Nietzsche goes to Hollywood

Rating: 10/10 (21 March 2000)

This is perhaps the greatest film I have seen for a very long time. OK, maybe it would appeal to a 39 year-old divorced man who had a similar epiphany in his life but it also appeals because it deals with fundamental philosophical issues. One comment on the database maintains that it is not beautiful because it is not moral. This seems to me to be a most simplistic and superficial assessment. The whole point of the film is a questioning of the wisdom of accepted norms and morals. It asks us in a very Nietzschean way what it is we do with our lives and how we really want to live them. The point of it being narrated by a dead man is that he has to look at his life and ask himself whether he would do it all again. The final look on his face before he dies not only justfies an oscar for Kevin Spacey as best actor but shows that after going full circle and living in despair he returns to his family and sees it as the beautiful thing it is. In that sense it is a hghly moral fim which should not upset any of the Christian moralists out there (perhaps that is the only bad point of the film) but arrives at that conclusion after only through a process of self discovery. As Nietzsche said, you have to become what you are. Being is therefore both process and state. Lester Burnham goes through the process and the end result is both shocking and beautiful. This film is a masterpiece.