I am willing to partially blame myself for my mostly negative assessment of this film. Due to the crowdedness of the screening, and my lack of an advance ticket purchase, I was forced to sit about three rows from the front -- a distance I work hard to avoid whenever possible. It made the entire experience feel too close, too pushy. So when the director employed a fairly typically commercial style involving many sharp focus close-ups, the faces just looked too close. It felt claustrophobic and fisheyed. So, perhaps in different conditions, I might have liked this better.
As it is, I didn't. What I saw was several occasionally beautiful long shots that never felt like they had enough time to breathe. For all the supposed tumult and endlessness of the characters' journey, it never felt as though they were having as hard a time with it as it seemed. I like the idea of using a son searching for his father as a metaphorical representation of the cultural confusion and uncertainty that Iraq has had to deal with, both during and after the Saddam era. But the pathos is only successfully explored in vague, intermittent pieces, and the idea itself is stated and then left to sit for the rest of the movie. It becomes a piece that is more about the narrative than exploring the ideas the narrative posits. The sadness is what we're supposed to feel, but, either because the movie just isn't that good or because of my poor positioning (or, more likely, a bit of both), I didn't. Every time it used a close-up of the little boy crying, I felt like I was being manipulated rather than like I was watching something real unfold. Manipulation isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, as long as you own up to it. Movies are, necessarily, all artifice. But we're mostly willing to believe that they aren't, as long as the filmmaker is willing to help out. Here, I felt like I was doing most of the work.
No comments:
Post a Comment