Review by Beatrice On 27-Jun-2023
Davis Mitchell is in the car and his wife is driving; he seems rather distracted as she talks and urges him to fix the leaky refrigerator, he seems elsewhere, and as they banter about his carelessness, an accident hits the car-he will be completely unharmed.
The tragic loss of his wife will leave this man, a successful financier, at the mercy of a life in fragments. That same evening in the hospital upon hearing the news of the death, Davis tries to buy a packet of M&M's from the vending machine that jams. The reaction immediately seems rather incomprehensible, which leads him to send letters of complaint to the vending machine company that become rather unpredictable personal confessions.
The therapeutic function of writing seems necessary at a time when perhaps Davis, unable to confide in anyone, evidently unaccustomed to talking about his feelings, as is often the case with the male gender, has no other tools to which to turn.
Certain that no one would read his confessions, Davis uses the complaint as a pretext as a cathartic tool. The customer care manager, a caring and troubled woman, herself a victim of a life larger than human endurance, seems the perfect interlocutor.
The two begin dating, while her son, " a 15-year-old who looks 12 when he would really be 21," brings added value to his stifled disorientation.
Davis can do nothing but dissect, dissemble, dismantle, and demolish everything that belongs to him, including the fancy house he hates precisely because it has only fancy things.
He pretends to cry in front of the mirror because he cannot do it spontaneously, declares that he never loved his wife while his life is devastated.
Despite his father-in-law's constant urging, he cannot bring order to his existence.
Everything has become a metaphor for Davis, and his need to disassemble objects belies his need to finally see inside things that previously went unnoticed to him; he wants to see now, in a different way, lost in his inability to be aware of whether he loves or not.
Dramatically hilarious scenes accompany this story: Davis pays to demolish a house in the face of the workers' bewilderment; he dances in the street to music produced by 15-year-old Chris, who was expelled from school for "artistically" chronicling the American presence in the Middle East.
Davis demolishing his house will uncover more secrets belonging to his wife, but he will always be astonished that he loved her without realizing it.
It had been "easy" for Davis to marry, everything had seemed simple, nothing had evidently placed this man in front of himself, and only such an important episode could upset his superficial and precarious, though seemingly untouchable, equilibrium.
Can one love without realizing it? Can life be lived without actually being a part of it?
Great performances, exciting and nervous sequences.
A surprising film about the disorientation involved in grief and about becoming aware of one's own unawareness...
One's estrangement from the world and self leads back to the unbridgeable distance that separates us from plausible meaninglessness.
We get into the habit of living before we acquire the habit of thinking
27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice