Stories and reflection

JonWatches

**SPOILER begins down at word SPOILER**

If you dig a deep hole, even if you do a perfect job of digging a hole that serves a very good purpose, you still have to climb out. I think I'm happier that My First Mister does the climbing, even though that makes the last part of the film more trite than the glorious beginning. Some stories dig, and dig deep, but to be a 'story' at all, they have to end, not just stop, although for this film I would have chosen a less Hollywood-tied-up ending. (But I didn't invest the money in a film that needs to pay the bills).

I'm glad the medium and considerable talent using it could bring me this lovingly ambiguous event.

Beyond that, the film showed me a few things I enjoyed learning.

From the story I especially took away the re-enforcing message that if we let our lack of boldness rule, we may be letting others down. Humility isn't thinking we have nothing to offer, or even that we might not be the only person in the world to offer it. The happiness of the rest of someone else's life may depend on us. In fact, a la It's a Wonderful Life, it probably has. Ignoring this isn't "humble," it's cowardly.

**SPOILER** In a mix of story and film, I thought after the great day R and J spent together that J was going to be molested, or in a car accident, to precipitate the third act with a crisis--I felt a TV moment coming on. So when we made it clear until R was late coming back from his jog (did we know he jogged?), I was actually holding out that a heart attack (turns out to be leukemia) would straight up kill him, then J would have the burden of the third act entirely in her court (Sobieski could have handled it), say, by having to do all the things a wife does after her husband's death while being treated as a child by ambulance personnel, funeral home director, clergy, et al. Think of the scene where she wants to dress R's body but is pushed away by funeral home people, and so can only leave a piercing stud attached to his clothes--an icon of her lonely youth used as a symbol of her maturing love. Her kiss from death would play out in a social role she wanted, but was not accepted in, in ironic juxtaposition to how she had imagined it playing out beyond any (accepted) social roles. And the scene where she almost but doesn't cut herself, and breaks down in shoulder-shaking sobs, and her mother shows up at her partially-open apartment door with food, hears her, and enters into the darkness, crossing into her own acceptance of the other side of life.

But, the TV moment came...by comparison, listen to the deleted scene commentaries for Passionada--if only My First Mister had gotten the same chance at a new third act... Perhaps I'm learning that our imagined endings are still valid. Who's to say that we can't enjoy a film because of where it pointed us, even if it didn't really go there?

As for the strictly film aspects, I still dislike non-standard dissolves popping up in the last one-third of a film, especially if it isn't strictly romantic comedy. Why, in such a delicate film, would an editor do something like that? But in the last supper scene the apparent discontinuity, then toast, then fading of individuals were inspiring. Did J really give that toast? To follow hinted continuity (R and Nurse Patty had already moved to the sofa, though they could have returned) she didn't, or perhaps she did, but it wasn't really like that...such a beautiful suggestion of how we remember those evenings that were too good to be true in the face of realities too bad to accept.

A hole well dug, even if I didn't dig the whole as much as I might have.

score 8/10

JonWatches 10 September 2006

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1471487/