Off to the Side

Rating: Null/10 (29 August 2007)

Its an exciting time to be alive because basic notions of narrative are being reinvented. Movies are where it is happening.
Now imagine that you are a writer and you want to do something honest, because honest is affecting and you want to resonate. Suppose you suspect yourself of simple, superficial effects, like that offensive "Million Dollar Baby" affair. Suppose you have some money and you really want to escape the feeling that you don't matter. You'll make your own "important" movie.
There's a challenge. Essentially no movie today can be honest and direct in the sense of being without modern reflection and what folks (inadequately) call irony. You just cannot escape it, no matter how emotionally pure and connected you wish to be. So the first challenge is to structure the thing so that these elements are shunted off to areas where people won't notice. This fellow knows enough about his craft to do so, and the results are interesting.
Contrast this with one of Altman's multithreaded projects. Or "Magnolia." The way they work is that they assume the world flows independently of what we see. The camera jumps from node to node, discovering enough about what is happening for us to make a story out of it. But that story is ours, synthesized in the eye.
This here is different. Everything we see are stories but they are complete stories. We see the beginning and end of each. We know that each isn't a part of a great river but is contained in discrete packages for us. The stories take the place of the world and come from the film to us. We have no say in making them.
Now this, I think is by design. All the modernity, the self-reflective and ironic character we need is shunted off into this cosmological corner, into place where most viewers never look. That allows the stories, and more importantly the actors, the freedom to just work at connecting. Not a complex connection where we get context about the channel, but direct, emotional contact. That's because this whole project is based not on making sense, giving us cleverness, or even mattering in our lives. Its all about connection, contact, soft crash.
Its an engineered risk, because it confounds itself in unexpected ways. The first is that it underscores that matters of race in the US are matters of inherited story. Those templates come to us in life much like the stories in the movie come: whole, encapsulated, apparently immutable. Inescapable. But at the same time, since the boundaries are so solid, the role of will and change and redemption are so remote, all we can do is take it as it comes. So it connects while it comes and is lost after it goes.
I think this writer, Haggis, might actually be able to do something that matters, that folks will count in the future as something forward and not backward. He sure understands the machinery. There's even a mechanical fold about mechanical folding. The most intense story is about a black man and his not-so-black wife. He's a maker of films (actually TeeVee, following Ted's law of layered abstraction). The things he makes are race stories, and his constraints mirror those that Haggis has. You can see Haggis diagramming this.
All in all, the connection didn't work with me. Its too contrived to be real. To judge from the way it is celebrated, most viewers will disagree because to them the mechanics aren't noticed as intended. I may have ruined this for you, which is why I put the spoiler tag on the beginning.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.