"It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them" — Moby Dick
Melville's dialectical image of the whale—a creature which,…
Hindered, surely, by its strange and half-baked racial politics, which risk seeming more like a failed attempt at being 'timely' than as any kind of compelling or astute analysis (the late cameo by the Trumps doesn't help in this regard), and an ending which doesn't quite pull the threads of the film together as strongly as I'd hoped. As an investigation of the mixture of cruelty and tenderness so often structuring familial relations, however, and especially parent-child relations, I found…
A tearjerker which struck me as a little one-note at the same time it moved me, though its accumulation of the same is in a way the point: the monotony of a degraded everyday existence as Sue struggles to find and keep employment and sustains only a tenuous interest in life through brief and necessarily transitory conversations and sexual encounters. What frustrates and at the same time produces sympathy is the film's tracing of Sue's repeated searching for connection, only…
When a film makes me cry inexplicably I always want to give it 5 stars but this one really does deserve it
