Reviews

Convention triumphs over the unexpectedly exposed and terrifying truth of the self in Atom Egoyan's contemporary marriage mystery. A female gynecologist—a professional trained to look inside the bodies of women to reveal their truth, and perhaps something of their essence—suspects her husband of infidelity. She hires a Lolita look-alike call girl to entice her husband to determine his betrayal tendencies. The husband, a college instructor, and flirt, denies aging by intentionally missing his flight to home on his birthday, thwarting his wife's surprise birthday party arrangements. Their relationship has died—he now devotes himself to teaching, and is apathetic about the burned-out marital passion; she walks around in frustration, and flails about in response to her ineffectual attempts to her marriage emptiness. While it appears the husband is at least getting his physical needs met, the couple's mentally ill teenage son is obviously the only one in this upper middle class bare semblance of a family getting any for sure. His mother, jealous of her son's liaisons, but actually confronted by her own passionless life by his success, fails to connect, too, with the other familial male —her son. This woman, apparently successful at discerning the nature, or at least the core female health of her professional clients, has lost the capacity to know herself, and how to know herself. The prostitute reports her 'findings' face-to-face to the wife, which arouses her. The young woman, played effectively with big blue eyes and mouthy nuance by Amanda Siegfried, notes the wife's subtle arousal signals. The wife surprises herself with her responses to the descriptive tales of liaison, but the girl's got an unrevealed plan. The wife comes to the discovery of her true sexual nature, but without revealing the whys of her rejection of it, falls back to conventionality. The movie's ending cops out to the truth, revealing once again Hollywood's immense incapacity for encouraging honest living, or at least genuine acknowledgment of the truth, and the cost of its ignorance. © Bruce Stern, April 2010

It's thirty years after an earthly holocaust. A lone man strides determinedly along a two-lane blacktop with a knapsack on his back. The visuals are sepia-toned--brown, like the desolate landscape. Then, the confusion begins. Is he protecting what little he has on his back? What's with the bad-ass sword he wields? What's he doing with the leather-bound and locked book he reads from? Why does he keep to himself? Why doesn't he give up the tangible treasure early in the story, when it becomes clear at the end of the story he didn't need it in the first place, accept as an apparent excuse to demonstrate his weapons prowess throughout the rest of the movie? Is this a good vs. evil story? Is it a story justifying violence for greater good? Is this a movie about keeping a special message from evils hands and minds to prevent the messages' corruption? Is it about means justifying ends? Does the story want us to believe that some preservation of a particular philosophical message warrant whatever behavior is necessary to preserve that message? Why is the message appealing, and so much so that it captivates listens of a small part of it immediately, especially those without any apparent ethical or moral education? And, as the movie shows, why couldn't the message be construed as being destructive, rather than constructive, or even uplifting? The Book of Eli presents too many conflicting messages for this viewer of it to have a handle any clear message to take away from my watching of it, despite enjoying Denzel Washington's performance and the visuals of its camera-work.