Review of Jamie Marks Is Dead

Spoiler alert: You may want to watch the movie before continuing much farther. I will say without giving too much away that the pace of the movie is slow, but worth the watch regardless. We're too used to the "action packed" fast moving white bread standard Hollywood fare for some to stick with a slow but well crafted piece such as this. But I found it anything but boring. Here's a spoiler, one you will encounter soon into the movie, but you may want to watch before reading my thoughts. I was thrown a bit by the hanging dead fawn. I may have missed something, but never to my knowledge was any allusion made of it in the film. It was a bit of a distraction, wanting to make sense of it while trying to take in the plot line. Here's my take on it. Unless someone was engaged in illegal hunting and too lazy to tend to the game during the movie's duration, the reasonable conclusion is that this was a victim of the driver. The brother does seem to be a bit of a thug type in his actions (pushing the mother out of the way to enter the house after beating on his brother, though the beating was provoked) so he may simply have been the hunter. But if run over it is evidence of prior knowledge of the drunk driver's carelessness (she is referred to as being drunk when she hit the mother by Adam) and was hung there as a cautionary message for her, apparently ignored. This makes the accident somewhat more inevitable, I think. And about that- the mother did back into the roadway at a fast clip, in a hurry, so even though there is little sympathy shown for her other than by the mother, the driver was not entirely at fault. One thing I must counter after reading another review. I don't think the relationship between Adam and Jamie has anything to do with homosexuality. It is a deep friendship that we see develop, nothing more and nothing less. That is the theme, seen also in the friendship, though too lightly explored, between the mother and the driver who "paralyzed her." Gracie's character is there to counter this conclusion. Adam is very interested in her sexually, though every encounter we see is abruptly- frustratingly, for him, ended prematurely (always due to Jamie's presence, in some way, but not because of the "gay thing" but the need to work out his presence on a very different level. Jamie first appears to her, not Adam. He is drawn to her as the person who discovered his body. But she wants nothing to do with him, she makes this very clear, and does her best to instill this feeling into Adam. Adam sees him and is drawn to him because he was sympathetic to Jamie's plight when Jamie was being harassed by the boys at the school, but he did not act to help Jamie, which is why he is compelled to help him later, out of guilt. Jamie is I think not so much jealous of Adam when he is with Gracie, but jealous of the relationship, before his friendship with Adam solidifies. And Jamie has a relationship with Frances which verges on something boy-girl, certainly very caring when he takes her from Adam's house. The love aspect spoken of by Gracie that Jamie needs is something beyond the sexual, the "love a man can have for a man" a quote from Miller's "All My Sons" referring to the bond of soldiers in war, nothing to do with sexuality, or beyond sexuality.

I'll just sum up at this point. I see many levels to this film, with the relationships working in developing the theme that culminates in Adam and Jamie, their relationship and moving on with their respective paths. Quite an unusual movie experience in many ways, and well worth waiting out the pace of the film. Just one further note, concerning the "note." Somehow, according to some questions I have seen the upshot of it was missed by some. The big spoiler: Jamie did indeed commit suicide. Gracie hid the note because she did not want his death to be trivialized due to its being suicide. So, while Gracie could not or would not deal with Jamie's presence, as a ghost, she was sympathetic towards him, as a person.