Elio, Elio, Elio...

Rating: 10/10 (28 January 2018)

This is a visually stunning film. Dramatically, it pulls its punches until long after you've expected, and wanted, them. And stubbornly, it never goes where you want it to go. And that is the point. Even so, by its conclusion you will feel that you've been on a profound journey drenched with strong, and confusing, emotions. Armie Hammer plays Oliver, an American college student on a foreign study assignment to Italy. There, he is a house guest of a family in a country villa with a 17 year old son played by Timothee' Chalamet. It is the early 1980's: the purgatory years for gay people when "Dynasty's" Stephen Carrington whiplashed between gay and straight from one episode to the next on American television, the AIDS epidemic was in, what turned out to be, its infancy, laws criminalizing gay people remained in penal codes around the world, and marriage equality had not yet been imagined; much less litigated, even much more less become a reality. Within this geo-social landscape, questions began to echo through these societal, and homophobic, norms. "Norms" that turned out, in fact, to be abnormal. They turned out to be merely dominant; and poorly examined. It is within this societal context that Elio and Oliver meet.
The pace, and arc, of their relationship is deliberately, well - not fast. On the way, however, we are treated to the breathtaking beauty of the Italian countryside, squabbling, and of course passionate, Italians, and the heterosexual distractions that constitute the moat between the two main characters. Armie Hammer throws his acting depth onto the sacrificial fires of this film for the greater good of delivering an Oliver who is as one dimensional as a billboard and as alluring as a mirage. He is tall, handsome, and cocky. He smiles with acres of white teeth and punctuates his conversations with one word quips like, "later". The power in his character is literally its lack of obvious depth. It is a thankless job. But so effective in the totality of this story. He is allowed a few brief moments to reveal the roiling conflicts inside of himself. Then just as quickly as they appear, they're withdrawn lest they be examined too thoroughly; which is the point. Elio, by contrast, is a walking human autopsy of the living. His deepest troubles and longings are laid bare. And Chalamet is extraordinary in revealing something about youth that we are incapable of taking our eyes off of. He is a fawn pulling himself up by his wobbly legs for the first time and then bursting into a full gallop fueled by instinct, exuberance, and energy. These are the qualities that have been slowly killed in the adults who surround him. They are the qualities that echo from the past; from the relics that Elio's father dredges up from the ocean floor (foreshadowing here...), to the beautiful countryside's centuries old stone walls adorned with faded, macabre, Mussolini posters. These same qualities will be killed in Oliver, ultimately. But you can't prevent instinct, exuberance, and energy, because it is continuously reborn. As it has been in Elio.
The deliberate, and sometimes deliberately frustrating, pace with which this story is told renders its most powerful moments a punch to the gut. Before that sledgehammer (no pun intended) lands, we are re-acquainted with the chaotic messiness of youth where anything is theoretically possible; until it crashes head on into reality. That's the time in life when we learn how not to hurt people by hurting them and then regretting it. By the time the final conversation between Elio and Oliver arrives, over a hissing and crackling long distance phone line, you will need to pick your stomach up from the floor. Elio, in a barely audible whisper, cries out to Oliver. His voice is the only voice that hasn't succumbed yet. He is the sole survivor that, for all practical purposes (bizarre plot line detour notwithstanding), is alone is the wilderness. Oliver cannot hear his pleas over the din of the grinding gears of the pantomime of life around them. Elio's pleas echo back to him alone; and leaves us with the question, him too? You'll get an answer to that. But not in this review.
Passing through the lobby after the film I saw a man, seated, head buried in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably. He was being comforted by a female companion; his sister, a friend, or wife, don't know. Truth be told, we all felt at least a little bit like the way he looked. Was he Elio? Or Oliver? Don't know. That scene in the lobby, for me, was the inescapable ending to this film.