Mighty Heart
My mother is visiting this weekend. She lives on the other side of the country and got on a plane to come take care of me and see the grand-kiddos for a few days. Because our house is so very small she doesn't actually stay here, but rather gets a hotel room several miles away. Yesterday I went to spend the night with her. It was very tempting to be all cocoon-like and order room service, watch movies, and go nowhere. However, we decided to go out to a restaurant before proceeding with movie cocooning.
The best of the movie bunch at the hotel seemed to be A Mighty Heart -- a film from which I left feeling oddly disconnected. Now, being someone who is typically reduced to a sobbing mess at the slightest hint of loss and heartbreak such as Jolie's character experienced, it was odd to find that I wasn't even shedding a tear. About halfway through the film I realized that this was because the movie wasn't even really about the Pearls (okay, it was), but to me it almost seemed to be more about all of the cellphone conversations and computer connections that intersected in the hunt for Daniel Pearl. You are immersed in this huge matrix of electronic connection that held everyone and everything together until the moment when Marianne Pearl hears the truth about the beheading and it all stops. All the phones and computers are silenced with one of the characters even yelling, "Turn the damn cell phone off!" Like a moment of dead air between the life before and the life after.
From everything I've read it seems like the Pearls did have a Great Love together, and that's the other element that interested me in this film. While I realize that it was a Hollywood depiction of only snapshots from their actual relationship, I still found myself watching with a kind of morbid fascination and longing of a sort. I'm not sure what I'm trying to learn (or prove) from my dissection of intimate moments between those that appear on the surface to have this kind of love. I don't think I'm simplifying or necessarily even romanticizing what these relationships might have that I don't. All relationships are complicated and difficult. I know this. However, I suppose I'd like to have a relationship where the balance between Great Love and pragmatism isn't completely skewed towards the pragmatic as it is (and has always been) my marriage. I get glimpses from things like the smallest of staged-by-Hollywood interactions between Danny and Marianne into what that possibility might be like and when it doesn't make me deeply sad I do become hopeful. Maybe just hopeful for humanity if not myself. I have to wonder, however, what it says about me that I study love rather than live it.
Besides all of that I was mildly distracted by the size of Angelina Jolie's lips (they don't seem quite human).
The best of the movie bunch at the hotel seemed to be A Mighty Heart -- a film from which I left feeling oddly disconnected. Now, being someone who is typically reduced to a sobbing mess at the slightest hint of loss and heartbreak such as Jolie's character experienced, it was odd to find that I wasn't even shedding a tear. About halfway through the film I realized that this was because the movie wasn't even really about the Pearls (okay, it was), but to me it almost seemed to be more about all of the cellphone conversations and computer connections that intersected in the hunt for Daniel Pearl. You are immersed in this huge matrix of electronic connection that held everyone and everything together until the moment when Marianne Pearl hears the truth about the beheading and it all stops. All the phones and computers are silenced with one of the characters even yelling, "Turn the damn cell phone off!" Like a moment of dead air between the life before and the life after.
From everything I've read it seems like the Pearls did have a Great Love together, and that's the other element that interested me in this film. While I realize that it was a Hollywood depiction of only snapshots from their actual relationship, I still found myself watching with a kind of morbid fascination and longing of a sort. I'm not sure what I'm trying to learn (or prove) from my dissection of intimate moments between those that appear on the surface to have this kind of love. I don't think I'm simplifying or necessarily even romanticizing what these relationships might have that I don't. All relationships are complicated and difficult. I know this. However, I suppose I'd like to have a relationship where the balance between Great Love and pragmatism isn't completely skewed towards the pragmatic as it is (and has always been) my marriage. I get glimpses from things like the smallest of staged-by-Hollywood interactions between Danny and Marianne into what that possibility might be like and when it doesn't make me deeply sad I do become hopeful. Maybe just hopeful for humanity if not myself. I have to wonder, however, what it says about me that I study love rather than live it.
Besides all of that I was mildly distracted by the size of Angelina Jolie's lips (they don't seem quite human).