The time of this film is the mid 60s. In real life, this was prime time for me. Lots happening that the movie brought back with a vengeance. I was never lower middle class, but much of my milieu was. If real-life recollection means anything, this flick caught it in spades. Not everything that happened hung together, which is how life REALLY unfolds. Lots of unhung-together stuff happens, and your awareness gets pulled all around from thing to thing. Only thing that's consistent is that it's all happening to you.
Of course, not everybody lives a complex life--particularly not one where their awareness must skip from one realm to an unconnected other realm. But back then mine was indeed like that. I lived a lot of things, in many different circles, all occurring quite suddenly in close temporal proximity to each other. When that happens, just living becomes very stressful. Most people blink out the temporaneously incongruent . . . give themselves the illusion that things happen in a unified stream of events . . . unwanted intrusions from incongruent events just don't seem to be there in their awareness and recollections to interfere with each other. For example, all their friends are white, of the same class, in a perpetually congruent cultural context (they don't even see the black cop directing traffic, the Hispanic busboy, the Chinese English professor with a thick accent, the gay barber). But if you travel eyes-wide-open in a lot of circles that typically exclude each other, these circles will intersect in more accidental than thematically coherent schedules of bumping into each other. Like a couple of hours in the bumper cars. Nobody in the other bumper cars has any specific designs on bumping you off your course. They've each got their own thing in mind, and the bumper happens in an accidental time/logic of its own. If you value every experience-- like if you were to value every bump in the bumper cars-- you start to feel constantly distracted. But over enough time and sufficient events, the whole starts to make some kind of for-the-moment sense-- while all the time random events take place all around you.
So, here's Tim Robbins--playing a white deceased cop's son who feels he might have stumbled (through hearing a Martin Luther King speech at an accidentally extra-propitious moment in his life) into actual enactment of a philosophy of love rather than boundaries-defining hate--trying to hold together several divergent currents in his life (some for which he had a past, others quite new). The bumper car temporality of it all for sure makes this movie. We see working class/lower middle class Carroll O'Connor ALL IN THE FAMILY life, with its penchant for ignoring things right under the nose that might make one more uncomfortable than one already is, displayed in all its famed insensitivity to otherness. A plainclothes cop on stakeout dies horribly and insignificantly inside a street phone booth crashed into with great disregard by the villain's car running into it in a bad version of emergency parking-- and when a uniformed cop is asked by a sleepy detective where the stakeout is, the uniform says carelessly (while pointing to the underneath of the car), "He's under there." No spirit of funeral ceremony for the thin blue line. Only the working class penchant for seeing self and others in terms of things that things unexplicably happen TO--a defensively blase attitude which careful research has shown causes cops to get into so much trouble when trying to handle the complexities of emotional events and interpersonal conflicts.
This is what Tim Robbins is trying to grow beyond as much as he can--and the course of the plot sets some harsh parameters regarding how far Tim is ever going to be allowed to get in this effort. In the middle of this high drama, some kid gets back with his girlfriend at the mention of their some day having kids together (totally unaware of the drama involved in the car that almost ran into a high-speed head-on crash into the car he and his girl are in), and the movie ends with a Black guy who had an intolerant encounter with Tim in the dinner probably coming to Tim's house to tell him (after all that happened right here in the Bronx) that he has been accepted to go to Mississippi.
What I'm trying to get at here is the suggestion that WHAT THIS FILM LOSES IN THEATRICAL COHERENCE IT GAINS IN REAL-LIFE DISPARATE FLOW. As a psychotherapist doing a lot of professional in-service training and supervision, I object strongly to the use of films to portray mental illness. Theatrical drama-logic requires a degree of plot evolution coherence and motivational reasonableness that are simply missing in genuine diagnoses of mental illness-- in fact, such fragmentation is often the point of mental illness. In the case of this film, however, I immediately purchased it for use in showing how the progression of real life wily nily sweeps together otherwise disparate flows of events. And I'm not using this to raise the consciousness of one-to-one psychotherapists, but of social workers who must do the magic of therapy on the run, in context, while catching life in real time out in the field (as opposed to in the comfort of a make-believe life milieu of the office). I started my career doing street gang work in the then murderous New York City Lower East Side at around the time this movie depicts, so the memories aroused in me by this film are hardly just theoretical.
As a European immigrant, I find myself enjoying more and more PBS travel shows (like Rick Steve's 30 minutes travel pieces through Europe). So I can't help wondering if a movie like this one doesn't require a travel guide for even the experienced to fully appreciate. That doesn't mean a movie critic (for whom I have only the greatest respect and appreciation), but someone who has lived the sort of life processes reflected in this film, and who has had to reflect on that living through to some depth.
Alas, the logic by which I give this gem five stars may seem quarky to some, so I'd very much like to hear what you think--AFTER you buy and look closely at this much underappreciated film, of course.
Opiniones con imágenes
Reporta una opinión
Algunas razones frecuentes por las que los clientes reportan opiniones:
- Acoso, lenguaje ofensivo
- Spam, publicidad, promociones
- Otorgado a cambio de efectivo, descuentos
Cuando obtengamos tu reporte, verificaremos si la revisión cumple con nuestras pautas de la comunidad. Si no lo hace, lo retiraremos.
Lo sentimos, se produjo un error
Inténtalo de nuevo más tarde.Opiniones destacadas de los Estados Unidos
Ha surgido un problema al filtrar las opiniones justo en este momento. Vuelva a intentarlo en otro momento.
Calificado en Estados Unidos el 20 de julio de 2011
Calificado en Estados Unidos el 22 de mayo de 2014
Calificado en Estados Unidos el 7 de junio de 2019
Calificado en Estados Unidos el 5 de febrero de 2011
Opiniones más destacadas de otros países
Linda J. White
DVD Five Corners - excellent movie, excellent product.
Calificado en Canadá el 3 de abril de 2012
