Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by rhizomatic (A) on October 22, 2003 at 06:48:32

In Reply to: Hmmm...didn't strike me that way at all... posted by Harmonia on October 21, 2003 at 23:44:08:

It conveys nothing but an unjustifiable emotional coldness on the part of Linney, which to me rings hollow in the context of the film. I agree that it's a character study, but it's a character study, as critics have pointed out ad infinitum, about the rippling effects of violence. We don't have enough contact with the characters who get wrecked and worse at the beginning of the film to feel any impact from the events. And the end of the film, to me, empties everyone out. It renders them, like I said, amoral ciphers. I really don't care much about amoral ciphers, and I fail to understand how we are supposed to *feel* how this could be a lingering effect of Dave's abduction, in particular, because that is so rushed through at the beginning of the film we have no sense of the shape of the immediate effects. How long did these kids really know each other to begin with? How much of the story did they find out? The causality from Dave's abduction to Jimmy's criminality and Sean's emotional distance is shoddy, you have to make quite a leap to even associate those with this childhood event that is tidily trotted out, dressed up with syrupy strings, and then quickly passed over to move on to the next catastrophe, which is treated likewise. And the whole film seems to be built around giving these characters a moral weight and complexity which dissipates all of a sudden at the end of the film. No one cares about Dave's murder. That is callous and weird. Laura Linney's speech might've been more effective if there was some hint of ambivalence, but she comes across like a seasoned mob wife or something. I mean, this is someone she knows, and she responds to the whole thing so breezily, and then they make out, smiling, like it's no big deal. I just didn't get it. And the thing with Sean's wife is just dumb, and the fact that Sean is similarly unfazed, and upon hearing about Dave's death actually seems immediately unburdened enough to come clean with his estranged and superfluous wife...huh? What is that about?

I really wanted to like it. I went in with high hopes. I think it's better put-together than most dramas, but ultimately I just found it rather empty and confused--confused, not complicated or filled with ambivalence, which is what I think Eastwood was supposed to be going for.