Lessons from Unexpected Places: A Not-So-Brief Film Review

Lately, my head has been whirling with a lot of incompletely-formed concepts and notions. Typically, my brain fires off all kinds of odd ideas, but usually I can connect and bridge these seemingly opposite worlds in a way that makes remarkable sense. Lately, though, my brain has been a little rusty. In efforts to "get away" from some of these thoughts and take a breather, this past weekend I stumbled upon the film "TiMER" on Netflix. While I don't really love the resolution of the film, I think that it raises some very interesting questions regarding relationships, waiting, and expectations.



Taking a bit of creative license, I'd like to take some of the issues tossed out in the film and apply them to a broader context. For instance, what happens when your whole life feels like a big waiting game? You're single, female, and about to turn 30 but have no good prospects for marriage. Your expectations for adulthood have failed to come to fruition. You wonder what the point of going on is when every day feels like you're pushing through an endless ocean of grey. You hope that one day things will get better but you're really not so sure anymore and are considering dropping out of the race for good. Sound familiar?

This film, if we'll let it, poses some important questions to the young adult crowd. [Spoiler alert...] It kicks off with a lead character who has grown tired of waiting for the right relationship and decides to dip her toes into the almost but not quite good enough. She was raised with the belief that one has a true destiny, in this particular case the "one" that he or she is meant to be with forever. But, as age begins to take its toll and many of the seemingly good relationships around her appear less than idyllic, she begins to wonder if those childhood lessons were actually just myths.

Throughout the movie, the lead character clings to the hope that something "better" really is in store for her while facing up to the fact that her life doesn't seem that way. In growing tired of relationships that never work out, she decides to pursue one that she knows isn't going anywhere. For a while, she loses herself in the idea of this relationship-the idea that she can have fun, live in the moment, and not worry about her once-grand hopes and dreams. As a perfectly capable, accomplished, intelligent almost-30 year old, she finds herself spending her evenings with an early 20-something musician who is adventurous and sexy in the slightly indie sense but who is also relatively clueless in the "doing something with his life" department. From the get-go, this guy is set up as the character who is probably only a few years from pulling his act together, but he's just not quite there yet. The only problem, of course, is that the girl already has her stuff in order and is simply waiting for the next steps to fall into place.

On the one hand, this film is an incredibly-accurate cultural commentary regarding the tensions present amongst the 20 and early 30-something dating population. You have a whole lot of disgruntled late 20s/early 30s females just waiting for the right guy to come along but wondering if they've been crazy to ever imagine he might be lurking in the shadows. Simultaneously you have a whole lot of boy-not-yet-a-man early to late 20-something males who are sowing their wild oats and for the most part thinking about the next best thing rather than the next ten years. Got it together, got a job, out from under her loans, career woman collides with video gaming musician and it's a match made in well...Neverland. These are, however, stereotypes that need some qualification. For one thing, got it together career woman doesn't really have it all together. Most of the time she's an emotional wreck, and if she's already capped the career ladder she's wondering how else to make herself useful. For another, Peter Pan has some worthwhile ideals: a desire to link his passions with his day-to-day affairs, a thirst for adventure, a hopefulness that he can do something with worthwhile impact. Far too easily, we forget the complexities inherent within both typecast situations.

On the other hand, this film raises some good questions about long-term relationships and one's expectations for life in general. As the lead character has watched her own parents marriage crumble and her mother idealize her second marriage, she longs for a relationship that comes with a guarantee. If she's going to put her time into something, she wants the proof positive that it is and will always be going in the right direction. But, life doesn't come with guarantees and neither do relationships. Even as many people's lives are graced with wonderful depictions of hopes-realized, life remains a mix of joy and pain. Simultaneously, we watch how a woman's choice to pursue a temporary next-best-thing stalls her opportunity to live into the right kind of relationship, creating a variety of roadblocks that hinder her ability to fully embrace such a relationship when it finally comes into perspective.

Now, for my primary critique of the movie...As this movie's leading lady encounters Mr. "charming boyish tumbling tumbleweed" early 20-something male, he helps her see that real relationships aren't quite as easy as she'd imagined. The difficulty, though, is that while said male helps to highlight the flaws in this woman's perspective, he doesn't provide her with a constructive alternative to her overly-idealized view of what a relationship should look like. This, I believe, is where the movie falls short. Towards the end of the film, there was a lot of room to develop this aspect of the plot, but instead of providing much resolution the viewers are left with a bunch of loose strings. These strings, mind you, can be tied together, it's just going to take some serious work. I'd like to see a firmer conclusion that grey is not the end of the story. We get a hint of that here, but it's just not quite enough for my tastes.

A Touch of Madness for the Modern Man

"Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be."-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Picking up the broken pieces and walking into the sunshine. Wouldn't it be nice if life worked that way? Sadly, it often doesn't. Friends move on and pretend like they never knew you, with no explanation as to why; loved ones get sick with uncurable illnesses, and the tears just keep pouring; husbands cheat on wonderful wives, and tear their families apart in the process. It's a sick, twisted world and one can easily get depressed. Sure you want to keep reading?

Over the course of the past few weeks, I have been watching Season One of AMC’s tv series Mad Men. I can’t explain exactly why I decided to start watching the series, but it had something to do with a review I read that suggested it was relatively true-to-life. In many ways I think it is. And probably, some critics don’t’ like it because it’s a bit rough around the edges. But, then again, so is life.

Set in the 1960s during the reign of cigarette moguls and post-depression era corporate steam engines, Mad Men depicts the working and private lives of a handful of ad executives-some of whom are vying for a ride to the top at all costs. Standing besides these men are trophy wives,-cast aside for intellectual thrills, quick fixes, and cocktails-whose only real claims to fame are the success of their husbands or their 2.5 perfect children. And supporting these men in the office is a team of snazzy underpaid women, who hold few qualms over their male cohorts’ illustrious affairs, and facilitate a great deal of ego-padding at the cost of their own self-worth.

Front and center into this cinematic universe steps Donald Draper: the man women love to hate, and also hate to love. He’s the one we fall for time and again, even though it hurt so bad the first time. Smooth talking, witty, not-to-mention handsome, he’s the strong silent type and an absolutely amazing businessman. He’s a man focused on the present, taking each new opportunity by the horns and sucking it dry for all it can give him. Don Draper is a tried and true modern man: a man who says he doesn’t believe in love, prides himself on being self-made, and pretends he has all the answers but quite obviously has no idea where he’s going. He’s a total charmer who can tell a story like nobody’s business, and seems so good at spinning yarns that he’s fooled himself in the process.

My take on the show so far is that it upsets me-it upsets me how accurately it depicts the tense realities of the human condition, the mistakes so many of us make trying to carve out a better life in our own strength, and the intense failure we always face when we realize we simply can’t twist an imperfect world into sheer bliss. It’s certainly no Little House on the Prairie, but really is that reality?

Take, scene. The red curtain opens to nothing less than real life, complex and confusing though it is. The John F. Kennedys of the world were garnering votes through mere appearances, and ad executives masked the dangers of cigarettes through simple puffs of smoke. Things looked good on the outside, but the inside was as sour as pure lemon juice. The growing movements known loosely as abstract expressionism and all things avant garde began to show hints of that not-so-obvious spoiling below the surface. AMC's Mad Men holds the tensions of history in balance, brilliantly showing that the world is messy, and that people long for answers but often look in all the wrong places. The show turns the clock back to a time when the American Dream was all but a complete farce for most of mankind, contrary to what we might think or believe. Fairytales were no truer then than they are today. Like it or not, the olden days were not quite as peachy as mom and dad might have suggested.

This show is not a Cinderella story, but it has something to teach us. That something is found amongst the tattered ashes of wounded marriages that continue on, and careers that move forward only because the men doing them do not know where else to turn. This is not one of those "no more tears, no more sadness" kind of feel good dramas, but it does remind us of our own deep brokenness. A world wounded, in need of help and guidance. This is the world of 1960s Mad Men and it’s the world of today. No matter how you spin it, it’s mad; mad until we give up trying to make it better all on our own.