Can a movie be a poem? Poetry is as much about the cadence of words and the feel of words tripping off the lips as it is about the content. Poems rely on offset imagery and the form the lines take on the page to convey meaning. Poems are suggestive rather than descriptive, emphatic rather than didactic, concise where prose would be verbose and effluent where prose would prove mum. Poems are experiential and experimental, abundant and obtuse, clever and cryptic.
Heaven is a poem in film form. Conceived by Krzysztof Kieslowski, famed Polish director of The Decalogue, as the first part of a trilogy of films entitled Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, and directed by German filmmaker Tom Tykwer upon Kieslowski’s death, Heaven follows the events surrounding a woman, Philippa, arrested for an act of apparent terrorism and a young man, Filippo, who falls desperately in love with her. The plot turns unexpectedly, and I dare not ruin it for you here.
Philippa is played by Cate Blanchett and Filippo by Giovanni Ribisi. Both are excellent. Blanchett is one of our finest actors and she is in top form as she portrays a character whose emotions range from rage to remorse. Ribisi is perfect as well as the picture of unassuming, unconditional, ultimately redeeming love.
Tykwer, as he also demonstrated in 2000’s The Princess and the Warrior, is a director of profound patience, and he is at his best when he allows his camera to linger. In Heaven, we are treated to luxurious shots of the Italian countryside. The camera revels in Philippa’s features like a lover, granting her presence as she works through her grief. And the final shot… AH! I dare not give it away, though it is long and slow and sublime.
Now, I don’t mean to make the movie out to sound laborious or boring in any way. Tykwer’s patient camera work in some scenes highlights the drive and urgency to the story’s more intense sequences. Tykwer is the director who also gave us Run, Lola, Run (1998), the short True featured in Paris, I Love You (2006), and The International (2009). He is not foreign to the world of the thriller, and Heaven is most certainly a thriller.
Heaven is also called “Heaven,” and so it is explicit in its engagement with theological matters. The story itself has almost nothing to do with the church or Christianity or any world religion for that matter. This is not a “religious” film, in the traditional sense of the word - it does not conform to a set of widely accepted practices or beliefs. Heaven is a very Religious film however, in that it manifests faithful devotion to some assumed ultimate reality.
It would be in disingenuous of me to proclaim what this film is about. I will not explain it and therefore belittle it and strip it of its power and worth. I will, however, attempt to express how this film affected me and leave it to you to be affected as you will.
Heaven impressed upon me a devout faith in the redeeming power of love. Filippo loves Philippa with single minded devotion. At first, I was put off by his obsession. I’ve been down that road, and I’ve seen where such infatuation leads. As I continued watching, however, I saw that Filippo was not meant to be prescriptive. We are all not meant to support and give ourselves to another person so completely without reason or recourse. We are incapable of loving with such a love on our own power.
I don’t think I was supposed to identify with Filippo at all. I think I was meant to identify with Philippa, the accused terrorist, Filippo’s beloved. Filippo is descriptive of the kind of love we are offered. We are the ones in need of redemption. We are the ones bound to remorse. We are the beloved. Filippo is descriptive. Philippa is prescriptive. We are meant to respond as she does and allow ourselves to be loved.
That is what Christ calls us to.
That is heaven.
(Heaven is in Italian and English as the story calls for each language. It is rated R for a scene of sexuality. At one point, Philippa and Filippo find themselves in the back of a delivery fan while the driver has a sexual encounter in the front seat. The scene is brief. Bare breasts are seen. Don’t let that scare you away from this beautiful film.)
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I love a good spy movie. What can I say? I am my father's son. By my dad's side, I've seen every James Bond movie, many of them multiple times. I've enjoyed all of Hitchcock's yarns of mistaken, duplicitous identity. I've even seen the spy movies you've never heard of like The Day of the Jackel and The Odessa File (both highly recommended, by the way).
On the most basic level, Salt is a throwback to the Cold War espionage films of my childhood. There's mystery and intrigue and elaborate world domination plots and evil Russians and secret, training facilities in Siberia and you're never quite sure who's on whose side. If you focus on this basic plot and premise, Salt is fun.
That being said, if you're in the mood for a good almost-throwback, Cold War era espionage thriller with some modern car chases and fight scenes thrown in for good measure, and if you think you might be interested in watching the further exploits of Eveline Salt in the soon to be produced sequel(s), this is the movie for you.
Dillinger was a thief, but more importantly, Dillinger was a celebrity. During the Great Depression, John Dillinger and his cronies waltzed their way through banks and prisons and onto the front pages of American newspapers. At a time when most Americans hardly had any money to put in a bank, Dillinger took what belonged “to the bank,” the ones to blame for the economic turmoil, and left what belonged “to the people.” He was Robin Hood, though without a moral compass like Friar Tuck at his side.
Mann has crafted a starkly realistic film. His use of high contrast, digital cameras highlights this realism to the nth degree. Public Enemies almost feels like a documentary, as if Mann traveled back through time and filmed Dillinger’s downfall. Scenes are also shot in the locations where they actually happened. Elements of the Dillinger myth have been removed (The Judas-like “Woman in the Red Dress” wasn’t really wearing a red dress. She was wearing an orange skirt.). Actual conversations from recorded courtroom proceedings have been mimicked.
Much to my charigne, the Bible is mute on the subject. Apparently the Biblical writers lived in a time much different than ours where romantic pursuits took on either a remarkably different character or existed as something else entirely. For the life of me, I cannot find the passage where Jesus tells me how to get a date, much less a wife. There is, of course, Song of Songs, but even then, the most strident exclamation arising from scripture's greatest love poem is, "Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires."
That is where we join the Guy's story in Once. He's brokenhearted and alone, unsure of what to do with his life, with dreams of doing this or that "once" he gets this or that straightened out.
The Bible seems to say both and neither. The Bible definitely says that God is good in all things, and I imagine that means no matter how desperate and desirous our hearts may be and no matter if our hearts find romantic satisfaction or not.
I'm indebted to my friends for this review. I'm indebted to my friends for lots of things actually, but I credit this review especially to them, because without them, I wouldn't have anything good to say about M. Night Shyamalan's latest film, The Last Airbender.
Finally, there are my friends who actually enjoyed the movie. From what I can gather, they responded to the explicitly stated message of the film - battles are won not by force but in the heart. The film's hero, Aang, (and the audience) is told by a grandmother figure that his destiny is to bring peace to all humankind not by violently defeating all aggression, but by changing the hearts of the violent ones. My friends resonated with this message, and I appreciate that about them.
If you haven't yet seen this film, I encourage you to stop reading my review, and go see it. Right now. Finish this paragraph if you must, but please don't read the rest. I won't be giving any spoilers, but I honestly believe that the best way to enter into the world of Inception is with as little preparation as possible. Briefly, the movie is excellent. It is a tautly wound, enthralling film, well acted on every part. It is akin to other psychological thrillers, and yet more ambitious and daring in its plot structure. It is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout, and deservedly so, but it does not deserve a more adult rating at all. Thematically, the film questions reality, how we perceive it, and how to live accordingly. Once again, I can't recommend it highly enough. Stop reading this review, and go see it now. Then come back and read the rest of what I've written.
And that's all I'm going to say about the plot. Like I said before, I don't know when I was so thoroughly engrossed in a movie as I was while watching Inception, and the little knowledge I thought I had about the film kept pulling me out of the story as I tried to make fit what I thought I knew. I don't want that for you, in case you didn't heed my warnings and continued to read this review without seeing the film first.
Nolan's post-modern leanings fall into the realm of, as I mentioned before, epistemology, or how we know what we know. He often accomplishes this through the manipulation of time. Mementotells its story backwards, Insomniaoccurs in a place where the sun never sets and it therefore without time, The Prestigehappens all out of order, andInception, well, if you've seen it, you know.