Reach for the light ... or Jack ... or Jake ...

Rating: 10/10 (26 March 2006)

I have now seen this film twice and enjoyed it each time. A friend of mine said she was annoyed by the film: she wanted the love story to have a happy ending, and I think that is precisely why this film remains with you afterwards; you keep thinking "what if ...".
Strangely enough it reminds me of the Dutch film "Spoorloos", whose ending with the hero buried alive haunts you for days afterwards. BBM was similar: you feel as though you have witnessed Ennis bury himself alive and you feel suffocated by his insistence on cutting himself off from all his feelings. Days later you keep thinking, why ...
It is strange to see what an effect the love of two utter losers (and I really don't use this term pejoratively) can have on so many people watching the film. Despite everything that happens, you go away thinking this is one of the great love stories of the cinema. You keep hoping that Ennis will reach out to the light that is Jack and finally take what will nourish him; but instead he remains in the dark. In the end Jack dies, and Ennis connects his death to the murder from his childhood; I wonder whether this is also not a reflection on the sense of his death: would it not have been better for Jack to have died a death which had meaning (i.e. to die due to his love) than to be the victim of a random accident? If they had lived together, murder might have been the outcome, but death was the outcome anyway.
It takes the death of Jack for Ennis to achieve his anagnorisis: at the end he changes his plans because he realizes it is important to make gestures to those you love (here his daughter) and finally at last he can blurt out the heart-rending last line (which still does not manage to articulate the words he needs). Like all good film love stories, the loss is what makes you feel the love.
So, a haunting film (but perhaps too easily so). Not my favourite by Lee (The Ice Storm works on a so many different levels), but his best love story and one in which he coaxes difficult performances out of his actors.
One thing does nag me: would this film have succeeded if they had used actors who were closer to those in the short story rather than the two most handsome young men in Hollywood?