When I write in Quarantine that Russell Crowe is too generic, another way to frame my contention is to bracket it in terms of over-exposure. He gets the organic nature of paranoid schizophrenia right in A Beautiful Mind, in terms of John Nash's transition from promising scholar to a man beset with illness, and it also felt like an Ike and Churchill rendition era film for modern consumption. Beyond this the star underwhelms, and does nothing to reconcile me to Australia. One of Tatyana's characters felt the same way in her early collection of stories, yanking the land mass out of the ocean like a diseased molar. A film like On The Beach exempts itself, simply by virtue of being early nuclear porn, as we call it today. It is not a fair comparison, but we do see a certain difference in handling impairments, however: the Rhonda of Muriel's Wedding adapts to her cursory paralysis, whereas here in the States, Swank's Maggie and her choice causes reactionary protests.
I happen to be on the character's side. Being a writer is an insulating process, by the nature of the beast, but when it has been your life for half a century, and essentially failed you, even if you always know you can never do anything else, sick now, broken, as well as crippled, making a choice to let go does not seem so threatening. The activists I knew, at least those who aren't dead, have nothing to say to me, and won't, obviously, since I haven't been nice, and on angry days, ah, well, some of you have seen the same diabolical villain films as I have, and can use your own imagination about what I do with a slowly dying vengeance, biodegrading; the very awareness of the fact that I am fragile fuels my urgency to get away, the ever omnipresent American impetus. Migrate. East to west, west to east, or be Hemingway in Paris.
I am running out of time. I am probably not going to make it, and neither stoicism nor protest is entirely satisfactory.
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