tell me about human life, i would really like to know

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2013)

I am dazzled by this type of film, because it is about real life. I don't know real life. I couldn't tell you where I, for instance, am exactly, what I am feeling or how I got here. I couldn't distill myself or any of my history into an explainable and recognizable plot. But that is exactly what the makers of this movie and presumably the biographical book it is based on have done. The people seem real, the layers of each others lives fit and adjust and make room for each other. And we are given a God's eye view of the otherwise unknowable human stage. How accurate this method of distillation is is hard to say. Certainly there are limitations. At the end we are shown the real person's photos and we are startled to see how little they actually resemble the actors with whom we have just so intimately met, lived and breathed. Movie stars are very pretty after all, and we are not. We resent the real people a little for daring to step on our dearly acquired representations of them. Much of what happened here was taped, and yet the tapes don't quite feel exactly true to the movie, or is it the other way around? We have films about Lincoln, about Kennedy, and a thousand others and yet we don't really know those human beings. Not really. A painting is flat and still, dry pigment on stiff canvas, and no amount of genius or craft can make it more than that, no matter how much the image startles or moves us. The representation of the thing is never the thing itself, "Dont eat the menu" as Alan Watts used to say. Having said all that and therefore distanced myself perhaps too much from my admiration for this film, all I have left to say is that to do this kind of art, to take real people and to introduce us to them with dignity, empathy and insight and whatever accuracy the material allows, is a monumental achievement. I write, and everything I write is fantasy whether I want it to be or not. I make people and things up. To do the other thing, to make sense and beauty of what is always experienced as an opaque and chaotic reality as we live it, that is truly wonderful. This is a great film.