a
long-time theater director, cuts the story of Billys liberation through
dance with the heightened tensions of the strike, with the massed line of
police shields as a constantly oppressive image. In another sequence, father,
older brother and Billys dotty but loving grandmother each move
spontaneously and gracefully in separate rooms to the music from the
brothers record player, while Billy is secretly dancing for his teacher
in the gym.
The movie gains additional credibility from the strong
performances of Lewis and Waters, but it is the jug-eared Bell who makes it
memorable. His facial expressions change from impish to sullen to thoughtful to
ecstatic; he is totally convincing when he erupts into dance. When the screen
is filled with an image of Fred Astaire and the boy gives vent to adolescent
frustration in kicking against the brick walls that seem to enclose him,
its hard to keep from cheering.
Yi Yi, the new
Chinese-language film from Taiwan, isnt trying to be inspirational at
all, but with his sympathetic, rueful observation of an aspiring middle-class
family in todays Taipei, director Edward Wang has made the richest, most
reflective movie of the season. If Yi Yi (also known as A One
and a Two) doesnt play in your area, wait a few months and look for
it in your video store.
Commercially, it doesnt help that Yi Yi is three
hours long; Wang needs that time, however, to tell his story of the Jian
family, which is slowly coming apart in an acquisitive society. The film begins
with a noisy wedding that is disrupted by the arrival of the grooms
jilted girlfriend and the grandmother being rushed to the hospital in a coma.
What follows encompasses a wide range of human experience, from the absurd to
the near tragic.
When the family arrives at the hospital to check on the
grandmother (Tang Ru-yun), the drunken brother-in-law (Chen Hsi-Sheng) rushes
to reassure them: Today is the luckiest day of the year. Nothing bad can
happen. At home, however, the father, the slight, rather
depressed-looking N.J. (Wu Nien-Jen), discovers that his wife, Min-Min (Elaine
Jin), is close to an emotional breakdown. There is a poignant moment as the
camera observes husband and wife through a sheet of glass that picks up
hundreds of reflections from the nearby expressway.
No one in the family makes a sustained effort to draw the
grandmother out of her coma by talking to her. The naively romantic teenage
daughter, Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), barely escapes a serious involvement with a
dangerous boyfriend, the mother takes up with a religious cult, and her
8-year-old son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), harassed at school, is constantly
taking pictures.
In a humorous sketch of the director as a young boy, Yang-Yang
asks his father, I cant see what you can see, and you cant
see what I can see. So how can I know what you see? There is no answer to
his philosophical conundrum. Determined to show people what they cant
see, however, Yang-Yang makes a specialty of taking pictures of the back of
peoples heads.
What makes it all work is that Wang, who also wrote the
screenplay, likes his characters; he sees their weaknesses but never judges. He
does not try to teach us anything, but the pattern of his story has been so
intricately developed that we see the familiar with deep emotion.
Joseph Cunneen is NCRs regular movie reviewer. His e-mail
address is SCunn24219@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, October 27,
2000
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