This isn't, to put it mildly, natural screen material. Then it's off to Europe only with no real sense of urgency. There's no question that plenty is at stake, but the search for meaning that Egan evokes in transcendental terms simply hasn't been injected into our bloodstream. The Invisible Circus works anyway, in a muted, literary way. A dark-eyed beauty with a sheet of black hair, she has a gift for seeming rapt and unsettled in the same instant she has a burning stillness.
Every gesture is pregnant, weighted, born of guilty inner struggle.
Cameron Diaz is Faith, and it's worth seeing the movie to watch her long, bell-bottomed form as it sways ecstatically behind the opening credits. That radiance returns at the moment of death, and Diaz makes Faith's fate seem terrible, tragic, unforgivable and aesthetically right. You need to work to pick up what I'm saying. Penn could evolve into a terrific director he knows how to move the camera and to make the space a character, and he's obviously in sync with actors. But he has to ditch this bum role he has embraced the taciturn Swede, the winter boy.