I’d hoped that my second review of this movie would be a little clearer-headed but I have to admit, I still find my head spinning with what can only be described as ‘stuff’ after the credits roll, and only wanting to watch it yet again. Though this movie drags in a lot of places only to shower you with bursts of emotional confusion seconds later, it just haunts me so much in the end (“If I go back to the beginning, I could start it over again. I could go line by line; try and find a shorter way. I could try to make it… better,”) and has a lot of moments that get to my heart and soul like only my deeply personal favourites can. Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins are fantastic, Jake Gyllenhaal is definitely growing on me bigtime since I saw Moonlight Mile, and I love Stephen Warbeck’s score. Hope Davis is really good as Paltrow’s sister, too, providing almost tragically comic contrast to the predominantly geeky nature of the main characters.

I’ll probably be watching this and failing to fully grasp its implications till I’m losing it like Hopkins in the movie or something, lol. I really wish I could’ve written more this time round.

December 31st, 2005:

Sorry, a bit babbly, this one, need to sleep before New Year’s Eve and I don’t wanna be catching up on all this year’s reviews at the start of the new one.

I feel a little like this movie should’ve affected me a little more than it did. I really didn’t know the story of this movie, I knew it had a little to do with maths and a father and daughter but just minutes in everything I’d expected went out of the window. This is an incredibly engrossing drama with the kind of performances you’d expect from Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow, not about mathematics but ultimately, I think, about dealing with life. It approaches madness, or what we call madness, the same way as movies like Girl, Interrupted – Paltrow fears she may be losing her mind the way her father did, but you get the sense that certain people, like her sister, aren’t doing a lot to convince her otherwise. I think it’s true, a person can convince themselves they’re going crazy and once you’re on the slide you don’t want to get off. Paltrow’s character here is 26 … I hate being all personal in reviews, I know you’re not meant to do that but I do … there’s this whole thing about missing days. Hopkins berates her at one point for staying in bed till noon. She counts the days she’s missed, and later asks herself the question again, “how many days have I missed?” as in, over her entire life to that point. She believes, like Hopkins’ student Jake Gyllenhaal, that mathematicians reach their peak when they’re young, and 26-7 becomes this mystical point where if nothing has been accomplished, you might as well die or something. I kinda know that feeling, but thankfully this movie has hope in the tail. I don’t know if another viewing would get through to me a little more, but I’m definitely glad I watched it, and it definitely got me thinking.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 7:30 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.