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Saw this on Saturday and loved it, loved it, loved it! Anybody else seen it? I'm going to describe exactly what was so good about it so SPOILER WARNING (although I knew the plot fairly well from the reviews and it lessened my enjoyment not a jot).
I have been a Jack fan for so long that I can't list all the times he's been fabulous on screen (plus the few times when he was, frankly, shit) but this was a tour de force. He made me cry and I had to think back all the way to Cuckoo's Nest for the last time that happened.
It's slow but so filled with telling detail that it never drags, as this beaten and empty husk of a man, like a vacuum flask keeping a hard core of fury warm but deep and unreachable within, stumbles through the fag end of his life realising how pointless everything has been and will be, until his time runs out.
He is rigid, frozen, awkward, just utterly at sea without an anchor and, to be honest, that doesn't change throughout the film in any happy Hollywood ending kind of way.
The backdrop of modern America's built environment echoes the bleakness within him and even when he's in majestic open country, he's on tarmac and the colours are washed and deadened. Beautifully filmed.
Sounds a laugh riot, doesn't it, but it is acutely funny, thanks to the observational comedy à la Ricky Gervaise, convincingly supplied by Kathy Bates and Dermot Mulrowney (best mullet ever and the flattest quarter past nine feet) in particular.
Perhaps the most moving thing is his sponsorship of a 6 year old boy in Tanzania. Pathetically, friendless Schmidt pours his heart out in letters to the boy at various points, hilariously and horrifically pointing up the unbridgeable gulf between their lives, and this is a magnificent device that lays the stage for a final scene which (in the Brixton Ritzy) left not a dry eye in the house. |
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