The story with god in the machine

Rating: Null/10 (13 February 2013)

Films usually work upon the same mechanisms, it is what religion in old times simply used to warn against. In more typical dramas, the sin is acted out as some part of life, the more recognizable the better. This was fine for centuries, but the invention of the camera opened it up in great ways. More ambitious films visualize the experience or feeling as it arises, more or less vividly render the hell of it (think Lynch), usually with some the ambiguity and mystery it happens in real life.
This is midway between the two ways.
Framed with religion and the search for answers, the story here is of a young boy on a spiritual journey with his animal self. The boy has previously adopted religion, several in fact, and this deeper perspective he cultivates is the film we see. On a simple level, it is a story of survival, but so extraordinary that you know there's more to it, hidden depths. Visualized around him, we have a series of meditations inspired by the elements—in tempestuous seas, in the whale magnificent to behold but wrecks everything, in the magical, by day, inter- connected nature of the island but turns deadly by night.
Visually, the experience has been more evocatively done in Tropical Malady, which is on the same journey to inner self (once more a tiger) and clarity. Greenaway has more puzzling symmetries. But it's a nice film to have, perhaps too clean and cutesy, but clean for a reason.
Here's the caveat. The idea so simplified in the end, is that we can't know one way or the other, but here we are, loved ones perish, we continue to be tossed in an ocean of suffering, and that god is perhaps the more attractive story to grim reality, it provides purpose and color, soothes the soul on her journey. This explains the Disney cleanliness, as his mind not dwelling on death.
The sentiment makes sense of course, but suddenly reduces.
Going back, you will see this reductive logic in places, reductive because it IS logic. The most telling spot for me is the following, it is the one that should be the most emotionally powerful moment in the film, the most purely visual because it is directly of the boy's soul. Among the visual meditations, there is the one of him being submerged in the sea to the quantum level of soul where images bubble up and form everything else, he goes past the animals, past the symbols, and settles on the face of his loved one, all of it illusory.
It is of course the feeling that has arisen in him, but see how it is rendered. Schematic isn't it?
Not unlike its notion of god, which reduces in retrospect by too simple sense. So keep this film to heart, it has its heart in the right place, but imagine how you would do the swim. Zen starry waters without the Disney luminescence maybe? I have similar issues with Koyannisqatsi's constructed nature.
The magic in it being what it is, not constructed, revelatory as it is.