Here’s what I like in movies: I want an accurate portrayal of normal human life in which basically decent people are confronted with a challenge, and, in wrestling with it, emerge as even better people.
I despise the idea of villainy — not because there are no villains in the world, but because they are almost never the problem in a normal human life. Film villains are stupid, insanely over the top. If you want to deal with villains in real life, take on angry drunks or passive-aggressive wraiths or the kind of everyday trolls who try to bring out the worst in otherwise good-hearted people.
Even then I’m not interested. In real life, most people are trying to do their best from the best of intentions, and the conflicts that arise between them are interesting because we each see the world from our own unique vantage point. We are beset, mostly, by errors of knowledge, not by malice. The true story of humanity is learning to do better, and from this idea comes the best art. Those kind of stories fascinate me.
Grand Canyon is a good example. The High Concept behind the film — people are becoming more divided by their chasm-like differences, and yet the real Grand Canyon is bigger and more significant than tiny human lives — is lame, symptomatic of the pontificating Sunday editorial page Deep Think piece. But co-writer/director Lawrence Kasden manages to overcome the banality of his theme with a series of overlapping, converging story arcs. Each character is motivated like a real person, which means that none of their motivations are evil or wrong, but they are sometimes in conflict and have to be worked out.
In the clip linked here, Mary McDonnell’s Claire endures an agonizing dream exploring the changes, welcome and unwelcome, she is going through in her marriage and family.
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