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.

"It's Complicated"

Ahh, the difficult web of relationships.

Tonight I went to see the film "500 Days of Summer." The movie is relatable on many levels for so many young adults: not doing what you're really passionate about because you don't think you can get there, dreaming big dreams that it seems might never come to pass, feeling lonely and longing for love as a cure for that loneliness.

Young and naive, we wander our way into adulthood, without a true manual showing us which way points north. Sure, our parents have done this, and stumbled through along the way. But, the world today is a different place, and while human nature is much the same, there are new complications. We must decide for ourselves whether the dreams of our youth were mere figments of imagination, whether things like true love and fate really exist, or if it's all mere chance. Nobody can really tell us how to do it until we live it and (by living it) know it for ourselves.

Meandering into a kaleidescope of visual stimuli and a delicious selection of folksy indie rock, mixed with a few Brit rock classics here and there, I found myself entranced in the imagery, along with the plot. The film's main character is trained as an architect, and yet he finds himself making greeting cards for a living. He reads Alain de Botton for fun and dreams of redesigning cities, but can't quite seem to understand that his path could involve becoming an architect. As he wanders along the course of life trying to find himself, he falls into a relationship (of sorts) with an intriguing young woman. Her mind and her personality stimulate him, and she's not bad on the eyes either, and so his interest grows rather quickly. Before even knowing her middle name (perhaps), he knows she's the one; of course. Boy with aimless ambition, but full of idealism, suddenly hitches his humble wagon to her sparkling star.

Plot thickens. Meanwhile, female lead says she doesn't want a commitment and doesn't need a man. She builds walls and barriers to keep said male from getting as close as he might like. The conversation's good, they like similar things, he engages some of her deepest longings...but something's always missing. She can't quite put her finger on it, until one day... Before revealing the plot, i'll stop.

What this film reminds me of as a young woman full of dreams and hopes, few of them realized, is that all is not lost. A secretly hopeless romantic still at heart-although I like to hide it even from myself (partly to shield myself from inner hurt and turmoil, and also partly to prevent a resurfacing of wounds from the past)-, I long for the day when I can truly say "this makes sense." Right now, it doesn't make sense. Almost everything is complicated, and I feel like an oyster without a shell. I'm tired of complicated relationships, i'm tired of putting effort into projects and ideas with seemingly little outcome, and i'm tired of always feeling like my deepest hopes will never come to pass. There's nothing worse than false hope: placing your heart's desires in something that doesn't pan out. Sometimes it's a relationship. Other times, it's a career path that doesn't quite work out. Mostly, it's holding life's circumstances to expectations that are probably a bit unrealistic. However, every now and then those deepest passions get stirred and our inner selves, often quenched by the world of adults and responsibility, reemerge-choking, gasping, begging for air.

As 500 Days' narrator weaves his tale, he shows us that those things longed for are worthwhile, they're just often misplaced. We live in a universe of infinite grandeur, with finite minds and bodies trying to comprehend it all. Sometimes, it all feels just a little too complicated for our liking and we just want to give up. We might like fun and games for a while, but eventually we tire of the daily grind, or even passing pleasures. Longing, most deeply, for something permanent, something real, something lasting, we ache for meaning. Sometimes the comprehension feels like grasping and groping along a muddied floor; other times glimmers of sunshine pierce through the rafters. This film, albeit melancholy, provides one of those glimmers for the hopeless romantic in us all.