Crying from the outside

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2014)

Another film about life with a damaged mind. Films of this sort often deal with mathematical or musical minds so that we can find in the apparent mess not just a handicap, but a reaching out and capacity for order and beauty. Focusing on genius however kind of obscures what's really at stake. In simple terms, if the protagonist of Shine wasn't a child prodigy would there be a film about him?
The film is open about this motivation, selfaware, by having the snappy journalist, a surrogate for the filmmaker himself, drawn to the schizophrenic homeless musician among thousands of a similar fate because this one makes for an enhanced story.
What matters for me though is what kind of salvation are we drawn to find. This is worthwhile in many aspects. The inspirational beauty comes less from any extraordinary playing, there is no triumphant final performance as in Shine, and more from the fact of his complete immersion in music. We get to see both the damage, the voices and paranoid storytelling inside the mind, and the enhanced capacity beyond: music as abstract color vision, the rapture of the immersion itself.
The final realization is that nothing matters more than simply being in reach for another person, a gently skiing support instead of any patronizing panacea.
I like all these things here, but at the same time it's a matter of evoking it as awareness. We perfectly sane minds of the audience (right) want to rediscover this capacity for immersion that eludes us in the outer shell of normalcy, it's why we watch films among other things. We need to be reminded that normal life has no logical purpose of its own without the commitment to someone. All this means that we want to experience film as madly as Ayers experiences music, the distance into which self dissolves into insight (this being narrative depth); but come out whole, lucid.
But there's no distance when you simply tell us; no value. In Ice Storm we get the same realization of holding each other into place but layered and visual. Woman Under the Influence is the real masterpiece in this vein: even more gruelling life with a schizophrenic than here, but enlightens by asking of us as viewers to experience the commitment and immersion, and this being the most important thing, one as the other, in other words we can immerse ourselves in the film and find value only if we commit to being a part of that life, nothing less will do. In the marvelous end, the gentle support doesn't have to be announced, it's there in two people simply taking care of the same house before going to bed.
This cries on its skin, enlightens in words, asks only the appearance of commitment.