As usual, anything Americans do is technically flawless. But people, this kind of stuff is never moving enough because it is not universal - two couples betray each other by having sex with each other and feeling guilty, remorseful, betrayed, about it. Only the English could have such a terrible time at sex. Think about it for a moment. How would the French have handled it? The Italians? The Chinese? This movie traces the journeys upper middle income Anglo-Saxons make trying to connect but failing - but Marber fails to show us what about modern love exactly that makes intimacy impossible - If Marber's point is that we don't know because we really can't know anything about each other (Jude Law's character finds out in the end he didn't even have Natalie Portman's real name), well, so what makes that modern exactly? Or that modern life has become empty and obviates against intimacy - though again Marber doesn't really show us how - Marber just says it but not shows us - so the only way these modern people connect is through sex but it doesn't work. (My grandfather could have told him that.) You can't have people obsess about sex and the lack of intimacy without building character. It's not enough to say oh, that's modern life. Strippers, photographers who take pictures of strangers, cybersex - it's not enough. It's character development that makes stories like this compelling. We don't really know who they are. We see what they do. We don't know what they want, what drives them. They remain abstract and general. It left me cold though it had great potential. They simply looked self-absorbed, egocentric, self-indulgent - that's right -upper middle income good-looking Anglo-Saxons who are actually closet puritans. Very retro.
Reviews
2 Reviews
Capturing the Friedmans
(2003)
The Real Dysfunction
8 July 2004
The most riveting aspect of this documentary was the inclusion of home movie footage taken during the family's most profoundly personal private moments in real time. How could the Friedmans allow its most painful moments to be recorded? And what kind of child would record such events? That's how I realized how deeply dysfunctional the whole family is. This family is guilty, and it's not of pedophilia, but of an extreme form of alienation from one's own humanity. And the worst part of it is they are not even aware of it. In a way, I found the family's obsession with home movies frightening. It made them vulgar and I felt cheap and dirty, as if I were a peeping Tom. What a frightening film. And how seductive Mr. Jarecki is for capturing my attention.
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