Book Review: "Rabbit Run" by John Updike

Rabbit Run (1960)

3.5 Stars out of 5

John Updike

325 pages

“And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.”

Rabbit Run

There is sometimes a problem in reading and reviewing a book from an earlier era. If one goes far enough back in time, say the late 16^th century/early 17^th century and Shakespeare, the language might almost be a foreign tongue. Of course, the themes and poetic prose used by Shakespeare make his work quite nearly timeless and equally obviously, worth the effort. If one goes back a century before one was born, say to Austin in the early 19^th century or Conrad at the end of the same century, the language is now completely comprehensible, though perhaps a little archaic at times; again, in the hands of an excellent author such as these two, the themes are completely relatable. Move forward suddenly to the not quite near present, to  books written in the world that you saw through your near-adolescence eyes,  but now read as an adult, and what is your reaction? For me, it has been generally a disappointment tinged with a sense of incredulity. Did we really live in the same and world and time, this unnamed author and I? I had this reaction a year or so ago when I finally got around to reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” (1957). I have had it again with John Updike’s, “Rabbit Run” (1960).

I chose to read “Rabbit Run” because in reviewing authors and books I should have read long ago, but hadn’t, I discovered that Updike was one of only three authors to have won a Pulitzer Prize for Literature two times. (The other two were Booth Tarkington, an author yet to be discovered by me, and my personal favorite author, William Faulkner.) Updike won both times for books from a four book series he started with “Rabbit Run” when he was only 28. The books that won were for the third book in the series, “Rabbit is Rich” (1982) and the concluding book, “Rabbit at Rest” (1990). He added a novella on Rabbit in 2000, “Rabbit Remembered”. With so much critical praise for the last two novels, I thought, I would start on the first book in the series, “Rabbit Run”. In short, my reaction to “Rabbit Run” is that I will read the rest of the books, but it won’t be for my reaction to “Rabbit Run”, it will be to seek what the Pulitzer committee saw in the last two books. The first book is intriguing but only for its examination of the protagonist’s self-centered view of the world. There is little to learn from this book about human nature other than that there are examples of humanity, I’d really rather not know. (See the quote at the head of this review for a nice preview of why I detest Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.)

“Rabbit Run” begins innocently enough. Harry aka “Rabbit” (his nickname from his days as a high school basketball star) walks a street at the end of the day selling. Rabbit sells the “Magipeeler , a kitchen aid, to housewives in the local supermarkets. He’s feeling a little down when sees a basketball game in progress. The players stare at him with unfriendly looks. Rabbit is undeterred and asks to join them in their game. He runs, he shoots and, of course he dominates his over-matched opponents. They look at him now with hate in their eyes. Rabbit could care less; he is the master of the basketball court once again. It is only now revealed to the reader that Rabbit at age 26 (curiously roughly the same age as Updike when wrote the book) has just defeated a group of 10 year olds. Rabbit doesn’t care in the least that he just beat a group of children less than half his age. The only thing that matters to him and his neurotically immature mind is that he is number 1 again. Nothing else matters to this man-child.

Rabbit returns to the home he shares with his pregnant wife, Janice. She is a former sales girl where Rabbit sells his “Magipeeler” and the daughter of a locally successful car dealership owner. Janice and Rabbit also have a two year old boy, Nelson. They live in Mount Judge PA. As this story proceeds, and despite whatever negative feelings you might on occasion have for Janice, her parental family (the Springers) , or even for her young son, I am convinced you will for the most part feel only pity for all of them as they orbit the self-regarding “sun” of Rabbit. He continues his journey of self-absorption as soon as he walks in the door and sees Janice, his late term pregnant wife. His focus on her will be centered around her physical and mental defects (as he would term them); and even more telling, how these defects have hurt Rabbit’s self-esteem. Somehow, being married to Janice has knocked him down from number 1 to number 2.

He will leave the house after an argument with the intention of not returning. He will drive aimlessly (rather like his life in summary) from Mount Judge to various sites to the south and then west of home. On this journey, Updike will demonstrate for the reader why he is grouped amongst authors in the “realist” tradition. A good example is given on Rabbit’s night time sojourn where he listens to the car radio. The reader will be treated to a very long list of the songs and advertisements that Rabbit hears as he drives along. There is no connection to Rabbit’s life or to the geography he passes through, this list (and it won’t be the last) is mindlessly detailed for the reader to ponder. Is there significance to the song and ad list, or like’s Rabbit’s quite pointless life (as he sees it) is there no meaning to the song list, let alone to the details of the ads themselves – and you will get to read the entire script from several ads.

After a night on the road, Rabbit will return to one of the foci of his adolescent heroics – his basketball coach, Marty Tothero. Marty is another class act. He still admires Rabbit, maybe not so much for his personality as much as the reflected glory of Rabbit’s high school basketball achievements under Marty as the coach. Could there be any two less mature characters in all of literature, one entering adulthood, the other nearing retirement? Marty will introduce Rabbit to a new victim of Rabbit’s arrested development, Ruth Leonard. Ruth will see initially Rabbit as a source of income, but in time will become at least partially enamored of him. Too bad for Ruth, for in time, she will regret having ever met Rabbit, let alone fall in love (in her own way) with him.

Rabbit’s misbehavior will not go unnoticed by the community of Mount Judge. A new character will enter the story; Jack Eccles. Eccles is the Episcopalian priest to the Springer family. By now, I think you won’t be surprised to learn that Jack has issues, too. Like Rabbit, Jack is struggling to find his place in life. He races about trying to save lost souls like Rabbit, even as he leaves his wife and children to their own devices. Jack’s wife Lucy will sway from hating Rabbit for diverting her husband from Lucy’s attention to Lucy disingenuously flirting with Rabbit.

One last set of characters in the book are Rabbit’s parents and his sister Miriam. Rabbit’s father is an ineffectual father and seems only concerned with how Rabbit’s behavior is embarrassing to his sense of parenthood. It goes without saying, Mr. Angstrom is as far out to sea as a father as Rabbit, himself. But the crown jewel of the family is Rabbit’s mother. She is shrewish to a degree rarely seen in literature. If she is even moderately considerate of anyone, it is Rabbit. As one reads the book, it is not in the least difficult to discern where Rabbit learned a sense of self-importance, or even more importantly a sense that he has earned more than what life has given him. And I do mean given him. Rabbit never thinks in terms of truly earning anything. His basketball skills came naturally to him, and he fully expects all else in life to come as effortlessly. This includes the love of a wife and a mistress.

So, what is Updike trying to tell the reader? Are there young men not long out of High School or College who excelled as jocks but find themselves as “also ran’s” in the game of life? Is he trying to question middle class, protestant values in 1960’s America?  Perhaps via Rabbit’s promiscuity, he intends “Rabbit Run” to anticipate the coming sexual revolution that America experienced in the late 60’s. And then with the flawed Episcopal priest, Jack, Updike would perhaps like to tweak the nose of conventional religious hypocrisy. Perhaps, each of these themes is important to an understanding of Rabbit, but I think the key is Rabbit’s aimlessness. He is in own immature manner looking for some meaning in his life. He can see Jack trying to find it via saving his parishioners. He can see variations of it in his and Janice’s fathers and mothers, middle-aged people dedicated to their jobs or their families or at least allegedly so. The problem for Rabbit is he doesn’t really want a job, a wife, or a child; he wants to be free. How adult of him.

I simply cannot recommend this book. It may be well written from the perspective of characterization and style, but its protagonist’s journey of self-discovery is fatally flawed in that this protagonist believes he is the center of the universe. Who cares about someone searching for meaning when that person believes all is due to him and due to him with virtually no effort on his part? I will continue the series. I want to get to the two books that were awarded the Pulitzer, but beyond serving as a springboard to those books and as an introduction to Updike’s narrative style, this was a very disappointing book.

Book Review: "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

5 Stars out of 5

Paul Kalanithi

208 pages

“Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I’m still living.”

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”

Paul Kalanithi

How does one approach the subject of death, especially when it is one’s own death? We all live with the knowledge that our day will come, but by not knowing the “when” of it, permits us to live a kind of fantasy that says, “Well, someday, but not today”, i.e. never. In the case of Stanford neurosurgeon resident, Paul Kalanithi, nearing the end of his multi-year training in medicine, it is a question that had gained vital urgency some twenty-two months previously when he learned that he had inoperable lung cancer. The manner in which Paul faced the question of "How to live a life of purpose" is a lesson for everyone. His journey from Chief Resident to patient is an example that one mightily hopes could be taught in med school, or indeed to the public at large. Everyone should read this book.

 Paul begins his book writing to a friend about the cancer with the fluid prose and gentle humor than infuses the book as a whole: 

 “The good news is that I’ve already outlived two Brontës, Keats and Stephen Crane. The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.”

By beginning the book in this manner, he is signaling to his readers several points that play a major role in who Paul Kalanithi is and was, a man with lofty ambitions, a man determined to live his life as long as he was living and also an allusion to his past as a student of literature; an alluded topic that would strongly inform his 2016 memoir “When Breath Becomes Air” and also provide a lovely segue to the opening sections of that memoir.

Paul began his life in Westchester NY as the second child to a successful cardiologist. Suddenly, or it must have seemed so to the youthful Paul, his father moved the family to Kingman AZ. It is hard to imagine two worlds further apart. And yet it provided Paul with an opportunity that he might have otherwise missed: homeschooling with his mother. Paul left behind the incredible school system in NY for what was essentially private tutoring in AZ. Paul refers in his memoir to the literature his mother encouraged him to read (to help him prepare for college) as the key component to his education. He became fascinated with how artists looked at the question of “what is the meaning of life and how one should live it”. He will go on to earn two B.A.s and a M.A. in literature at Stanford, and just for good measure a M.A. in philosophy at Cambridge before starting his medical training.

He started his training in literature and philosophy as he pursued his quest to understand better how one lives his life. As he neared the end of his artistic tenure at Stanford, he came to the conclusion that he needed to understand the “how” of the human mind, not just the “why”. He would return from Cambridge to earn his M.D. at Yale and to meet his wife to be, Lucy; she too would become a physician and would in fact finish his unfinished memoir. She would become an internist while Paul would train to become a neurosurgeon, both at Stanford.

Paul’s memoir’s reflection of life as a physician in training is interesting in its own right. Consider his description of life in his first day as an intern where during his rotation in OB/GYN he helped give birth to a pair of severely premature twin boys – two boys who would begin and end their short lives on the same day as Paul’s first day. It is a sobering moment in the book as the reader feels most acutely Paul’s empathy for his patients, and also how this tragic day for those twins’ parents aligns so well with the core message of this book’s discussion of life and death.

Paul will also describe how in his early years as a med student/intern he continued his struggle to understand the role of physician and the role of the patient in how we all view death:

“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death -- it's something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients' lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

These early parts of the memoir are all written from the vantage point of the caring physician, but that will all change once Paul is given his earth-shattering diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer; his perspective changes radically. He will enter the same hospital and the same hospital rooms where days before he had led as chief resident, but this time as a patient. He will now be treated by attending physicians and nurses he knew as colleagues. He will also in time find out first-hand how mistakes are made as a young oncology resident mistakenly stops a drug than had been keeping Paul alive. He will survive that experience only to return to his immediate situation: he wants to live each day as anyone would, but how many does he have; he knows it is few, but just how few?

“Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die—but I’d known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”

That Paul was a polymath, someone brilliant in his multiple fields of literature, philosophy and medicine plays a terribly important role in this book. This is not just an average Joe looking death in the eye, but a man who had and still lived to his final day a fully examined life. His academic achievements underscore this point, but it is this incredible elegiac book that makes the point all so clearly. His wife will provide an epilog that comes with her own narrative flow, but one that is consistent with that of Paul’s. The book also comes with a forward from a fellow Stanford physician Abraham Verghese. I do not deny Dr. Verghese’s writing talents or his enthusiasm for Paul’s work, but the tone of his forward felt awkwardly out of place with the book that follows. My opinion is to skip the forward and read the book and epilog first, and then return to the forward. It will be less tonally jarring. But however you decide to read this book, I strongly recommend that you do so. It may be the best book you read from 2016.

Below is a picture of Paul, his wife Lucy and the daughter Cady they conceived after he knew he was to die. Their discussion on this point is heartbreaking and enlightening and the same time.

Movie Review: "Youth"

Youth (2015)

R

3.5 Stars out of 5

Director/Writer                 Paolo Sorrentino                             
Cinematography               Luca Bigazzi
Music                                   David Lang

Michael Caine                    Fred Ballinger
Paul Dano                           Jimmy Tree
Jane Fonda                         Brenda Morel
Harvey Keitel                     Mick Boyle
Rachel Weisz                      Lena Ballinger

 

“Keep true to the dreams of your youth.”            Friedrich Schiller

“All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”     

                                                                                    Wm. Shakespeare, As you like it (Act II, Scene II)

 

If a person walked into a theater to see Paolo Sorrentino’s 2015 film, “Youth”, a movie starring movie veterans Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda, based on the title alone one might well expect to see a film dedicated to issues at the “end of the road”, that is those last stages of life where one is still capable but quite definitely past the arc of one’s career. However, it seems to me Sorrentino has another purpose in mind for this movie, and that is an exploration of “identity”, an identity that stands independent of age. A priori, one might have expected the Schiller quote shown above to be a guidepost to this movie, but in point of fact, Shakespeare’s quote comes much closer to the truth. Sorrentino has written and directed a movie that is superficially about life in Shakespeare’s seventh (st)age, but he really seems to want to talk about the reality of the adult stages. What acts do we put on as we move through life, and maybe, just maybe do we ever become aware it is all just an act when we come to that final scene?

An American film goer raised as we have been on Hollywood endings might have hoped/expected that the two lead characters, Fred (Michael Caine) and Mick (Harvey Keitel) when they reached their personal endings would have gained some wisdom, or at least some perspective beyond the narrow purview of their own lives; but this movie would leave one largely disappointed in that respect. I suppose there is verisimilitude in writing two such self-focused characters, inasmuch as most of us suffer from the same malaise. Still…it would have been nice to have one character, even a minor one display a little knowingness about life and where each one of us fits into it – surely, such people exist? Instead, the viewer is treated to two protagonists speaking constantly in platitudes, platitudes that carry the appearance of wisdom but are actually simply banalities designed to pass from one of life’s minor moments to the next.

This move/play is staged in an exclusive Swiss resort, high in the Alps. It is peopled by guests that largely tend to the very aged, and certainly to the very wealthy. Music fills this stage and is used marvelously in the opening and closing scenes – in fact, these two scenes alone are worth watching the movie, most especially the moving operatic singing of Sumi Jo coupled with the artistic camera-work covering her performance at the movie’s end. The camera-work directed by long time Sorrentino collaborator, Luca Bigazzi is simply brilliant. Bigazzi under Sorrentino’s direction takes the camera from facial close-ups framed by significant background scenery to classic cinematic “mis en scène” of juxtaposition - consider well the two aged men in the pool staring in amazement at a nude Miss Universe (Mădălina Diana Ghenea) as she enters the pool, completely oblivious of their presence, let alone their stares (see a family version of this scene below). Added to these scenes are camera shots of various guests as if they were simply (and nothing more) “still life paintings”, and also the grand exterior shots of “heavenly” views of the skies as backdrops to the characters that are so close to entering Heaven in a more real sense.

 

 

The story centers on a retired composer (Fred) and his lifelong friend, a movie director, Mick. Their children have married: Lena (Rachel Weisz) is Fred’s daughter and manager, Julian (Ed Stoppard) is the nattily-dressed but caddish son to Mick. During their stay at the resort, Mick and Fred have the opportunity to interact and watch (mostly watch) their fellow guests. These guests include an American actor, Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano) preparing for his new role (as an aged Adolph Hitler), a very aged and ill due to obesity (I guess) retired Argentinian soccer hero, Diego Maradonna, and an extremely aged and silent couple of dining companions. That Fred and Mick split their time watching and analyzing their fellow hotel guests leads the viewer inevitably back to the concept of an “audience at a play” that will during the intermission, self-consciously spin their “informed “ opinions to all around them, as well on every minor event in their individual lives.

Fred is the true master of these platitudes and metaphors, despite the fact that at one point he will label Mick as the “magician of metaphors”. It is really Fred that for the most part spouts non-stop metaphors of “wisdom”.  He will pass through what’s left of his life commenting in meaningless sayings, meant to pass as his learned wisdom, or maybe to cover up his hidden pain. This mindless commentary is itself (cinematically speaking) Sorrentino’s metaphor for the way we live our lives, hardly differing from an actor reciting his lines. He adds to this message by having Mick guide a group of his writers working on a new movie starring Jane Fonda (oops, aged Marilyn Monroe stand-in, Brenda Morel). These self-important little writers will as characters mouth their suggestions to Mick for ending his as yet un-finished play. Each one is clearly written by Sorrentino as an archetypical character: the intellectual writer, the funny writer, the female writer, the writer in love. They are all so shallow, it is painful watching them speak lines in the movie. And how does Mick finally end his movie? Well with a melodramatic death that happens off-stage is all I’ll say, but it does provide one of the movie’s two twists. However, the twists are not the point, it is actually the manner in which each of the characters in the movie play people that are playing characters in real life (if that tortured sentence makes any sense).

The weakness of Sorrentino’s movie is at times one of its strengths, and that is the style he has chosen to employ throughout the movie. It seems clear that minus the circus props and characters, Sorrentino reaches at certain times for a very Fellini-like feeling. He uses this very effectively on two occasions: when he has Fred, wandering in his thoughts and fading memory, crossing a narrow bridge above a large pool, and where Fred must pass closely to the statuesque Miss Universe. It goes without saying the rising waters reflect not just his physical image but more closely Fred’s sense that he is drowning; he’s losing it. The second occasion is a comparable scene where an almost equally confused Mick (following his argument with his diva Brenda and where Mick proclaims his own identity as a brilliant director of women) sees arrayed on a hillside every woman he has ever directed. They are all there, even the previously recalcitrant Brenda, though now lacking the 1 inch thick shellac of make-up he last saw her in. These were good uses of surrealism, but Sorrentino over-does it. The sense of surrealism suffuses the entire movie. For example, what is the purpose of having Paul Dano dress as an octogenarian Hitler, except to make a pointless point about shock value; or maybe to allow Dano his moment in this movie to prove how good an actor he is?

Everything else aside, the acting is the best reason to see this movie. For the most part, professional critical attention has focused on Caine, and with good reason. Long lauded as one of the best actors we have had for the past 40 years or so (ever since “Alfie”, 1966), Caine has shown time and again how capable he is of dissolving into his chosen character. Additionally, Fonda and Dano also have their big emotional scenes, and both do an excellent job. But the highest movie plaudits for this movie belong to Weisz: her scene of her anguish at her husband’s infidelity, her anger at Fred for his distance during her childhood, and most subtly her remorse as her father finally explains his refusal to direct an orchestra any more in his most famous piece, Simple Song. Her range of emotions in her acting is just awesome.

In the final analysis, this movie is most definitely not for everyone. The over-use of surrealism is the only reason I do not give this movie a perfect score. Almost everything else screams for such a score: clever imagery, great music and cinematography, some of the year’s best acting (the lack of Oscar nominations notwithstanding), and finally the clever way Sorrentino weaves two important parts of life as themes into the story. Even if the deeper point of identity is ignored in this film’s narrative, it is a compelling movie just for the depicted views of how each of us looks at ourselves in life’s mirror. This is definitely a movie for adults eager for a story about difficult subjects and told in a manner that demands thoughtful appreciation from the audience.

Movie Review: The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life (2011)

Four and half Stars out of Five

PG13

Mr. O’Brien (Father): Brad Pitt

Mrs. O’Brien (Mother): Jessica Chastain

Adult Jack: Sean Penn

Young Jack: Hunter McCracken

Director/Writer: Terrence Malick

Cinematography Director:  Emmanuel  Lubezki

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Film Editing: Hank Corwin et. al.

Terrence Malik has directed six movies with “The Tree of Life” being his fifth. His topics have ranged from John Smith and Pocahontas (“The New World”), to WWII (“The Thin Red Line”), to romance (“Days of Heaven”), to a romantic art film (“To The Wonder”). “The Tree of Life” has its own genre, one not usually seen in Hollywood: religious/philosophical/nostalgic.  “The Tree of Life” has been widely praised (it is on many Top 100 lists, won the Palme D’Or in Cannes, and is listed as the best picture ever by several critics), and widely panned. It is one of the most ambitious movies I have ever seen, but perhaps in a final analysis, it is a little too ambitious with its message.

The movie is told in four parts: the death of the O’Brien family’s second son, RL; the birth of the universe and of life on Earth; the birth and early life of Jack O’Brien (the first born child of the O’Brien’s) in Waco Texas, and a slice of time in the middle-aged years of Jack. The seemingly unrelated segments are linked by the philosophical and religious underpinnings to this story. The underpinnings at first glance seem to reduce to the eternal question: what is God’s intent with respect to Man. But then it has a second philosophical question to address: what is Man’s intent and his means with respect to Life.

The first question is strongly alluded to with a quote from the Bible’s Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?” Throughout this movie, various players within the movie are overheard asking questions, apparently to God the Father, but conceivably in some cases to their own father or mother. There is within the story’s overall structure a frequent sense of being disconnected from a powerful, perhaps loving parental figure. There is a near constant questing for answers, for a sense of understanding to the question of why we are here, and where are we going. The second part of the story, the part that depicts the formation of solar systems and then of life, provides a literal answer on the “how” of why-we-are-here, but of course leaves the “why” question unanswered. Near the end of the film as the adult Jack has a vision, we see the expansion of our sun into a Red Giant and the end of the Earth; thus, we see the physical answer to the where-are-we-going question. We see this even further defined in the last parts of Jack’s vision as he walks amongst the dead on a beach.

In the third part of the story, we are told the explanation to a topic first brought up by Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) in the opening scenes of the movie: there are two paths in life for Man to follow, the path of grace or the path of nature. These paths of nature versus grace are first suggested in the second part of the movie, the part that illustrates the origin of life. We observe a dinosaur that “compassionately” does not kill a second dinosaur that is at the mercy of the first. Instead, it would seem this dinosaur chooses the path of grace. The metaphor is greatly expanded in the third part of the movie wherein the early life of Jack, his two brothers and his parents are depicted in Waco. That his mother is clearly the human icon for the path of Grace, while his father is the icon for the path of nature is made abundantly clear. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) made a choice early in his life to turn away from music for engineering. He has not become successful in this field and as a result carries a heavy burden of shame. After having been a stern father to Jack and his brothers and having lost his engineering job, Mr. O’Brien questions his own worth to Jack; Jack (having chosen the same path in life) rushes to reassure his father. Mrs. O’Brien has in the meanwhile been shown to be a person captivated by the joy of life as it surrounds her, and specifically in the joy of her three children.

Besides the philosophical aspects of the story, Malick himself grew up in 1950’s Waco Texas. For those of us that also grew up in this era, it is entertaining to watch the third part of the movie for the little details of life in the 50’s: the physical details like the beaded belts worn by little boys, or the bigger picture such as the sense of safety that permits people to leave their front doors unlocked or their children to walk home alone from school. The family life of the O’Brien family struck me as one not too atypical for life in the 50’s and early 60’s. The father works during the day, the mother stays at home to wash, clean, and cook. The father is a stern disciplinarian that walks a fine line between loving his children and guiding his children; the mother is there to pick up the pieces when the father crosses too far over the line into discipline. The movie makes much of the father’s delicate dance between his two desires towards the children, while the mother universally keeps to her single –minded path of love, of grace.

The final part of the movie is surely a complicated part. We see the adult Jack dealing with the passing of his younger brother and also with the upbringing he had at the hands of his father. To be sure, Jack was raised by both of his parents, but as he states in the movie, he is just like his father; he has chosen the path of nature. On the anniversary of the passing of RL, the adult Jack (Sean Penn) is filled with remorse; remorse for the lost little brother that “trusted him” (even when he shouldn’t have), remorse over a sterile marriage, and remorse over an unhappy life; a life buried in the stainless steel and glass canyons of Dallas – very far from his bucolic childhood in Waco. With his little brother dead and seemingly his loving mother, too, Jack is searching again for the answer to the big question raised by this movie; that is the meaning of life. Fortunately for Jack, he has a vision of walking through a portal in the desert. He meets his mother and his little brother once again. He sees many people on a beach, apparently happy and satisfied. Jack returns from his vision with a smile on his face.

This movie is gorgeous in both visual and musical imagery. Apparently, Malik chose to minimize the use of CGI and to use older techniques in order to create his vision of the origin of the universe and life (presumably this did not extend to the various dinosaurs depicted). That Malik had a vision for this movie and that he exercised his considerable skills to bring it to life cannot be doubted by anyone that has seen this movie. The only failure in the story from my point of view is that the viewer can sense Malik’s desire to send a profound message of hope and joy found by one path through life versus the despair and self-doubt to be found by the other path. I believe I can see and understand his message, but I was strangely unmoved by it. At a time in my life where I can be brought to tears by animated movies such as “Up”, I was simply not feeling the emotion I am sure Malik himself felt in writing and directing this movie. In the final analysis though, and despite being a scientist that has also largely chosen the path of nature, I concede his point. The path chosen and symbolized by the mother figure, Mrs. O’Brien, and so beautifully shown in the scene of her smilingly holding a butterfly is surely a wonderful and happy path to take in life. Is it the only way to understand and be content with the universe is a question I am not certain is so clearly true. I believe there are several ways to shout with joy for the universe.