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Absolutely Riveting and Unshakable!
by Yahoo! Movies User (movies profile)
Feb 23, 2006
14
of
17 people found this review helpful
I was taught that a movie critic keeps him or herself out of the review. That's a tough one with this review, as I am always honor bound never to give away the plot or ending, so what does that leave? Well, it still leaves a huge reservoir with which to work, and drops me right where I must be for this review -- deep inside my soul with emotions swirling and engulfing me to the point of waking me at 3:30 a.m. wanting to sit and write this review.
While this was not an upbeat holiday film, and I had not read the book propelling me to want to view it, something in the preview gripped me and wouldn't let me go. I don't even like to see anything disturbing or violence of any kind any more in movies, but when making my choice I kept coming back to this one even though I really did want and need to laugh. As I do love a well-written story with plot twists and cliff-hangers, this imposing film more than qualified and won out, and I felt myself literally driven to experience it for better or worse. Turns out it has staying power, and I can't seem to shake its haunting story and visuals.
Being dropped into the middle of a story is never appealing to me, as it usually leaves something out, usually something excruciatingly important, like building characters that you care about. But that is exactly what is done here, and you find you don't need more than the crumbs given you about their lives and pasts. What the viewer identifies with is the concept of the house itself -- the elephant in the room so to speak -- and the concept of ownership of that to which we retreat and nurture ourselves in this all too cold world outside.
Three lives, perhaps at the peak of their breaking points, fortuitously intersect over a house (inherited from her father by Jennifer Connelly) wrongly put up for auction. But before you just go ahead and conveniently blame the government (it's always such an easy, obvious choice), in truth there's plenty of blame to go around here. And while you are able to strongly "see" everyone's viewpoints and reasons therefor, you are still blind-sided by the slow but steady forward movement of the film's story toward its climax. Great care was taken to give equal weight to both sides of this riveting story, so much so that you ultimately become attached to both major characters, albeit very late and rather begrudgingly to Ben Kingsley's. But then the actions of the third spin the movie out of control and to its no-turning-back conclusion. To think that something as intangible as a house could cause such shattering effects on their destiny is what makes you shake your head in gut-wrenching sadness at the movie's final scenes. Yet that very slow-paced forward movement which has you so caught up emotionally along the way, in retrospect, deep in the recesses of your mind clearly foreshadowed what was to come.
In the end, it was an emotional morality play. TV's financial guru, Suze Orman, has oft-repeated the heartsong of this movie, "First people, then money, then things." Everyone had it backward in terrifying unison. |
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