I evidently appreciate Thomas McCarthy vision of progressive pushback despite the fact that trying to live it in my own life has turned my innards overripe. Films being what they are, however, it seems only the Farrelly brothers take risks with the grotesque, with spina bifida contained by leg brace and diaper and crutch, and McCarthy is cautious, not risking this over much in his desired, some might say extracted, performances. Jenkins' Walter Vale has the slight and not unkindly whiff of a pruned Puritan about him, especially in his jagged rebuff of his student, his interaction with the piano instructor who mildly offends his sensibility, Hiam Abbass is muted in ethnicity, not Syrian, slightly too Anglicized so as to evoke empathy and lower defenses. Haaz Sleiman is like the jazz player, infusing the somewhat shriveled European cultural polish. Danai Gurira clips it like a Nile Queen. I've seen the type before, in students, bad attendant pair bondings, but my point being that McCarthy very carefully polishes his collection, edgy, but with all the parts clicking in the right places, rather than the inner city disrupting, or threatening, the pattern of the wearied American academic.
This is still a great film, and it is the real reason I persist with disability themes online, despite what you may believe to the contrary, to deconstruct such precious jewels, probably the only thing that keeps me human, at the end of the day.
What McCarthy manages to expose is the cost of the systems we impose upon ourselves, their crushing weight, sacrificing the gifts of cultural infusion. The gifts of the west are not dead when seen through fresh eyes. Mouna's ability to get emotionally involved with the Phantom of the Opera encapsulates and reflects on her situation, with her son in a dungeon she cannot penetrate, and Mrs. Vale's music offers this mother solace in much the same way that Walter finds an outlet in learning the djembe
No one is accountable here, certainly not the guards at the center where Tarek is detained and removed, individuals against whom a strike would be futile, which Walter finally accepts in resignation. This does not mean that immigration is not an intractable problem due to the imbalance of affluence, nor would McCarthy's compassionate leniency solve for it any better than Arizona hardliners, just to cull an example, but the US certainly lacks a sane and coherent policy, something that transcends administrations.
That such divergent visionaries as Tolstoy and a post modern independent director could illuminate the same problem, how our systems subsume autonomy, points to the fact that we'll probably need to shave a few billion of ourselves off before we scare ourselves straight, and start to really pay attention.
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