ReportWire

Tag: Darren Aronofsky filmography

  • Caught Stealing With a Hand in Pi: Darren Aronofsky’s Expertise in 1998

    [ad_1]

    As Xan Brooks of The Guardian pointed out in an interview with Darren Aronofsky, his latest film, Caught Stealing, “could almost be his parallel-universe first movie, given that it’s set in 1998, around the time he was shooting his actual first film, Pi, on the same East Side streets.” But beyond just that full-circle kind of correlation, there are many marked similarities between Pi and Caught Stealing…even though Aronofsky didn’t write the script for the latter. No, instead, Charlie Huston adapted it from his own novel of the same name, originally released in 2004. A year that found the masses still coming off the “high” of the late 90s. Sobered instead by the new realities of the twenty-first century, which weren’t at all what they had been made out to be as the twentieth century came to a close. Or, as Aronofsky puts it, “People were looking forward to the new millennium. It was going to be The Jetsons. It was going to be sci-fi.” Turns out, it was just going to be a shitshow. And one that greased the wheels for the current horrors plaguing the globe (though the U.S. in particular). 

    Granted, many were still generally feeling plagued (and paranoid) in the late 90s, as Aronofsky shows only too well through his main character in Pi, Max Cohen (Sean Gullette). Although a number theorist, Max is what “the suits” would call “unemployed.” But that doesn’t mean his time isn’t constantly occupied, mainly by an obsession with finding the numerical pattern in everything, even a number as chaotic, as unknowable as pi. And, being the type of person who, the more he’s told something can’t be done, has to do it, it’s no wonder that 1) he thinks he can find a pattern in pi and 2) among the initial voiceovers the viewer hears from Max is that when he a child, his mother told him not to stare into the sun. “So once when I was six I did.” The result was temporary blindness and, in the present, randomly occurring, debilitating headaches. Even so, it seemed Max found it worth it to prove something to himself. More accurately, to find out something for himself. 

    At the same time, denial and avoidance are imperative to the way he lives, functions. The same can definitely be said of Caught Stealing’s anti-hero, Henry “Hank” Thompson (Austin Butler), who descended upon New York’s Lower East Side after running away from his dark past in California, where, once upon a time, he had a bright future ahead of him. For he was slated to become a professional baseball player. That is, until he, like Max, engaged in the kind of self-destructive behavior that was to doom his once-bright future. And, also like Max, Hank might be viewed as “barely getting by” on the financial front. This during one of the last eras in New York when it was possible to just “kind of be there” without an actual career.  Or at least a career goal. But Hank’s lone goal is to forget, able to do so in part thanks to the alcohol perks of being a bartender at a dive called Paul’s Bar. With Paul (Griffin Dunne) filling in for the sort-of mentor role that Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis) fulfills in Pi.

    Hank’s only other “distraction” is Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), a paramedic who increasingly wonders just how serious their relationship is (on a related side note regarding Hank’s “emotional distractions,” there’s also, of course, Bud, the cat he’s saddled with early on in the movie). But at least Hank doesn’t come across as asexual in the least, like Max, who clams up if his clearly interested neighbor, Devi (Samia Shoaib), so much as approaches his, er, peephole. And yes, the POV shot from the peephole is among the pivotal filming techniques that Aronofsky uses to assert a “unique style” for his debut. Even if it is the sort of style most commonly associated with debuts: deliberately “esoteric.” 

    Aronofsky’s directorial signatures have, needless to say, been quite fine-tuned since then, with Caught Stealing exemplifying his ease with “slickness.” But not the kind of slickness that was so aware of itself in the late 90s (see also: The Matrix, which seems to have borrowed certain elements of Pi, if for no other reason than modeling the apartment that Neo [Keanu Reeves] lives in after Max’s). And yet, part of what makes Pi such a distinctively “of its time” product is its highly postmodern sense of self-awareness (complete with the voiceover trope that was so popular in “edgy” 90s movies—case in point, Fight Club). 

    What’s more, the soundtrack of Pi is so authentically of the 90s that it would be impossible to fully entrench Caught Stealing’s sound in that way. Try as Aronofsky might with the inclusion of such signature alt-rock hits of the day (with Madonna’s “Ray of Light” also thrown in for some added “1998 musical clout”) as Garbage’s “I Think I’m Paranoid, Smash Mouth’s “Walkin’ on the Sun” and Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy.” But he also deliberately ties Pi and Caught Stealing together with a sonic thread. Namely, through Orbital. In Pi, it’s Orbital’s “P.E.T.R.O.L.” that helps add to the overarching feeling of paranoia Max is spreading to the viewer; in Caught Stealing, it’s Orbital’s “Satan” that gets used instead. This along with David Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans,” which casually plays in the background while Hank is hanging out with Yvonne. Because Aronofsky likely couldn’t resist the inclusion of such a timely track. Even more timely than it actually was in 1998 (though the “techno version” of the song was released in ‘97).

    Then, obviously, there’s the inclusion of Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” a highly appropriate track for a movie about a bartender. Though, of course, it’s about so much more than that. However, at its core, like Pi, it’s about a character who’s at the wrong place at the wrong time (the concept of “time” perhaps even extending to the very year he exists in), therefore entangling that character into a nexus of people that ultimately mean to harm him. 

    Hank has a much worse go of it than Max in terms of that form of abuse. Because, whereas Max does most of the harm (physical and emotional) to himself, Hank is so roughed up by the multiple parties in search of his next-door neighbor Russ’ (Matt Smith) key that it costs him a kidney. To boot, an obsession with “the key” takes on a different meaning in Pi, but it still means that multiple parties are fixated on getting Max to give them the information—the “key”—they want, just as it is the case for Hank and the literal key he’s found himself in possession of. So desired that even the Hasidim are after it, specifically the Drucker brothers (played by Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio). And yes, Judaism is an instrumental aspect of Pi as well, with Max, like Hank, eventually turning to the Jews for help when he finds himself in painted into a corner with the other people who are after him. 

    Taken to the temple by Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman), who he’s been having frequent conversations with about the Torah at the local coffee shop they both frequent, Max is told by the head rabbi that the 216-digit number his computer has been spitting out is “the key to the Messianic Age,” for it can crack the code to the true name of God. The rabbi then continues, “[The high priest] walked into the flames. He took the key to the top of the burning building, the heavens opened and received the key from the priest’s outstretched hand. We have been looking for that key ever since.” Key, key, key, always with the key in these two Aronofsky movies. Not to mention Coney Island, which features prominently in each film for the purposes of Max and Hank’s proverbial “epiphany scenes” (well, one of them anyway).  

    With the tagline, “Faith is chaos,” Aronofsky taps into something similar, narrative motif-wise, with Caught Stealing. Though its own tagline—“Small town boy. Big city problems”—reveals how much more commercial Aronofsky has become in the twenty-seven years since Pi. And yet, it’s evident that the twenty-nine-year-old who, per The Guardian, “subsist[ed] on pizza and liv[ed] in a fifth-floor walk-up,” who “was anxious and ambitious” and who “had his eyes on the prize” still does have it trained on said prize. In this instance, proving that he can still go back to 1998 as if it were yesterday. As if no time had passed at all. For that’s what many people, based on the present circumstances, do wish. Maybe, with the right combination of numbers, the right pattern, a time machine can be created to get us all back there (or, more likely, those with money back there). 

    Until then, Caught Stealing will have to suffice for those seeking, like Cher, to turn back time. For, while Aronofsky might claim, “I don’t want to be one of those old men shouting at clouds. Or shouting at the TV set, ‘Elvis Presley’s moving his hips and he needs to be banned!’ The world is changing. I’m trying to lean into the excitement. It’s time to shut up, stop complaining and dance.” Or, better still, stop complaining and provide music in a movie set in 1998 so that at least the music is more compelling to dance to. 

    [ad_2]

    Genna Rivieccio

    Source link

  • Caught Stealing: Darren Aronofsky Might Call It a “Love Letter” to New York, But It’s More Like a Requiem (Not for a Dream)

    [ad_1]

    It’s been three years since Darren Aronofsky proceeded to break audiences’ hearts with The Whale (written by Samuel D. Hunter, and based on his 2012 play). In that time, of course, the world has only become a darker place. And so, with that in mind, perhaps there was a reason Aronofsky felt compelled to go “back in time” (that is, to “a simpler time”) via Charlie Huston’s screenplay adaptation of his own novel, Caught Stealing (released in 2004, ergo having a fresher perspective on the 90s after the decade had just ended). For yes, it appears that Aronofsky is actually at his best when directing someone else’s material (in other words, there aren’t many “fans,” per se, of Requiem for a Dream or mother!). Accordingly, Caught Stealing signals a marked tonal shift for Aronofsky.

    For, although the material is still quite, shall we say, heavy at times, Caught Stealing has “probably more jokes in the first ten minutes of this than in my entire body of work,” as Aronofsky told The Guardian. Plus, as a native New Yorker, Aronofsky has a certain kind of nostalgic slant to bring to the distinct period he’s depicting: late 90s on the Lower East Side. And, to immediately indicate this is “B911” (Before 9/11) epoch, a shot of the Twin Towers, in all of its romanticized glory, is proudly displayed at the beginning of the film. This being a seminal downtown view belying the seedy goings-on at a joint like Paul’s Bar (which is actually the Double Down Saloon on Avenue A, near the corner of Houston). The joint where Henry “Hank” Thompson (Austin Butler) makes his way in life as a bartender subjected to such jukebox picks of the day as Smash Mouth’s “Walkin’ on the Sun.” The type of bop (or is it the type of MMMBop, in this case?) that can now put the bar at risk thanks to Rudy Giuliani’s “quality of life” campaign that extended to outlawing dancing in bars without a cabaret license (and, of course, most bars weren’t trying to shell out for something like that). Yes, that’s right, Giuliani “Footloose’d” NYC bars starting in 1997—this being just one of many harbingers of doom that his mayorship heralded. Yet another portent of the unstoppable gentrification that Giuliani further aided in opening the floodgates for.

    To be sure, the late 90s was arguably the last time anyone can remember truly seeing some glimmer of what they call the “old” New York. This being why the fall (to put it mildly) of the Twin Towers in 2001 further demarcates a “before” and “after” period for the city and what it once used to “mean.” Thus, Aronofsky and Huston’s organic wielding of these types of details, like Hank telling customers to stop dancing (lest the bar get shut down and/or fined), lends further insight into this period. And it’s part of what makes Caught Stealing feel authentic to the time. 

    Indeed, this form of Giuliani shade-throwing was used even in the era when his “sweeping changes” (read: implementation of a police state) went into effect. One need look no further than the first season of Sex and the City for proof of that (with Miranda [Cynthia Nixon] being the most prone to insulting Giuliani). In fact, it could be said that the season one “look” (a.k.a. how it actually looked in New York at the time) of SATC served as a kind of “mood board” for cinematographer Matthew Libatique, another New Yorker on the crew who has been with Aronofsky since his 1998 debut, Pi. A film that, per The Guardian, “he says could almost be his parallel-universe first movie, given that it’s set in 1998, around the time he was shooting his actual first film on the same East Side streets” (back when Kim’s Video didn’t have to be added into the set design, because it was still there).

    Caught Stealing, instead, has a much greater sense of “levity,” even amidst all its darkness. That “dark aesthetic” of the city, however, is still there. And further aided by the fact that bartenders (and other assorted “shady” characters) live by night. But, more than anything, it seems that with this dark cinematography, Aronofsky aims to more than just subtly convey how much grittier the city used to be. And, as Caught Stealing makes quite clear, that grittiness was most palatable within the crime and corruption sector. With every “organization” from the Hasids (or Hasidim, if you prefer)—played by none other than Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio—to the Russian mob to the cops to Bad Bunny (playing the Russians’ “Puerto Rican associate,” Colorado) thrown into this blender of “antagonistic forces” who all suddenly have it out for Hank after his British, cantankerous punk rocker of a next-door neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), leaves for London in a hurry. And sticks Hank with his equally surly cat in the process. (On a side note, viewers detecting some major overtones of Quentin Tarantino-meets-Guy Ritchie [the latter being an obvious acolyte of the former] stylings wouldn’t be incorrect in making that comparison.)  

    Needless to say, the greater sense of levity in this particular Aronofsky film is supported almost entirely by the presence of this cat named Bud (played by a Siberian forest cat named Tonic). From the start, Hank makes it known he “prefers dogs for a reason.” Luckily for him, Siberian forest cats are described as having a “dog-like” temperament. But it takes his girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), encouraging Bud’s stay for Hank to fully get on board with the unwanted task. As for Yvonne, a paramedic (hence, her and Hank’s work schedules being perfectly aligned), it’s obvious from the outset that, even apart from her profession, she has a thing for rescuing people.

    And no one is in more need of being saved from himself than Hank, who, much like Henry “Hank” Chinaski (a.k.a. Charles Bukowski), has an alcohol problem. Albeit one that stems from trying to outrun the demons of his past, which, at the time, seemed to foretell an impossibly bright future. Back then, when he was still in high school, Hank thought he would be a shoo-in to play for his favorite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants (because, as it should go without saying, the title Caught Stealing has a baseball meaning too). This very possibility marveled at as he drunkenly drove through some backwater roads of Stanislaus County while his friend and fellow ball player, Dale (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), rode shotgun, talking up this future before Hank swerved the car at the sight of a cow and wrapped the car around a pole, launching Dale through the windshield and killing him instantaneously. 

    Hank’s own fallout from the accident, apart from a guilty conscience, was injuring his knee so badly it was never going to be good enough for the major leagues. And so, what would a California boy running away from his problems and looking to forget about his past do but move to New York?—the antithesis of his home state on the other side of the country. The irony being, of course, that his beloved Giants moved from NYC to San Francisco (not unlike the Dodgers moving from Brooklyn to LA). In any case, Hank runs as far as he can from the scene of the accidental crime (/car crash) without leaving the country entirely—that will come later. In the meantime, he thinks he’s going about his business, living his life as “minimally” (read: with a disaffected “90s slacker chic” aura) as possible, only to have every heavyweight of every crime organization on his ass in the wake of Russ’ departure. 

    With no one else to harass/beat to a pulp for answers, Hank is left holding the bag. Or rather, the key. A key he finds in a decoy piece of shit in Bud’s litterbox (this after dealing with another human’s shit in his own toilet since, again, the Sex and the City [de facto, And Just Like That…] connections to Caught Stealing abound). Considering his discovery occurs after two scary Russians (always the Russians, n’est-ce pas?) land him in the hospital for two days, Hank is unsure what to do with the newfound item. Worse still, while at the hospital, doctors removed his kidney because the Russians fucked him up so bad that it ruptured. Which means that, now, alcohol—the one thing that was getting him through it all, holding everything together and making New York seem like the nonstop party it really isn’t—must be off the menu. Otherwise, it’s at his own health risk to imbibe. And certainly a risk to do so with same intensity he did before. 

    Alas, all that resolve, all those promises to Yvonne (and the cat, for that matter) that he has it in him to quit cold turkey, go out the window when he walks into Paul’s Bar to show his boss, the eponymous Paul (played by a man considered a “New York institution,” Griffin Dunne) the key. Walking into the bar as Madonna’s “Ray of Light” resounds through the space (because it was the song of ’98), it’s apparent that Hank is doomed to go down a rabbit hole. The kind that happens after he experiences the adage, “One drink is too many and a thousand never enough.” From the looks of it, as the night goes on, Hank does seem to have very well close to a thousand, getting up on the pool table to sing along with another prime tune of the day: Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch.” This moment amounting to his version of Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) in 10 Things I Hate About You drunkenly dancing on the table at Bogey Lowenstein’s (Kyle Cease) party to Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize.” 

    Saddled with “picking him up” is Yvonne, who quickly loses her patience or sympathy for him when he starts drunkenly ranting about how everything in his life is garbage (by the way, yet another band that gets played on the soundtrack), and that he used to have it all. Everything ahead of him. So much promise, so much potential. The dramatic irony here is that the same can be said of New York, seeing it through the lens of the present as compared with the past. This late 90s past, so evocatively shown in Caught Stealing. 

    Of course, there are literally millions who will swear up and down that the New York of the present remains just as viable, as “vibrant.” More so than ever, they’ll insist. Take, for instance, when Taffy Brodesser-Akner told Vulture, in an article discussing the issues of filming Fleischman Is in Trouble in a manner that would make it look like 2016, “The New York you live in now is the best version of New York. You have to keep out the noise from people like me lest you come to think you missed the whole thing by arriving so late—either by being born or moving here more recently than the person you’re talking to.” But no, she’s wrong…and so are all the others who try to maintain their “positive outlook” (a.k.a. daily application of denial) about “the greatest city in the world.” The New York you live in now is patently not the best version at all. 

    And, perhaps as a testament to how effective a job it does as a “period piece,” Caught Stealing is sure to remind viewers who still cling to, er, live in New York (and even those who never have) that such a statement simply isn’t true. Sometimes, the reality is that it really was better before. This is one of those instances. Even so, it doesn’t stop Regina King (as a cop named Roman), meant to be existing in one of the city’s primes, the 90s, from delivering a beautifully bitter monologue that details how she won’t miss anything about New York other than the black and white cookies once she makes her escape. Because “escape from New York” isn’t just a movie, but a wise person’s motto. Besides (barring that traitor, Joan Didion), Californians like Hank never really commit to New York, eventually turning it into just another base stop on the way home.

    [ad_2]

    Genna Rivieccio

    Source link

  • A Uniquely American (The) “Whale” of a Tale

    A Uniquely American (The) “Whale” of a Tale

    [ad_1]

    The Whale wastes no time in cutting to the quick of human desperation and sadness. As most stage plays tend to do. And yes, the film is based on Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 play of the same name. Hunter, who adapted the script for Darren Aronofsky’s directing pleasure, accordingly leaves the one-location setting intact. A static milieu that is rendered totally believable by Charlie’s (Brendan Fraser) reclusive nature. Not necessarily because it’s a “conscious choice,” so much as a practical one. After all, he’s too morbidly obese to get very far without extreme difficulty and over-exertion. So it is that, with the help of his best friend/enabler, Liz (Hong Chau), Charlie manages to work and live with relative “ease,” at least considering his situation. One that finds him in the John Popper-from-Blues Traveler position of being too obese to masturbate without the risk of a heart attack. Which is where we find him within the first few seconds of the movie, and how the appearance of a missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) at his doorstep is actually welcomed as Charlie tussles with the throes of death.

    To calm and recenter him, Charlie insists that Thomas read from an essay he hands to him about Moby-Dick, one that we later find out was written by his estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and that he has become rather obsessed with for its “honesty.” Having written it in eighth grade (the audience is expected to suspend disbelief on such a book being assigned at that age), the sentence structure is simple and written in the first person, with Charlie most focused on the lines, “…and I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while.” That author being Ishmael who “shar[es] a bed with a man named Queequeg,” as Ellie homoerotically phrases it. Indeed, there are a number of scholars who interpret the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg as homoerotic, with one critic, Caleb Crain, noting that the cannibalism portrayed by Herman Melville is meant to be a metaphor for homosexuality. Charlie’s guilt-racked gay relationship and subsequent practice of “eating himself to death” fits in quite nicely with that analysis of Melville’s opus—the subject of which also ties in to the film not just title-wise, but “pursuit”-wise as well. With Captain Ahab easily representing the religious zealots embodied by Thomas and the “New Life Church” he works for seeing “The Whale” as pure evil (in this case, Charlie—because of his homosexuality). Just for existing, for being itself. As Charlie is, obese or not.

    “Working around” the physical limitations of his body, Charlie’s job as an English Composition professor teaching courses for an online university also allows him to conceal the monstrosity he has become. To address the word “monstrosity,” the backlash against The Whale for its portrayal of corpulent people was rebuffed by Aronofsky, who worked with the Obesity Action Coalition not just to help Fraser with the physicality of the role, but to better get into the headspace of the self-destruction and addiction behind overeating. Per Aronofsky, the Coalition “really [feels] this is going to open up people’s eyes. You gotta remember, people in this community, they get judged by doctors when they go to get medical help. They get judged everywhere they go on the planet, by most people. This film shows that, like everyone, we are all human and that we are all good and bad and flawed and hopeful and joyful and sorrowful, and there’s all different colors inside of us.”

    Aronofsky also added of the decision to cast a “thin person in a fat suit” (see also: Weird Al’s “Fat” video), “…actors have been using makeup since the beginning of acting—that’s one of their tools. And the lengths we went to portray the realism of the makeup has never been done before.” Those lengths furnished by makeup artist Adrien Morot, who was rightly nominated for an Oscar for her part in bringing the character of Charlie to (large) life. His “girth,” of course, serves as the pronounced metaphor regarding how self-flagellation comes in all forms—“shapes and sizes,” if one prefers a more overt pun. And Charlie’s has been to eat himself into oblivion as punishment. Not just because he feels partly responsible for the suicide of his long-time partner, Alan, but because he left his wife, Mary (Samantha Morton), and then eight-year-old daughter to be with him. At the time of their meeting—when Alan was a student of his at night school—Charlie was still “robust” in build, but obviously not morbidly obese. And whatever Alan saw in Charlie was less about looks and more about his personality. His essential “goodness.” For it’s true what they say about the person who loves you being able to see past certain physical “flaws” that others might deem “grotesque.” But Charlie is bound to live forever with the guilt of abandoning his daughter. Something he’s determined to make right as best as he can.

    This is spurred by the imminence of his demise, as the film commences on Monday to show us the short lifespan of a week Charlie has left after being told by Liz (who is, conveniently, also a nurse) that he has congestive heart failure. Rather than seeking medical treatment—which plays into not only a lack of health insurance, but the aforementioned fear of judgment by a medical professional—he decides to “get his ducks in a row,” as it were. And at the top of that list is getting to know Ellie and trying to help her. When she refuses to stay after being summoned over, he offers to pay her all the money he has—roughly $120,000 in his bank account (all of which he has saved up specifically to give to her). By this point, the “uniquely American” nature of the tale has been accented not only by the out-of-control overweightness that a person can allow to flourish in their dissatisfaction paired with endless access to processed foods, but by the fact that only in America would someone rather die than go to a hospital and incur the inevitable hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt as a consequence. This always occurring when one doesn’t pay the monthly baseline cost of health insurance (itself an extreme expense for those who can’t get it at least partially covered by their workplace). What’s more, only in America would someone be so concerned with expressing their love through money. And know full well that love can be “bought.” Or at least the feigning of love. Which Ellie does little to convey through her surly, enraged aura.

    An anger that has led her to alienate others from being her friend at school, as well as any teachers who might want to keep her from failing out of it. To that end, part of the deal to get Ellie to keep coming around while he still has time is that he’ll rewrite some of her essays for her. In exchange (as he’s convinced of her brilliance), Charlie asks Ellie to write whatever she wants in the notebook he provides for her while she comes over to his apartment. After the first “session,” he finds that all she has written is: “His apartment stinks/This notebook is retarded/I hate everyone.” But yes, it’s a haiku. So she isn’t the incompetent git that her teachers say she is.

    Taking into account the religious and faith-based overtones of the movie, the biblical narrative of Jonah and The Whale provides an additional symbolic context. For Jonah was saved from drowning by a “whale” (or big fish), which one can argue Charlie has done for Ellie by reminding her of her greatness. That she’s “perfect”—just as she is, as Mark Darcy would say. And as it’s the last meaningful thing he can do as a human being on this Earth, he’s made it his mission to not be foiled by her armor. Her dogged determination to be as mean and vicious as possible. For he knows, in the end, that people are “incapable of not caring” (save for, you know, people like Putin). That belief certainly holds true for Ellie.

    As for Liz, who learned long ago by trying to “save” her brother, Alan (hence her deep connection with Charlie), she does not believe a person can ultimately be “saved” by anyone but themselves (going inherently against everything Christians stand for). This being what keeps her from intervening in what Charlie truly wants: the long punishment on his body he’s given himself, followed by death. What Thomas believes Alan was striving for in order to make himself “clean” again for God, citing a scripture Alan had highlighted in his own bible about separating the spirit from the flesh—flesh, in all its meanings, being at the very center of The Whale. But so is strength. The ability for the mind to overpower the body in ways both harmful and beneficial. This being why it was so appropriate for Fraser to note of the part, “I learned quickly that it takes an incredibly strong person inside that body to be that person. That seemed fitting and poetic and practical to me, all at once.”

    A whale isn’t the only symbolic creature in the movie though. There’s also the unacknowledged bird that Charlie keeps luring back to his window by setting food out for it on a plate. By the third act, that plate is broken into shards and the bird seems nowhere to be found. Charlie’s own proverbial plate has been broken now, too, as there’s nothing left to figuratively eat. He’s swallowed life whole and it has spat him back into the abyss. In other words, this bird has flown.

    [ad_2]

    Genna Rivieccio

    Source link