Paradox, delusional narrator commits to dance

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2013)

The Oscars are famously fuddy in a cinematic sense. So, having earlier this week murmured at the snubbing of Moonrise Kingdom, I am now pleased to see this film take its place in the lineup. Part of me is not convinced by some of it, for instance that we should be shown in films the achievement of a perfect happiness as the ending depicts here, if you will a happiness that is happiness because it is perfect. In reality, things rarely fall into place but that shouldn't preclude happiness of the present moment, being whole now with just this whatever it is, in a Buddhist sort of way.
But on with the film.
I come to this as a viewer steeped in narrative dissonance, paradox and asymmetry, these are all things I value in the films I see, in particular when those are carried in a visual way—the Japanese are masters of this, try and track down the seldom-seen All About Lily Chou Chou.
The story here is that we follow a distressed group of more or less delusional people who suffer the usual social frictions with an unusual acuteness, precisely the fact that things are not into place but broken, and through the film overcome their damaged selves to come out on the other end, still more or less damaged but whole. In truth, we all walk through life with delusional expectations of the ideal life, this is just comically exaggerated in this group.
This is most clear in the football-obsessed father, who outgrows his compulsive disorder that in order for his team to win, things or people have to be in a certain place, in a certain order. They don't, life fluctuates. It can go either way. The acceptance of this fundamental truth is what in my eyes sets this apart from something like The Descendants, a touristy film that mistakes manufactured beauty (linked to memory as a Hawaiin postcard) for purity.
The beauty is all in the recognition that things are damaged, dissonant, incomplete. Which brings me to my main point—all of this is wholly carried in the narrative in a visual manner.
The obvious first. The narrator is clearly delusional—to that effect throughout the film the camera is tightly screwed at eye-level, intensely prowls as he does and bursts into views. The narrative has a bipolar energy, with mood swings all over the place. In that vein, I would have liked more swings in the mood, in the 'color' of the camera, together with more visual narration, but so be it, the film is dialogue-driven first, plot-focused.
This type of first-person camera I have elsewhere remarked that can achieve the literary effect of stream-of-consciousness, of consciousness hovering in and off itself, where what we see is not necessarily 'real', but as Malick exemplifies and Herzog before him, can lead to ecstatic perceptions of 'real' intensity.
The filmmaker is aware of something along those lines, you will see in the scene where the man attacks his father in the wedding video scene, that suddenly remembered images from the earlier assault that was the breaking point burst into view.
In line with bursting views, mood swings, and the acceptance of a dissonant life is the dancefloor climax—things fall into place when you commit to the dance together, the dance as love, but this doesn't have to be the ideal dance as you'd normally expect, a 5.0 will do.
And in the actual dance, we have abrupt swings from ballroom jazz to rock'n'roll, from normalcy to how these people experience feelings. The dance reflects who these people are together, a little sloppy but committed.
That's all more than enough. What makes it so enjoyable though, and ultimately exhilarates, is that the whole is continuously stitched with paradoxical behavior. I only recently discovered Lubitsch, whose famed 'touch' was about exactly this.
The finale still bothers, but I can write it out of my mind. This is good stuff.