Emotionally engaging mystery and drama

Rating: 9/10 (1 June 2011)

My husband and I were both very impressed and emotionally engaged throughout the whole film even though we had seen the play Scorched which we both considered the best play with deep meaning we had seen in years. Let me recommend the play, too, whether or not you've seen the movie. Someone said the play is 4 hours long. It may have been but I don't remember a boring moment, though I remember parts that aren't in the movie. The movie, nonetheless, is whole and complete.
The characters of the mother and her twin daughter and son are all extremely sensitively portrayed by the actors. Without flashbacks to the emotionally distant and confusing parenting they received from their mother, you are able to imagine the wounds they received, compounded by a complete lack of knowledge of the reasons. The daughter, Jeanne, seems to have dealt with this by becoming a student of pure mathematics. The professor to whom she is a TA welcomes the students to the world of abstraction and solitude. Her brother Simon simmers in rage.
After their mother's death, they embark on a journey of discovery their mother stipulates in the cryptic and startling instructions in her will. The journey leads first Jeanne and eventually Simon to Lebanon. They discover the origins of their mother's wounds, little by little, as they learn of her difficult (an understatement)life as a young adult in a country with unforgiving moral standards for young love relationships and at war with itself. As the viewer, you see this difficult life of the mother through flashbacks of her coming of age in horrendous circumstances, as her children in the present day learn of her tortured life and of her determined strength.
The movie, as does the play, provides the audience an opportunity to see what may lie hidden behind the face of distance, withdrawal, or rage in others. It encourages compassion for ourselves and others whose demeanor is simply a survival mechanism to deal with wounds which you may not know or understand. It also lets one experience vicariously (thankfully)the horrors of war, especially, war based on revenge for personal and "tribal" atrocities. All of this makes us more whole, more compassionate, and less quick to judgement of good or bad in a very complicated world.