Sometimes I've got this feeling that Jerry (Liam Neeson's character) was devoloping feelings for Nell. Also Paula talks about that: "why do you think you spend so much time with her?"
Maybe I'm completely wrong, What do you think about this?
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I don't know, Sibeth, and I might never know. I watched the first half hour and just could not get around Liam Neeson's poor attempt to simulate an American accent. Call it nitpicking, but when something annoys me so much in a film I can't pay attention to the better aspects of it.
It happens over and over again in Hollywood... why, when there are dozens or hundreds of good American actors, do the producers select an Irish actor to play a part like this?? I mean, he wasn't even portrayed as some immigrant sawbones, but good ol' boy "Jerry".
I thought Liam's character was Irish wasn't he talking about it near the beginning when he was saying he was an only child?
Maybe I'm wrong
Jerry was Irish, he moved to the States and that's why he had a blend of an Irish accent and an American, it was changing but he was still Irish.
When you can't run, you crawl, and when you can't do that...well you know the rest.
Paula alludes to this by suggestion that Nell is for some men, the perfect type of woman. Basically very dependent and childlike, but at the same time free-spirited. Not that this is politically correct, but some men have a response to it that is very powerful. Paula picked up on this.
shareBest definition I've heard so far!
"Wow, entertainers AND dancing girls? Is there a buffet as well?"
I think he was more interested in her in a paternal sense, not a loving sense. It seemed to me like he cared for her the way a father cares for his daughter.
shareI was kind of hoping they would end up falling in love.
http://www.myspace.com/mcdojo2849
I'm agreeing with Kalza on this one.. I think he was very overprotective of her, the way a father would be. I think when Paula was pointing out the fact that Jerry put all his attention in Nell because she didn't talk back/was very accepting. He didn't want to deal with the "real world"
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*~The greatest and truest of loves leave pawprints on your heart~*
Yeah. He was like her extremely close protector or as he said in the movie her 'guardian angel'.
share[deleted]
It seemed to me that Nell almost immediately associated Paula and Jerry as being a couple, culminating in the scene where she identified them as characters in the sex book. There was definitely a lot of love between Nell and Jerry, but from Jerry this was either in a protector or fatherly sort of sense, feeling for how vulnerable Nell was to all the outsiders who were trying to invade her life. From Nell, this was from her yearning to have someone there for her after the two closest people in her life had died, her sister and then her mother.
sharePaula was becoming jealous. The question was a reflection of Paula's rising feelings for Jerry.
shareYou're all getting a much more fatherly feeling from Jerry than I was. Perhaps I did not watch the film closely enough, or perhaps whenever I see a handsome man and a beautiful woman I think something could happen. Plus, if Jerry was supposed to be fatherly, what was that scene where he skinny dips all about?
I do agree that Paula and Jerry became Nell's "parents." Perhaps that's how they came to accept their relationship. I really didn't feel Jerry liked Paula all that much, in fact, I found her a bit annoying. Their getting together was the mature thing to do ... the way all those people on the Bachelor and the Bachelorette choose the one the audience thinks is best for them and not whom they really want; for gosh sakes, let the Bachelor go for the slutty girl, it's his life! But anyway at the very end when Nell is looking at Jerry and Paula's daughter who reminds her so much of her lost sister, I felt she was also sad because she didn't have a child, perhaps even sad that she didn't have a mate. It is perhaps a bit frightening to imagine what might have happened if Jerry had married Nell, but from what we saw at the end it seems she would have at least come up to being able to speak his language if not exactly support him in his work. I am happy he ended up with Paula in that she could meet him halfway but surely there are many couples who would fall into the sort of Jerry-Nell disparity. And who knows ... could Nell not have achieved that a level at which she could have really been a helpmeet for Jerry intellectually?
The skinny dipping scene was to show Nell that not all men are rapists. The scene before that was all about how "e'ildoers skuwed" her mother in "the belly". Her mother's most influential experience with a man was a rape. It deeply affected her trust in men and in the outside world. She taught her daughters to fear men and the world because of this. Jerry and Paula wanted to show Nell that she needn't be afraid of a man just because he's a man. They did this by having Jerry disrobe and innocently skinny-dip with Nell. That scene was as innocent as you can get. There was nothing sexual about it. Nell is an adult, but she's ignorant of sexuality. So, this was, in their minds, the best way to show an adult who has a distorted view of men that a naked man could be a perfectly harmless thing. It wasn't conventional, but it was all they could think of and it worked, ultimately. Nell most likely had never seen a male body in the nude, so Jerry probably served as a good model because he's not intimidating and he's trustworthy. Rewatch the scene and especially the one before it. They explain it all.
shareWell, that is beautifully said. I tend to watch movies while doing boring things, but, you know, as Jesus said, a person can't have two masters so I am probably not getting enough out of the movies I see. Plus, I tend to watch them on small devices. I'd love to kick back and enjoy them on a big plasma-type screen ... if I had one! Oh, woe is me. Plus, maybe I'm just a bit more distrusting than most. It's lovely to think that so many people took this in the way that it was apparently meant. I do know a little about psychology and know that psychologists these days can have some nutty ideas, and then, on the other hand, some really restrictive ones like the man who was Paula's boss, I think. So it was nice to think that Jerry and Paula could indeed think outside the box but in a way that worked, as you said. Probably the movie is a lot more enlightened and yet sensible than I had realized.
shareHarlan Ellison once said (can't remember exact words) he could not understand how people could watch a movie like Avatar or some other huge epic, the kind of film that was made to be watched on a screen the size of Lithuania, on a tiny screen on an iPod. (He also said Avatar was a boring piece of B.S. and probably the best thing to do was buy a giant calendar of art by Roger Dean.)
You've got me?! Who's got you?!
You, or perhaps I should say Harlan, are so right. I'd love to have screen the size of Lithuania across the way from my couch but a hutch my stepfather built for me is enthroned there so I guess big TV is out for me right now. P.S. I was curious about your icon, which at first I thought was a Haagendaz carton. I think it might be a takeout coffee cup with Greek on it. Then I saw your explanation having to do with Snowfire, a movie about which I had never heard. Then I looked it up here. I only read the first half of a sentence because I hate to know anything about a movie before I start it. But from the little I read, and the year it was distributed (1958), I would love to see it, too. Too bad the family no longer has rights to it.
shareIt is indeed a Greek takeout coffee cup, http://www.nycoffeecup.com/ a tribute to my misspent youth (near/in Chicago, not New York though).
Snowfire is a very weird film. See it if you can.