not much

Rating: Null/10 (15 August 1999)

Close your eyes when Judi Dench speaks and I think you'll hear strong echoes of Bette Davis. As in "The Private Lives Of Elizabeth and Essex" and "The Virgin Queen." Paltrow deserved the Oscar. The final scene in this movie hasn't been mentioned much in all the user comments I've read. It is a profound metaphor of art's relation to humanity. I think anyone with a literary bent could unleash a torrent of interpretative explication on it. So, here goes nothin'. The shipwreck is Death, the drowning victims are the innumerable generations of nobodies lost to History, and the survivor, Viola, is the Muse (Art), who, like her twin sister, Hope, [another survivor, trapped in the safety of Pandora's box,) crosses the barren wastes of chaos to the fertile forests of meaning and redemption. If you study the composition of the closing shot, you'll see that the credits{text, language,} are superimposed over the treeline in the middle ground, while the strolling figure of the Muse {Viola} traverses the barren sands {chaos}. If Shakespeare is considered as the great organizer of experience, then this scene invests his works with an organic fecundity that resonates throughout the ensuing historical attempts of war and capitalistic endeavors to stave off the inevitabile triumph of Thanantos. Marcuse and Norman Brown are revving in the soil right now, I'm sure...