Pointless and Depressing

Rating: 5/10 (27 August 2002)

OK, OK. I sent in the following comment just after seeing this movie for the first time:
"The summary [Stupid, Pointless, Terrible] pretty much says it all. Save yourself 2.5h of boring, hard-to-watch stupid movie. Perhaps the only conclusion about this movie is that accidents involving parents during childhood can really, really mess someone up."
I admit that I was upset, and not just a little bit. After some relaxing and thinking, the above needs some elaboration to be useful to anyone that has not yet seen this movie.
First, this could have been a very good movie; it comes close in a lot of areas, especially in the cinematography. The Greek locations are spectacular. But I have to say that the underwater shots left me unimpressed.
**SPOILERS** More importantly, this movie _seems_ to be a movie about love: the lead male (Jacques Mayol) is conflicted between his love of the ocean, love of his "family" of dolphins, and love of his human partner, Johanna.

This is where I just don't get this movie, and the almost overwhelmingly positive response to it at IMDB. Mayol is in many respects a classic male lead: he reminds me of Clint Eastwood in many of his westerns, and as Dirty Harry. Does Clint portray a loving male role model in these movies? Not in my book, and Mayol misses even more so in this movie. Mayol doesn't communicate with anyone in a reasonable fashion, except, it seems, his dolphins. My initial response to his adult character is that he's just a really messed up individual that never got over the abandonment of his mother and the death of his father, who was a diver for his living.
Nothing I saw in the movie leads me to believe otherwise about Mayol. One wonders why Johanna would possible stay with this guy. He and she never have anything more than extremely tense, completely dysfunctional interactions. Johanna tries to get him to interact with her, but other than sex, absolutely nothing happens that one could view as positive in any way. Mayol has sex with her, tells her he _thinks_ he's in love with her, and then takes off and spends the rest of the night swimming in the ocean with his dolphin friends (lovers?).
A lot is made about the "friendship" between Mayol and his boyhood bully Enzo. Forget it; Enzo tries his best to be friends with Mayol in their adult life, but again Mayol seems completely disinterested in this other form of human contact. Enzo and Mayol compete in free diving, but Mayol clearly just doesn't care about the competitions, taking any real interest away from this part of the movie.
Mayol is just flat nuts in the head, and the end of the movie proves that he is more seriously suicidal that Enzo. Enzo dies trying to prove he is the best; Mayol dives away from the love and family that is offered to him with Johanna.
So my anger has to do with watching such a destructive, unhappy, dysfunctional individual not only mess his own life up, but also that of the people that need and love him. There's some weird talk in the movie about the call of the deep blue, and mermaids that await males in the depths of the ocean "if their love is true." What a load of baloney! It would work if the movie went toward showing how Mayol was psychologically damaged by his father's death, and how Johanna (and Enzo's death) help bring him back to humanity. But the movie goes in just the opposite direction.
I found this movie utterly depressing and pointless. It's clear a lot of other people saw something else in it. Even as a fairytale--Mayol swims away to live as a weird human/dolphin--the movie just doesn't work. He leaves a wife and unborn child for no justifiable reason.
I finally gave the movie a 4 of 10 rating, only for the cinematography. If you like weepy love stories, there have to be many better movies out there! This one just makes no sense at all.