To each his own but for me the content and form meet perfectly to create a complete portrayal of Wilson, anchored by Terence Stamp and Soderbergh's movieola. The free form cutting, creating an authorial subjectivity, is something you don't see in American movies too often, and it's not so much used to create a piece necessarily steeped in existentialism as much as it is to specifically carve out a character. And from where I'm sitting that character is completely defined. It's one of the better portrayals of a character existing in a present and past tense I've seen, especially in genre. Using and elaborating on Poor Cow was a particularly inspired, insular touch.
The "look" wasn't an attempt to recreate Point Blank, but to expound on it's rhythms. If it weren't so obviously derived from Boorman's film I would sooner actually connect it up with the form of Roeg/Cammell's Performance. There wasn't much flashy about the photography and I thought the cutting was graceful in it's connectivity. You don't have to get loads of overt, on the nose character background from every supporting player for them to draw some well rounded dimension. I think it's a feat that they all function on a plot and personal level from one to the other - one character gives insight into the other like dominos (Valentine to Avery to Stacy is this kind of dynamic that reveals itself one at a time and then kind of doubles back to redefine both plot and character for each based on each pro(di)gression, something also reflected in the editing) and it's a method of leapfrog and then retroactive discovery that mirrors the spine of the flick - Wilson's search for his daughter leads ultimately back to himself through all these other people (parallels and surrogates) and the unsuccessful overlap of the regular and the criminal worlds.
This wasn't style at the cost of all else, cool for the sake of cool, (Soderbergh does that elsewhere but not here) this was style at the precise service of the totality of the experience. The speed of the cutting, for instance, is always an indicator of Wilson's internal state. I see people get thrown by the film's approach but it's a case of it being completely hand in hand and a total success as a character piece and a post-modern attack of the genre.
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chilone
8 years ago
That's gotta be one of the most ridiculous posts I've ever read! What a load of wanna be, pseudo-intellectual, psycho babble, bull shiz!! Gimme a break!! It was a good movie. It wasn't some "complex", metaphor filled, character study or deep statement, "steeped" in anything. Sheesh! Sorry, but you sound like a putz.
I don't love her.. She kicked me in the face!!
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