Moriarty's Rumblings From The Labs
Harry here, you have enough reading to do... Here's
Moriarty!
excerpt from column
Seeing Scott Caan in that film came as a strange sort of
coincidental shock, since one of the other films I watched
this weekend was a very small, unreleased independent film
called SATURN. It’s a strange, beautiful little film about
holding on to pain and letting go of control and about that
particular moment when we cross from being the children who
are taken care of to the ones who take care of our parents.
Leo Burmester, who many of you would recognize as Catfish in
THE ABYSS, does knockout work here as a stroke victim, a man
locked in a degenerating body, forced to rely on his son for
everything. As Drew, the long-suffering son, Scott Caan gives
a really subtle, special performance, one that should net him
more work if this film is ever seen by people. It should be. I
know that the director of the film, R Schmidt, already has
another film in the can and ready for release called CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT IN SUBURBIA. Maybe that film’s release will provide
the impetus to some brave distributor to take a chance with
this one. Mira Kirshner, so wonderful in EXOTICA, gives a
brave, raw, intuitive performance here as a girl whose life
intersects with Drew’s for something that looks like love, but
which is ultimately nothing more than convenience, temporary
connection. Caan is crushed slowly in this film by the weight
of the responsibility he feels for his father, and he handles
it in all the wrong ways. He is derailed from school, loses
his job, finds himself drinking and getting high every night.
He looks for any sensation that might dull the ache he feels
for the life that’s passing him by, and it’s wrenching to
watch his slide, especially by his father, who is trapped
there, a spectator to the ruin he is causing in his own son’s
life. This is a film that you don’t just watch… you feel it
deeply. It gets inside you. It’s never a big film, and that’s
part of its power. It just keeps coming at you with detail
after detail, small moment after small moment, until the final
accumulated mass of them all crushes us the same way it does
Caan. This is not a perfect movie… the ending feels almost too
pat for me, too easy… but it’s one that people should see, and
it seems to be an announcement of sorts for a new voice worth
listening to.
In another act of peculiar synchronicity, I read a book
this week that I have to recommend to you that ties in
thematically with SATURN, although as an almost inverse mirror
of that film’s central relationship. I picked the book up
initially because of its title, but I couldn’t put it down
once I started flipping through, reading passages. A
HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS (Simon & Schuster)
is neither a novel or a non-fiction document. Instead, it is a
sort of recreated memory piece, a memoir of sorts for Dave
Eggers, one of the founding editors of the short-lived MIGHT
magazine. His mother and father both died of cancer within
five weeks of each other, leaving Dave, barely old enough to
drink, to take care of his nine year old brother Toph.
Together, the two of them try to forge a life together in San
Francisco, 3000 miles away from the Chicago suburb where they
grew up, trying to escape the immense pain they exist in the
shadow of, trying to find some way to make this impossible
situation work. The book is laugh-out-loud funny in many
places, deeply moving in others, and it frequently demolishes
the wall between itself and the reader, commenting on itself
even as it unfolds. Eggers is a marvelous writer, detailed and
emotional and witty and wicked. The most amazing thing about
the book is how naked it is. Eggers doesn’t paint himself as
perfect. Far from it. His reportage is so honest at times, so
brutal, that you wonder if he isn’t exaggerating his own
shortcomings for dramatic effect. He’s so open that there’s no
doubt he burned some personal bridges with this book. I admire
him. I am attacked viciously whenever I reveal personal
details in this column or in a review, and I am always amazed
to see someone take their pain and their sorrow and turn it
into something that helps other people, that speaks to them.
Eggers talks about his experience in starting MIGHT magazine
with his friends; about his attempts to get onto THE REAL
WORLD for the San Francisco cast; about meeting Judd and Puck,
two of the people who did make the show; about their infamous
MIGHT cover story on the death of Adam “Eight Is Enough” Rich,
a hoax that got picked up by wire services, then angrily
debunked. Throughout it all, Eggers comes back to the deaths
of his parents, working it like a raw nerve. He circles his
grief, picking at it, refusing to deal with it, until very
late in the book, when he simply rips the band-aid off and
lets himself mourn with his whole being. The impact of this
change is cataclysmic as a reader. I was deeply touched by
this book, by this writer, and I can’t urge you strongly
enough to find this book and soak in it. It’s a killer.
See how quickly that went by?
Moriarty Out
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